| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 10 | COMICS & SUPERHEROS | AMIRAN, E. | In this course, we will consider how comics use fantasy to work through social, psychological, and ideological issues. One of our main arguments will be that comics address social and topics like immigration, sexual identity, racism, and the cold war under cover of personal issues, such as eating disorders, paranoia and narcissism, separation anxiety, and OCD, so that in comics you can’t separate psychological from social and political arguments. Readings and viewings include McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Herriman’s Krazy Kat, classic adventure comics like Tarzan, Foster’s Prince Valiant, and Terry & The Pirates, Hanks’s Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle and Stardust the Super Wizard, Herge’s Tintin, Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol. 1, Moore’s Watchmen, Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, manga, and other contemporary comics. Superheroes like Batman, Spiderman and Wonder Woman will be considered alongside anti-heroes like Katchor’s Julius Knipl and El Chapulin Colorado. We will view films that animate comics, including classic Bugs Bunny and Popeye shorts and current web-based comics. Several theoretical positions will be presented, alongside readings about infantile fantasy, to help argue the perspective of the course. Students will help select recent comics for the course. Assignments include two short essays and a final exam. |
| COM LIT 60A | WORLD LITERATURE | 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 105 | T MORRISON&WALCOTT | KEIZER, A. | In an interview from the early 1980s, Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison states that “narrative remains the best way to learn anything … so I continue with narrative form.” The Nobel-Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott has said, “I have a belief that a poet is instinctively closer to the theatre than a novelist or fiction writer because, structurally, the feel of the poem is the feel of a play[;] … they both have the same kind of chording.” The aim of this course is to explore, in detail, Morrison's and Walcott’s uses of poetic and narrative form and figurative language in a range of genres: lyric and epic poetry, novels, short fiction, and drama. We will also read Morrison's and Walcott’s literary and cultural criticism, paying particular attention to the ways in which issues in the novels, poems, and plays are addressed in these non-fiction works. Among the questions we will attempt to answer by reading the literature and criticism together is the question of how literary works might function as forms of theory. Another ongoing concern of the class will be to situate Morrison's and Walcott’s work in the African American, Caribbean, and hemispheric American literary traditions. Students will complete a book review, an in-class midterm, and a take-home final. |
| COM LIT 107 | COL & MOD AF LIT | THIONG'O, N. | Colonialism and the colonial 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. Though based on the African literary production, the issues raised are relevant to all post-colonial societies. |
| COM LIT 107 | NARR OF LIBERATION | KEIZER, A. | The theme and project of liberation has been a driving force in literary works from around the world and across centuries. This course will examine a variety of narratives that foreground the attainment of physical, spiritual, sexual, and political freedom for individuals and groups. We will use classic theories on the attainment of freedom (Fanon, Freire and others) as frameworks for reading these narratives. Beginning with the Book of Exodus and traveling through African American slave narratives, Latin American testimonios, novels, literary essays, and contemporary films, we will explore the ways in which a wide range of writers and filmmakers have conceptualized the goal and process of liberation in their works. A core element of the course is a research project on a first-person narrative of each student's choice, connected to a 20th- or 21st-century movement for liberation. Course requirements include a library visit, a midterm, and a final research paper. |
| COM LIT 131 | PSYCHOANALYSIS | TERADA, R. | This course introduces psychoanalytic theories of consciousness and unconsciousness, especially as developed by Freud in two of his major works, *Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis* and *The Interpretation of Dreams*. We'll discuss dream motivation and function, parapraxes (or Freudian slips), symptoms, resistance, trauma, melancholia, and recovery. We'll also explore psychoanalytic thinking through the writings of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott and through films. We'll treat the films not as illustrations of psychoanalytic ideas, but as works that themselves develop new psychoanalytic theories. One of the main aims of the course is to encourage questioning about the mind's complexity. Class experience emphasizes mutual exploration and collaboration. Requirements: participation, informal writing on messageboard, midterm, paper, final. |
| COM LIT 143 | MAD MEN, CRAZY WOMEN | SCHLICHTER, A | What is this thing called “madness?” How can literature and theory talk about it?
