| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 9 | CULTURAL CONTACT ZONES: US, GERMANY | SCHLICHTER, A | The class offers a look at multiculturalism as "contact zone" through the examples of cultural production of various minority groups in the United States and Germany. We will discuss literary, autobiographical, and theoretical writings, films and popular music in order to explore both the historical and contemporary conditions of two different multicultural societies in a global context (such as their histories of migration, notions of citizenship, discourses of race and ethnicity etc). Readings might include texts by Marie Louise Pratt, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Honigman, and we will watch movies on the tensions between East and West German cultures (such as Good-Bye Lenin, dir. Wolfgang Becker) and on German Turkish life (Head-on, dir. Fatih Akin). Requirements: regular attendance, midterm and final, short writing assignments (short essay or blog). A website will be available at the beginning of the quarter. |
| COM LIT 10 | PIRATES | JOHNSON, A. | In The City of God, Saint Augustine recounts the following exchange between Alexander the Great and a pirate he captured. “What gives you the right to disrupt the sea-lanes by force?” asks Alexander. To which the pirate boldly replied, “What gives you the right to disrupt the whole world by force? I use a small ship, so I’m called a thief; you use a great fleet, so you’re called an emperor.” In this class we’ll explore popular depictions of pirates (in movies such as the Pirates of the Caribbean series and literature) and compare these with historical narratives of piracy. We will also, as St. Augustine’s anecdote suggests, inquire into how piracy gets defined and what it might tell us about the dividing line between legality and illegality, relations of force, and the fantasies and practices of opposition to dominant social structures. While our main focus will be on piracy in the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th and 18th centuries, we will also discuss contemporary forms of piracy such as the Somali pirates and internet piracy. |
| COM LIT 60A | WORLD LITERATURE | RAHIMIEH, N. | This course introduces you to the development of literary genres across time and place. You will become familiar with the concept of world literature and how it has been understood at different moments in history. Because we are reading literary works originally written in various languages, we will also discuss the role translation plays in providing access to world literature. You will learn how to read literary texts closely, be attentive to linguistic, cultural, and historical differences, and how they inform our understanding. |
| COM LIT 102W | VOICE & WRITING | SCHLICHTER, A. | The examination of "the voice" has been largely neglected in a culture dominated by the visual but recently Sound and Voice Studies have directed attention to the vocal. In this class, we will listen to the complex and elusive phenomenon of “the voice" and examine how it is related to such central notions as narrative, identity, representation. We are familiar with the "voice" as a metaphor of the representation of a subject (e.g. the voices of the marginalized, the voice of an author), but such an understanding of voice does not consider its material aspect: sound. In this class, we will examine writing and voicing as two different media practices, i.e. pay attention to their different materialities, and think about their interrelation. How do acts of voicing, in particular speaking and singing, function in written texts? How does literature stage "voicing"? What’s the relationship between reading and listening? Can we listen to “oral literature?” And what impact do sound technologies have on the reception and production of literature (think poetry readings, slams and audio books)? The explorations should help students to find out more about their own voices in writing. Requirements: regular participation, final paper and drafts, small writing assignments. |
| COM LIT 140 | 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 143 | READING THE CITY | ABBAS, M. | Walter Benjamin once described the city dweller as ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’, reflecting the many facets of the city like a broken mirror. More and more, the city exists not just as a physical, political, and economic entity that can be mapped, but also as a cluster of images, a series of discourses, an experience of space and place, and a set of practices that do not necessarily add up. Each of the cities that this course examines—Hong Kong, New York, Taipei, Los Angeles, or Shanghai—is a kind of jig-saw puzzle of the mind, made up of cognitive/experiential fragments, of historical residues and aspirations. In this sense, all these cities are what Calvino in his great novel calls ‘Invisible Cities’. Through a discussion of films, fictions, and theoretical texts, this course will consider the city as a text that challenges our ability to read it. The syllabus will include, besides some seminal writings on the city by Simmel, Benjamin, and Barthes, films like ‘Chungking Express’, ‘Chinatown’, ‘Lust Caution’, ‘Stray Dogs’; texts like ‘Delirious New York’; and fictions like ‘Invisible Cities’ and ‘The Speckled Band’. |
| COM LIT 150 | DOSTOESKY | MJOLSNESS, L. | This course will focus on the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and will highlight his influence on 20th century literature and film. Reading for this class will include three novels by Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. The goal of this course is to encourage the exploration of one of Russia’s greatest novelists and public figures. An understanding of Dostoevsky is an essential component of an understanding of nineteenth century Russia, and arguably of Russian culture, and Russian intellectual and cultural history. |
| COM LIT 200A | HIST&THEORY COM LIT | RAHIMIEH, N. | Seminar designed to introduce graduate students in Comparative Literature to the discipline of Comparative Literature. Issues and theories of comparative literary and cultural study are covered. Strongly recommended for first and second year students before the M.A. exam and review. |
