| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40A | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | |
| COM LIT 60A | READG ACROSS BORDERS | RAHIMIEH, N. | This course familiarizes students with the movement of ideas and the development of literary genres across time and place. Our discussions will explore the representations of encounters and conflicts across national and cultural borders. Students will learn how to read literary texts closely and to be attentive to the linguistic, cultural, and historical context within which they were produced. Students will also be asked to explore what distinguishes literature from other modes of writing and how to critically engage with a literary work. Some of the works we will read are viewed as European literary “masterpieces” and will shed light important turning points in the history of literature across Europe. Other, more contemporary works will highlight how established literary forms are deployed across international borders and are transformed to speak to new cultural contexts. |
| COM LIT 102W | WORD AND IMAGE | JARRATT, S. | This course offers an introduction to the study of visual rhetoric: the critical analysis of image making, circulating, and viewing in transnational public spheres. We will concentrate on the still image, primarily the news photograph in times of war, although we will also work with a graphic novel. Topics include the lure of objectivity, formal image analysis, the ethics of representation in wartime, race and visibility in U.S. culture, and word/image resonance in an Iranian child’s story of exile. Readings are drawn from Sontag, Barthes, Satrapi, and others. Fulfills the upper-division writing requirement. |
| COM LIT 132 | POSTWARS | TERADA, R. | “Postwars” will explore three historical contexts’ responses to the ends of global wars: post-Napoleonic Europe in the early 19th century, post-WWII Europe, and post-WWII Asia. We’ll discuss literature, philosophy, film, and other materials, focusing on debates about economic rationalization and nation-state formation (or not) and the impact of "postwar" concept on everyday life. How does the sense of living in the aftermath of a globalized conflict change experience, and how is it exploited politically and economically? Texts will probably include films by Malle, Antonioni, Fassbinder, Masumura, and Kim. |
| COM LIT 143 | FASHION,IMAGE SPECTACLE | ABBAS, M. | Fashion is a part of everyday life that is often dismissed by the serious-minded as frivolous. Yet Baudelaire begins his seminal essay on modernism ('The Painter of Modern Life') with a discussion of fashion plates, and Benjamin describes fashion as 'a tiger's leap into the past'. A similar ambiguity adheres to image and spectacle, but their importance can be seen in the fact that contemporary society has been characterized as a society of image and spectacle. Working with popular cultural materials as well as with groundbreaking theoretical texts, this course will present 'fashion, image, and spectacle' as related ways of interrogating and understanding the cultural history of the present. |
| COM LIT 150 | LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE STATE | JOHNSON, A. | Outsiders throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and up to today have often remarked on Latin America’s seeming failure to live up to ideals of modern democratic state-hood, embroiled instead in constant revolutions, protests, guerrilla fighters, and dictatorships. They have also noted the penchant for much of Latin American cultural production to take part in this unruly political terrain. In this class we’ll be studying some of the foremost authors of the Latin American literary canon with an eye to their analysis of how power works – or fails to work – in their countries including J. L. Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Bolaña, and Miguel Angel Asturias. |
| COM LIT 160 | HONG KONG/CHINESE CINEMA | ABBAS, M. | This course approaches contemporary Chinese and Hong Kong cinema from the perspectives of critical cultural studies by relating cinema to the city. Transformed at unprecedented speed by new forms of capital, politics, media, and technology, the Chinese city threatens to outpace our understanding of it. Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei--each of these cities is like a jigsaw puzzle of the mind, made up of fragments that do not necessarily add up.By studying a number of innovative films, the course will attempt to provide new terms for describing Chinese cities and cinema, and rethink old terms. |
| COM LIT 210 | IMAGINARY ETHNOGRAPHIES | SCHWAB, G | CL 210 Imaginary Ethnographies
Tuesday 9:00 to 12:00
Office Hours: Tue 12:00 to 1:00 and by appointment at the Cyber Arts Cafe
Course Requirements:
Seminar: 1. “Imaginary Ethnography of Home Town” (Short Creative Paper); 2. Final paper (10 pages)
Proseminar: 1. “Imaginary Ethnography of Hometown” 2. Short Commented Bibliography
Class Presentation
Exploring the relationship between literature, ethnography and the cultural imaginary, this course views literature as a form of writing culture. We will explore the specific role and devices of the literary in relation to other discourses on culture such as ethnography and cultural theory. In this context, we will develop a method of reading that emphasizes the complex transcodings (as defined by Jameson in The Political Unconscious) between the literary, the cultural/ethnographic, and the psychological. The literary readings will foreground a set of liminal cultural figures that have aggregated iconic value in the cultural imaginary: the native, the child, the disenfranchised, the alien and the posthuman.