Several theorists pose the question how “madness” can be communicated if we understand it as the condition of a mind at the limits of language. Such a problematics is of particular interest in narratives, which use the perspective of a subject deemed mad in order to provide a critique of society, i.e. try to rearticulate “madness” as social pathology. We will explore these issues in a range of contemporary theoretical and literary texts, films and examples from popular culture. One of the special interests concerns the roles of gender and race in the construction of madness and in the experience of subjects deemed mad. Readings might include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, and Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony. Movies of interest include Richard Kelly, Donnie Darko, Pedro Almodóvar, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Jane Campion, Sweetie.
Requirements: Regular attendance, short papers, midterm, final, regular note board postings. |
| COM LIT 150 | GENDER IN GREEK LIT | JARRATT, S. | In this course, we will read examples of ancient Greek literature in translation (8thC BC to AD 4thC) from many genres—the Homeric epic, lyric poetry, comedy, oratory, legal argument, philosophical dialogue, poetic treatise, Christian epistle, the first work of science fiction, and a very early novel—focusing our critical attention on modes of persuasion. Speakers and writers use the beauty and power of language to persuade others to go to war or embrace peace, fall in love, punish wrong-doing, submit to belief systems or keep a skeptical distance from the claims of philosophy and religion. Gender is a key component of persuasion in each case we will encounter. The forms of masculinity demanded by warring states, women’s civic status and arguments in response to war, women as tokens of exchange, the gendering and homosociality in philosophical relations, and the invention of heterosexual romantic love, among other topics, will engage our critical imagination. The class will be conducted through discussion. Students will exchange short reading responses online, write one critical essay, and take mid-term and final exams.
Readings may include the following:
Homer, Iliad, from Books II and IX
Sappho, Fragment 1
Aristophanes, Lysistrata
Gorgias, “Encomium of Helen”
Thucydides, “Pericles’ Funeral Oration” (Book II, History of the Peloponnesian War)
Lysias, “Against Eratosthanes”
Plato, Phaedrus
From Aristotle, Rhetoric
Longinus, “On the Sublime”
Paul, “First Letter to the Corinthians”
Longus, Daphnis and Chloe
Lucian, True Story |
| COM LIT 160 | NEW CHINESE CINEMAS | 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 | HIST&THEORY COM LIT | JARRATT, S. | 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. Approaches may include 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. This class is pro-seminar only for Comparative Literature students. Assignments will be determined in consultation with the students at the beginning of the quarter. A reading list will be posted in the summer.
Thursdays, 4-6:50p |
| COM LIT 200B | THRY OF TRANSLATION | SUH, S. | By drawing on the work of such thinkers as Karl Marx, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, this course explores the possibility of translation as an ethical and political practice that opens up an alternative way of associating with others who are presently excluded from communities defined by their sameness. The reading list also includes the work of Tejaswini Niranjana, Sakai Naoki, and Lydia Liu, who have examined the problem of translation with regard to such issues as racism, cultural representation, colonialism, and nationalism specifically in Asian contexts.
Fridays, 4 - 6:50PM |
| COM LIT 210 | POL,REPRES,&AFTER | JOHNSON, A. | The seminar proposes a foray into some forms of thinking politics in post-representational terms (including notions of biopolitics, necropolitics, the multitude, habitus and everydayness), paying special attention to the way in which phenomena often filed away under the heading “globalization” exert tremendous pressure on an inherited conceptual
vocabulary. To do this, however, it will first briefly explore some articulations between representation and politics (through a study of hegemony as well as subaltern studies
which takes on the limits of representation in politics). Readings will include Antonio Gramsci, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, David Lloyd, Jon Beasley-Murray, Michel Foucault,
José María Arguedas, Carlo Galli, Paolo Virno, Pierre Bourdieu.
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2 - 3:20PM |
| COM LIT 210 | EXISTENTIALIST PHEN | NEWMAN, J. | It is conventional to note that in 1945, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty collaborated on the
launching of the important post-WWII journal, Les temps modernes (the title of which
famously refers to the Chaplin film); the yoking together of the two philosophical schools of
existentialism and phenomenology and their responses to the crisis of universalism that
characterized “modernity” often follows this account of the two thinkers’ association.