| COM LIT 210 | CINE LATINOAMERICAN | JOHNSON, A. | This class will introduce students to key films, texts and debates in the history of Latin American film. One of the main axis of the course will be the relationship between New Latin American Cinema in the 1960s (tercer cine, cine imperfecto and cinema novo) and the current boom in film. Particular attention will be paid to the Cuban, Argentine and Brazilian film traditions. We will also coordinate our class with the Latin American film festival, scheduled for fall 2015. The class will be taught in Spanish but students may choose to speak and write in English if preferred. Course Cross-listed with Spanish 234 |
| COM LIT 210 | MARXISM IN CULTURAL THEORY | AHMAD, A | In the spirit of Etienne Balibar’s proposition that there can be no such thing as Marxist philosophy but philosophy has to learn much from Marx and Marxism, we could propose that there is no such thing as a Marxist cultural theory but very large segments of cultural theory are permeated with Marxist kinds of theoretical labour. One could plausibly suggest that in some of its most influential articulations, cultural theory is often the mode in which Marxism is done through other means, i.e., through means quite other than those that regulate the discourse of Marxist political economy which, in turn, is said to be the primary discourse of Marxism. One might add that ‘doing Marxism through other means’ is sustained by quite a venerable tradition in the humanities. Otherwise, who would have thought that Deconstruction was, in Derrida’s own view, a “further radicalization” of Marxism! Hence the title: not ‘Marxist cultural theory” but “ Marxism in cultural theory.” Not what it is but what it does: its various modes of insertion, intervention, existence within the larger body of what we call cultural theory. For, contrary to a very common belief, Marxism as a practice of theoretical knowledge is neither a doctrine nor a body of precepts nor some kind of applied science. It exists much more as debates, dissentions, interventions, readings and re-readings, mobilizing certain theoretical categories and interrogating those very categories. Marx’s own work was executed at the intersections of philosophy and political economy (humanities and the social sciences, so to speak in contemporary parlance). All subsequent Marxism that is worth the name works with this sublime indifference to disciplinary boundaries. ‘Culture’ as such was not, strictly speaking, a significant category in the theoretical apparatus that Marx improvised for himself, the way ‘Ideology’ was fairly central. Later Marxists have addressed the question of culture in its broadest inflections as the category of ‘Culture’ appears in the various intellectual disciplines—Philosophy and Aesthetics, Anthropology and Sociology, Literature and the Arts, even in domains of politics— while literary studies, partly under Marxist pressure, begin to move more and more away from the traditional ‘literary criticism’ toward ‘literary theory’ with its concerns to bring ‘literature’ in significant relation to other forms of inquiry. In more recent decades, the word ‘Culture’ has come to encompass such a wide variety of meanings as to sometimes become simply a synonym for what was once called ‘the human condition’. If there once was a biological determinism we now suffer, in some precincts of the humanities, from what one may call cultural determinism. So, a primary question we shall ask is: what might the word ‘Culture’ mean in Marxist terms? The differential use of the term ‘culture’ in different academic disciplines, and the way Marxism negotiates these differences, is one kind of issue. Furthermore, one could suggest that Marxism comes into cultural theory via several national traditions that are largely distinct and autonomous of each other and intersecting only partially and over time. If we consider their respective conceptual origins, there would appear to be little in common between Soviet semiotics, German cultural Marxism of the 1930s, British Marxism of the postwar years, the Italian Marxist tradition that reaches a yet unsurpassed apex in Antonio Gramsci, and French Marxism ranging from Sartre to Althusser to Badiou. In deed, there would appear to be more divergence than commonality among the three French thinkers named in the previous sentence. It is only in the work of the later figures, such as the commanding and intellectually voracious ouvre of Fredric Jameson, that these diverse traditions are brought into mutual articulation as figures in the same carpet even though as highly distinct figures, incorporating different histories. In this course, we shall be concerned with some of the forms of this variousness within the ‘Marxism’ that intervenes in cultural theory. Then, there is the very large issue of what happens when Marxism, in origin a product of European thought, arrives in the tricontinent (a term I prefer over ‘the Third World’) and encounters cultures, often undermined and disarticulated and then re-configured under colonial domination, that are very different than the ones in which Marxism initially arose and intervened. This is in fact a vast arena. Some significant names can be mentioned: figures from the African diaspora who are well-known in the US academic institutions, such as Cesaire and Fanon or Stuart Hall, but also a broader range from Roberto Shwarz to Kojin Karatani with others such as Samir Amin and Aziz al-Azmeh in between. The question here is not as to which of these is or is not a certified Marxist but, more fascinatingly, how Marxism appears in the cultural theories and analyses of such diverse thinkers in such diverse global settings, including ones who do not think of themselves as Marxists or who think of Marxism more as a problem and a provocation than a home. Students who enrol for this course should come to the first session with some grasp of the following: Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, Part One: Feurbach Marx, Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (1857) Herbert Marcuse, “Foundations of Historical Materialism” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/historical- materialism/index.htm Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Role of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory Aijaz Ahmad, “Alienation and Freedom: Marx’s Ontology of Social Being” V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Part One. Raymond Williams, “Base ad Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Materialism & Culture: Selected Essays Terry Eagleton, “Base & Superstructure in Raymond Williams,” in Terry Eagleton (ed), Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives |