| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 40A | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | |
| COM LIT 60A | READG ACR BORDERS | RAHIMIEH, N. | In this course students will learn how to read literary texts closely and write focused arguments and analyses about them. Our readings will include poems, plays, and novels, from different linguistic and literary traditions and will focus on the concept of travel across borders of time, language, history, and culture. Included in our readings will be:
Heinrich von Kleist, Prince Friedrich of Homburg
Claire de Duras, Ourika
Honoré de Balzac, Colonel Chabert
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Nazim Hikmat, selected poems
Forugh Farrokhzad, selected poems
Ali Mamdouh, Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad
Sharnush Parsipur, Women without Men
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| COM LIT 100A | AFRICAN LIT | NGUGI, W. | Colonialism was simultaneously a practice of power, production of knowledge and social engineering. The colonial system and experience have profoundly affected intellectual production in the world. With the theme of colonialism as the unifying principle, the course explores the work of a number of African writers from the different parts of the continent to cover Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusaphone traditions. Though based on the African literary production, the issues raised are relevant to all post-colonial societies and indeed modernity. |
| COM LIT 102W | ANIMALITY, DIGITALITY | OBODIAC, E. |
“Animality, Digitality”
This writing seminar will look at philosophical discourses on animality and living being through the lens of the current “digital turn” in the humanities. Digital media and theory not only generate new representations of animals, people, and other living beings; digitality in general belongs to a larger technological framework that is changing life itself. Biotechnology, genome projects, and the interface between animals, machines, and human beings generate a new biosphere or vivarium ruled by the commonality of our digital condition. Our seminar will explore such questions as: how do digital media push us to rethink the distinction not only between the animal and the human, but the animate and inanimate as well? If the human being is the speaking animal, do digital media alter our relation to language and hence alter our humanity? How do digital media mirror the life-worlds of insects and non-human animals? And finally, how does the interface between new media and living beings of all types open new possibilities for digital poetry, art, and architecture?
Texts include:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Question Concerning Technology, Prometheus Bound, De Anima, Discourse on Method, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology, The Origin of Species
Films include:
Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, The Planet of the Apes, Blade Runner
New Media include:
Nintendogs, Heideggerian Analysis of the Iphone, digital Bestiarum Vocabulum, Notes Toward the Complete Works of Shakespeare, InterspeciesCollaboration.net, ZooMorph, GFP Bunny, GFP K-9, embryologicalhouse.com
Writing assignments include five 3-4 page analyses of readings.
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| COM LIT 105 | COMPARATIVE MULTICU | SCHLICHTER, A. | CL 105 Comparative Multiculturalism
A. Schlichter
The class will look at discourses of multiculturalism through German and US literature and culture. We will explore the historical conditions of two different multicultural societies (such as histories of nation building, citizenship, immigration) and engage in a critical discussion of cultural identities and differences (ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc.) in contemporary US and German culture. The materials will include different genres and media, such as fictional, autobiographical, and theoretical writings, films and popular music.
Requirements: regular attendance, midterm and final, short writing assignments (4-5 pp.)
A website will be available at the beginning of the quarter.
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| COM LIT 121 | NINETEENTH CENTURY REALIST NOVEL, | GELLEY, A. | CL 121/ Eng. 103 Fall, 2010, A. Gelley
Nineteenth Century Realism offers an astonishing variety of approaches -- conceptual and technical -- to the human condition. What George Eliot wrote, "I have gone through again and again the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit," could also apply to Flaubert or to Henry James, though each writer employed radically different narrative techniques. This course will study three novels -- George Eliot's Adam Bede, Fontane's Effi Briest, and Henry James's Portrait of a Lady -- in the light of a variety of conceptions of "realism." We will draw on criticism by Erich Auerbach, Mikel Bakhtin, Harry Levin, Roland Barthes, and others. Student requirements: two oral reports (one on a work of criticism, one on a section of a novel), one of which is to be expanded to an essay.
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| COM LIT 143 | VOICE & THE AURAL UNCONSCIOUSNESS | ABBAS, M. | CL143: Voice and the Aural Unconscious
This course will investigate the paradox of voice as what we don’t hear; or more precisely as what we don’t hear in what we hear: an aural unconscious. We forget ‘the voice’ either because we are too focused on meaning or content, as in ‘speech’; or because we focus too much on form or ‘beauty’, as in singing. In such cases, the voice is displaced onto something else and we hear it only when communication breaks down, as in lip-synching when the machine is suddenly switched off. The course will draw on a number of works (of music, literature, cinema, and theory ) to explore the implications of ‘voice’ in culture.