Connections between existentialism and phenomenology of course predate the war,
reaching back to earlier receptions of Husserl’s work by Heidegger, for example, in the early
20th century and during the volatile post-WWI period, when not only European intellectuals
sought to think with and beyond Heidegger about how to interpret the human “situation”
anew in the world shorn of most of modernity’s core mythic frames. In this seminar, which
appropriately enough will be offered in 2014, the centenary year of the outbreak of the war
that some say itself exemplifies the unraveling of many of modernity’s myths, we will first
return to some of the earlier texts of these two traditions(Kirkegaard, Husserl, and
Heidegger) before taking up the respective projects of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; selected
texts by Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Bultmann, and Karl Jaspers will also be read. Topics to be
discussed include theories of world-making via perception, consciousness, poeisis, and
individual and communal action and belief, and thus the relation between existential
philosophy and theology, on the one hand, and between existentialism and theories of
realism in cinema, literature, and art, on the other. Finally, because one of the characteristic
ways these thinkers confronted the fracturing of modernity involved returning to, indeed,
reanimating a particular tradition of pre- and early modern texts and systems of thought, we
will also read selections of the texts that they read; here, possible readings will include work
by Augustine, Martin Luther, Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal. |
| COM LIT 210 | VOCAL TECHNOLOGIES OF SELF | SCHLICHTER, A | The class will provide an introduction to the field of Voice Studies by considering the role of the voice (as metaphor and materiality) in the formation of embodied subjectivities. Rereading embodiment through the sonic allows for an intervention into current critiques of the construction and perpetuation of identities and differences. Since vocal acts are material but can never be fully detached from a system of signification, an interrogation of their role in subjectivation offers itself to a critique of the linguistic as a framework for the explanation of the production of subjectivities, while preventing a return to essentialist notions of identity. Thus, the consideration of the voice as technology of self poses questions about the material conditions of subjectivation in relation to the cultural, the social, the historical, the technological and the political. Here, we find promising intersections with the investigations from queer studies, feminist theories and critical race theories.
The reading list might include Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Chion, Alexander Weheliye, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Jonathan Sterne et al. Requirements: 20pp final paper for seminar option, two 5-7 pp position papers or annotated bibliography (relevant to your own research project) for pro-seminar option. Oral presentation, regular postings of analytical comments or discussion questions on class message board.
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| COM LIT 210 | THE POST:GENEALGIES | AHMAD, A. | This transdisciplinary course draws materials from a range of humanities and the social sciences—literary and cultural theory, philosophy, anthropology, history, political economy and, in deed, that unruly body of thought that we now know just as ‘Theory’—to reflect upon the many genealogies of what, in one register, Lutz Niethammer, the German historian, simply calls “The Post Condition.”
We begin with an intellectual atmosphere, a transdisciplinary mood as it were, in which the prefix ‘post’ tends to get attached to countless phenomena (post-Enlightenment, post-Industrial, post-feminist, post-national, post-secular but also—in Asef Bayat’s formulation-- post-Islam, and so on) and all kinds of ‘Ends’ are perceived and enunciated (End of Ideology, End of History, Farewell to the Working Class etc). These ‘Ends’ and post-marked designations co-exist with an equally widespread sense of ‘Crisis’: of capitalism as well as socialism, of Marxism as well as liberalism, of humanist epistemologies as well as claims to scientificity, of the postcolonial state as well as quagmires of contemporary imperialism, not to speak of an ecological crisis so extreme and deepening so rapidly that the survival of the human species itself is no longer entirely assured. Capital accumulation, the driving force of so much ‘progress’ over roughly half a millennium, seems to be fast reaching its limits and perhaps terminus.
The positions indicated in the previous paragraph are enunciated from a wide range of standpoints, from the political left as well as the political right (and many in between), and in a great variety of accents, from the nihilistic and apocalyptic to the celebratory and euphoric. In some cases, as in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, with its peculiar invocations of Hegel and Nietzsche, the euphoric and the nihilistic may even coincide. Much of this proliferation may in indeed be mere fashion. However, in our time, as at several other turning points in modern history, powerful clusters of writing have emerged with a sense that a certain kind of historical formation is in decline or has already vanished, rendering inadequate the presuppositions and epistemologies that had been more or less adequate. Some of the Ends have in deed been theorized as new Beginnings. However, what is perceived as the emergent and the new may then be regarded, variously, with incredulity, suspicion, optimism, confidence, or fear and recoil.
In an earlier Critical Theory Seminar at Irvine, “Periodizing the Present,” we had undertaken a set of readings from several academic disciplines to decipher some of the key intellectual currents of our time in the highly unstable conjuncture that prevailed in the post-Soviet world, 1989 onwards, up to the economic crisis f 2008-9 and the (so-called) Arab Spring that had just begun a couple of months before the Seminar was conducted.