We will explore topics such as the colonial imaginary and the colonization of psychic space, violent histories and trauma, the social construction of childhood, zones of abandonment and emergent forms of subjectivity in global cultures.
Literature:
Juan Jose Saer, The Witness
Richard Powers, Operation Wandering Soul
Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, trans. Peter Theroux, NY: Vintage International, 1989) (orig. publ. 1984)
Octavia Butler, Xenogenesis Theory: Essays by Donna Haraway and Gabriele Schwab on Xenogenesis;
Samuel Beckett, Le Depeupleur / The Lost Ones
Ethnography:
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Writing Lesson
Joao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Abandonment (Introduction and “Catarina and the Alphabet”)
Film/Documentary
Werner Herzog, Where the Green Ants Dream
Marcos Prado, Estamira
Theory:
Clifford/Marcus, eds., Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (“The Writing Lesson”)
Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997)
Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California Pr., 2003)
Sharon Stevens, Children and the Politics of Culture
Donna Haraway, Writings on Xenogenesis in Primate Visions and Simians, Cyborgs and Women
Gabriele Schwab, “Ethnographies of the Future: Personhood, Agency, and Power in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis in Bill Maurer, Gabriele Schwab, eds. Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood, NY: Columbia UP, 2006.
Jean Francois Lyotard, The In/Human, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991 (Original: 1988) |
| COM LIT 210 | RELIGION AS A CATEGORY OF POLITICAL ANALYSIS | NEWMAN, J | Professor Jane O. Newman (jonewman@uci.edu)
CL210/H270 (Fall, 2011): Religion as a Category of Political Analysis
Wednesdays, 2-5 p.m. HIB 220
It has become something of a truism these days that we are living in a post-secular age (Assad, de Vries, Taylor). The claim has huge implications for both the study and the reality of political life in and beyond the modern territorial state. This course will engage in a critical genealogy of the ‘post-secularism’ thesis. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with current claims about the “task of infinite proportion” that “religion” in principle is (de Vries, 2008, 7) and with several varieties of the so-called “secularization thesis” and responses to it (some selection of Weber, Schmitt, Benjamin, Blumenberg, and de Certeau). We will then turn to some of the founding texts of modern political theory and read them in dialogue with both the Old and New Testaments and as historical reflections on the role of religion in early modern political life. Here, readings will include Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli and Luther, Calvin and Althusius, Bodin, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hobbes. An important component of the course will be gaining an understanding of the political dimensions of Scriptural narratives and topoi and the important role they play in the evolution of both the democratic and the authoritarian state (and resistance to it) in European thought, on the one hand, and as a way of theorizing the role of figurative thought and the function of these narratives and topoi in political discourse in general, on the other. Also central to our discussions will be the various ways that the relation between transcendence and immanence, the so-called “Two Kingdoms” of this world and the next, has been discussed. Topics to be addressed will include: theories of modernity and critical periodization studies; reason, tolerance, and power; covenant theory, “election,” and the nation; subjectivity and free will; conscience, faith, accommodation, and resistance; power versus authority; and the political rhetoric of figuration. Of interest to students of political theory, ancient and Renaissance/early modern history and the history of ideas, and the historical genealogy of contemporary debates about religion and the state. Students may write papers (for the seminar option) or develop annotated bibliographies (pro-seminar option) using the terms of the course either to examine these and other problems of political and philosophical history or to read ancient, Renaissance/early modern, and modern literary texts and art historical materials – as well as (of course) contemporary events. Please contact me by email after 1 September, 2011, for a reading list/list of books to order (jonewman@uci.edu).
(same as Hum 270) |