Topics studied will include :
--Theory: Dolar on ‘voice-as-thing’ and Chion on the acousmetre.
--The voices of innocence and experience in Blake’s ‘Songs’
--The colonial voice in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’
--Kafka’s ‘Josephine the Mouse-Singer’ and ‘The Silence of the Sirens’
--Beckett’s ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’
--Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ and Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’
EVALUATION
By class participation, a short mid-term test, and a 10-page or so final paper.
TEXTS (all on order from bookstore)
Mladen Dolar: ‘A Voice and Nothing Else’, MIT 2006.
Michel Chion: ‘The Voice in Cinema’, Columbia UP 1999
William Blake: ‘Selected Poems’, Penguin.
Joseph Conrad: ‘Heart of Darkness’, Norton
Franz Kafka: ‘Metamorphosis and Other Stories’, trans Malcolm Pasley, Penguin
Samuel Beckett: ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, Faber
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| COM LIT 160 | CHINESE CINEMA | ABBAS, M. | Asian Cities, Asian Cinemas
The course is not concerned with asking what is specifically 'Asian' about Asian cities but with testing the assumption that the urban concepts useful for thinking the Asian city are likely to be the concepts crucial for an understanding of urbanism today. It is arguable that Asia is where some of the most radical urban and cultural experiments of the twenty-first century will be taking place. Transformed at unprecedented speed by new forms of capital, politics, media, and technology, the Asian city today threatens to outpace our understanding of it. The Asian city reminds us that the city exists not just as a physical, political and economic entity, but also as a cluster of images, a series of discourses, an experience of time and space, and a set of practices that do not necessarily add up. Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Mumbai, Istanbul -- each of these cities is like a jig-saw puzzle of the mind, made up of cognitive/experiential fragments, of historical residues and aspirations. We need to provide new term to describe Asian cities and rethink old term. Besides films, the course will draw on novels and memoirs, urban and cultural theory, architecture, music, and performance art to evoke the Asian city today. Topics will include:
1) Koolhaas's "China" and the warped space of 'globalization": Zhang Yuan's "Crazy English"
2) Affective spaces in Hong Kong cinema: Wong Kar-wai's '2046'
3) Violence and Information: Mark and Lau's 'Infernal Affairs'.
4) Taipei: Hou Hsiao-hsien's 'Millenium Mambo'
5) On Chinese Women: Ning Ying's 'Perpetual Motion'.
6) Figures of Disappearance: Lou Ye's Suzhou River'
7) Documenting Demolition: Jia Zhangke's 'Still Life'
8) Deceptive City: Lee Ang's 'Lust, Caution'.
Course Requirements: Attendance, a short mid-term test, final 10-15 page term paper
Some references:
· Gary Xu: 'Sinascape: contemporary Chinese Cinema'
· John R. Logan(ed): 'The New Chinese City'
· Tsung-Yi Michelle Huang: 'Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers'
· Sheldon H. Lu: 'Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics'
· Bishop, Phillips, Yeo (eds): Postcolonial Urbanism' |
| COM LIT 200a | HISTORY &THEORY COM LIT | SCHWAB, G | CL 200A History and Theory of Comparative Literature (INTRO TO METHODS & THEORIES)
This course is intended as an introduction to a locally grounded version of Comparative Literature and will present a diversity of practices and positions within the field (such as cultural studies, media studies, critical theory, intellectual and literary history, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial studies etc.). While required of first-year students in Comparative Literature, the class will be of interest to all students, who wish to explore a range of approaches and methodologies within the Humanities. Different faculty will be coming to the class to discuss pre-assigned texts relevant to their understanding of Comparative Literature, including their own work. A list of visiting faculty and a reading list will be distributed in the summer. This class is pro-seminar only for Comparative Literature students. Assignments will be determined at the beginning of the quarter.