In this new Seminar, we shall be studying diverse moments in a much longer, very complex history of thought that constitute the very condition of intelligibility for what is described here as, for lack of a better term, ‘the post condition’. The Foucauldian term ‘genealogy’ in the title of the seminar is meant to suggest that the course does not expound any linear unfolding of an Idea, a concept, a school of thought, or a set of demarcations within a discipline (the fixing, for instance, of postcolonial or the postmodern modes of inquiry and criticism as differentiated from other modes). And we use the term in the plural (genealogies) to indicate that we shall not be concerned simply with multiplicities or contradictions within what purports to be a singular discursive formation, such as ‘postmodern culture’ or ‘postcolonial theory’, even though such units, and the multiplicities within them, will be very much a part of our investigation.
The course will be organised around topics and readings related to five areas of study:
(1) The ‘End of History’ discourse as it unfolds from Hegel, through such figures such as Kojeve and Gehlen, right up to Fukuyama, with its different contexts, accents and implications;
(2) The range of ‘posthistorical’ thought during the interwar years in Germany that may include such disparate elements as the Spenglerian discourse of ‘Decline’, Benjaminesque and left-oriented scepticism regarding ‘reason’ and ‘progress’, Schmitt’s discourse on law and sovereignty with a view to recuperate a post-liberal politics, from the right, in a moment of crisis encompassing the decomposition of the Weimar Republic and rise of the Nazi regime;
(3) The long-gestating crisis of the disciplines, as it were. For instance: the critique of anthropology that runs from the contrasting positions of Leiris and Levi-Strauss, then takes new turns, in the Anglo-American world, with Talal Assad, Clifford, Taussig and others; and the convergence of that critique of anthropology, focussed as it often was on the discipline’s colonialist investments, with critique of western historiography of the colonized peoples out of which arose the postcolonialist protocols of subaltern social theory and historiography;
(4) The many conflicting positions that have developed within postcolonial theory (itself an interdisciplinary practice) since its some emergence in the early 1990s, the lineages it has claimed, the productive terrains it has defined for itself, the criticisms it has been subjected to;
(5) Finally, and punctuating all that, will be the inquiry into contentions over what we might call post-Leninist Marxism. Some of the most powerful currents of thought during the past one hundred years or so have emerged out of affiliations and/or confrontations with Marxism, in a whole range of registers, in response to a certain, very influential codification of it in the Soviet Union. Voloshinov, Gramsci, Lukacs and even Althusser are some of the influential figures who mounted opposition to that codification from inside communism (in four different national contexts). Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School arose very much as a re-examination of the Enlightenment and of Marxism in response to the rise of the Nazi state in Germany one the one hand, and, on the other, the dashing of revolutionary hopes after the ascent of Stalin in the USSR. That same dialectic of affiliation/confrontation can be seen in the British Historians’ Group as well as literary/cultural theory (e.g. Williams, Eagleton, Jameson) in the English language, not to speak of the magisterial figure of Sartre who offered, among other things, the most profound critique of colonialism that any Western philosopher ever attempted. (We shall be looking closely at the Sartre-Fanon-Sartre relationship). Derrida was to again ask, soon after the disintegration of the Soviet bloc: what kind of fidelity to Marxism is now possible—after Stalin, after the collapse of “existing socialisms”-- in the face of neoliberal triumphalism?
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Format and Requirements
The 10-week Seminar is designed to negotiate salient moments in these very complex fields of knowledge but as inquiries, without final definitions and conclusions. Lists of required and recommended readings for each of the sessions shall be circulated well in advance.
Each session will include: succinct student presentations on readings of the week, a lecture, and a discussion of readings and the lecture. Students are very much encouraged to take notes and speak from their notes, so that the discussion is rigorous and well focussed.
Depending on the enrolments, attempt will be made to have individual conferences with all the students during the first four weeks. At the end of it, a list of possible topics for a final paper shall be circulated and students required to write a final paper, approximately 5,000 words, on one of those topics, due one week after the last session.
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For the first session, students would be expected to have read:
1- Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to An End, pp. 1-60.
2- Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History” in The National Interest, Summer 1989; and “Part V: The Last Man” in his book The End of History and the Last Man.
3- Perry Anderson, “The Ends of History” in his A Zone of Engagement.
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