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| COM LIT 210 | POLITICS AFTER EXPECTATION | TERADA, R. | POLITICS AFTER EXPECTATION
In this course I’d like to consider reflections on the experience of everyday life in periods of intensified alienation: especially in England and Germany after Waterloo and in Italy in the 1970’s. Circumstances such as conclusions of war, erosion of civil rights, disappointed hopes for systemic transformation, and loss of credibility in representative government generate unusual psychological tactics for “holding” a situation during an indefinite period of negated expectation. Thinkers whose hopes for sociopolitical reorganization went unrealized in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars or, in Pasolini’s case, the popular social movements of the 1960’s, describe the ensuing years of negated expectation in figures of fixity, absorption, or desolation; but they also describe their reliance on certain kinds of sensory experience, a non-moralized co-existence of activism and distraction, and the attraction of conceptualizing a world beyond representational politics. Their writings show the spectrum of attitudes that become possible when change is neither rationally expected
nor, in some cases, even irrationally hoped for.
Figures of particular interest may include English romantic poets; Hegel; Heinrich Heine; Deleuze’s *Cinema Two* as a theory of the postwar; and Pasolini’s prose and film. It may also be interesting to discuss recent UC protest writings that explore an activism not based
on recognition or expectation. I would like to study these writings to work toward an understanding of mental attitudes during repression that differs from others given in studies of tyranny, totalitarianism, or the demise of representational and national politics amid globalization. |
| COM LIT 210 | THEORY OF THE NOVEL | GELLEY, A. | THEORY OF THE NOVEL, Comparative Literature 210, Fall, 2010, Prof. Alexander Gelley
Mondays, 2-4:50 in HIB 220 (except Oct. 18, which will be rescheduled)
There are two issues here, though they are closely related: the novel as a modern (that is, post-Romantic) genre; and narrative form, which of course has wider applicability than the novel but is at the same time a major component in any study of the genre. We will be drawing on a series of (mostly) 20th-century critics, e.g., Fr. Schlegel, Lukács, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Auerbach, Lotman, Genette, Barthes, Prendergast, N. Armstrong, F. Moretti. Concurrently we will refer to a few 19th-century works for exemplification: George Eliot's Adam Bede , Flaubert's Three Tales, and Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. Students may want to read these before start of the course.
All students will present short oral reports on one of the theoretical selections and on a section from one of the fiction texts. In addition, a term paper (this may be a development of one of the oral reports).
The readings will be drawn from a wide variety of sources, available in the Reserve Book Room and/or in copies to be made available to the class.
The theoretical perspectives are organized under five general topics (see below). For each topic I have prepared a list to be used selectively by seminar members. It is not expected that we will cover all the readings below. They represent choices to be made in accordance with the needs and wishes of participants. The seminar members will decide how to balance breadth of coverage with focus on particular issues.
Weeks 1-2: Grand Theory
Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragments # 26, 42, 78, 89, 108, 120. Athenäum Fr. # 116, 165, 238, 252; “Letter on the Novel, pp. 73-80, in K. Wheeler, ed., The Romantic
Ironists and Goethe
Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, Pt.I, chs. 1,3,4,5; Pt. II, ch. 2.
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (in Illuminations, pp. 83-109)
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (sel.)
Jurij Lotman, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology”
Weeks 3-4: Realism, the real:
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (sel.)
Georg Lukács, Essays on Realism (sel.)
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (sel.)
Harry Levin, “Romance and Realism,” ch. 2 in The Gates of Horn
Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis (sel.)
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and domestic fiction : a political history of the novel (sel.)
Weeks 5-6: History and the Novel
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (sel.)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (sel.)
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (sel.)
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (sel.)
Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (sel.)
Weeks 7-8: Plot
Aristotle, Poetics (sel.)
Paul Ricoeur, “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis,” in Time and Narrative I, pp.52-87.
Jurij Lotman, “The Composition of the Verbal Work of Art,” (sel.) in The Structure of the Artistic Text, pp. 209-44, 251-60
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, chs. 1-2, pp. 3-64.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot , chs. 1,2,4,7
Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets (sel.)
Weeks 9-10 : Narratology and the Novel
Roland Barthes, S/Z - An Essay, Hill and Wang
Jonathan Culler, “Poetics of the Novel,” in Structuralist Poetics
Gérard Genette, “Frontiers of Narrative”
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (sel.)
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative fiction : contemporary poetics (sel.)
James Wood, How Fiction Works (sel.)
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