| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 8 | THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION | DIMENDBERG, EDWARD | This class will explore varieties of the geographic imagination. Through readings of texts by Alexander von Humboldt, Élisée Reclus, Anton Wagner, David Harvey, Kristin Ross, Tom Conley, and Henri Lefebvre, we will consider the interplay between exploration and conquest, the literary genre of natural history, and the relations among space, politics, and culture more generally. We will investigate the geographies of specific cities (Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Mexico City, Shanghai) and the nature and function of different types of maps, ranging from mental images of a neighborhood, to the maps of nations, to images of the city developed by literature and film, to large-scale images and data sets enabled by contemporary GPS and GIS technologies. Course requirements: Take-home midterm and final research paper. |
| COM LIT 10 | RENAISSANCE EUROPE GOES TO THE MOVIEWS | NEWMAN, J. | In his well known book, Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1996), scientist Stephen Jay Gould writes that the film Jurassic Park contains several scientific errors, but that these errors "belong to a juicy and informative class of faults." "Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truths for yourself." In this course, we will examine the "juicy faults" about the European Renaissance that we find in a series of movies from the 1940s up through the early twenty-first century, viewing them in conversation with primary and secondary historical and literary texts from and about the period. We will think about the role that cinematic representations of the European Renaissance and European history between c. 1500-1650 played in the fashioning of modern and post-modern political, religious, cultural, military, and scientific identities from the Cold War up through the aftermath of 9/11. All the films will be available for screening on Google Drive and all readings will be available on the course website. In other words: You will not need to purchase any books or films for this course! Lecture attendance, viewing of the films, completion of short readings, several on-line reading and viewing quizzes, two MessageBoard posts, and two short movie reviews. |
| 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 105 | THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN LITERATURE | THIONGO, N. | Just about everything about African literature generates heated debates about Africa and the world. Even the language and definition of African writing are highly political: is it literature written in European languages or in African languages? The course is an introduction and an in-depth look at the issues animating the African imagination such as colonialism, language, orality, race, class, gender and ideology. The course explores the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and power in literature and society, in the process raising important questions of deracination and identity; domination and resistance. Texts for discussion will include drama, poetry and fiction in English or in English translation. |
| COM LIT 105 | HISTORY, MEMORY, AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFAM LIT | KEIZER, A | Twentieth- and twenty-first century African American literature is deeply engaged with the history of blacks in the African Diaspora. One might say that history, especially the history of slavery, haunts contemporary African American expressive culture. This course will examine novels, drama, and some visual artworks published from the 1970s through the present, analyzing the ways in which they address memory (especially the memory of trauma), oral and written history, and the formation of black identity. Issues of gender, sexuality, and “racial” formation will be central to our discussions. Course requirements will include an in-class midterm, an in-class presentation, and a take-home final (an 8-10-page essay). |
| COM LIT 123 | THE ILIAD AND ITS RECEPTION | GIANNOPOULOU, Z. | |
| COM LIT 132 | ANARCHISM | DIMENDBERG, EDWARD | This course introduces the anarchist political and cultural imagination through readings in philosophy, literature, history, and viewing of select films. Classic texts by Marx, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Tolstoy will be read. The British True Levellers of the Seventeenth Century, early advocates of egalitarianism and the abolition of property, will be studied through the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the film Winstanley by Kevin Brownlow, and the novel Comrade Jacob by David Caute. Poetry by Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine and cinematic biographies will explore the relation between personal identity and sexuality. Mary Wollstonecraft¹s Vindication of the Rights of Women and Mary Shelley¹s Frankenstein will be approached as explorations of gender equality and romanticism. The Paris Commune of 1871, among the first modern revolutions, will be approached via Emile Zola¹s novel The Debacle, writings of participant/observers such as Élisée Reclus and Mikhail Bakunin, and later films The New Babylon by Sergei Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg and The Commune by Peter Watkins. We will consider anarchist participation in the Spanish Civil War by reading Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and viewing the recent extraordinary compilation of period documentaries produced by the Spanish Cinematheque. Course requirements: Take-home midterm and final research paper. |
| COM LIT 144 | VERNACULAR MODERNISMS | AMIRAN, E | This course reads popular, alternative literary and artistic work from the modernist period, 1900-1945. We read “less great” diaries, dreams, comics, experimental film, and popular stories. Vernacular modernism makes the same assumptions and considers the same ideas as does so-called high art of the period. Both offer synthetic world visions and believe in the power of language to make the world. But vernacular literature (like songs, diaries, children’s literature, and comics) doesn’t rely on the institutional and generic structures that define and shape official literature: it is often popular in form, private or self-published, uncommercial, unusual, or even hard to recognize as art. Readings include Garrett Price’s failed comic “White Boy,” Dada poetry, selections from Rebecca West’s travel literature, adventure stories from popular magazines, surrealist painting by Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and Kay Sage, Milne’s Winnie the Pooh or other children’s lit from the period, Gertrude Stein’s “Four Saints in Three Acts,” Rodia’s Watts Towers, Adorno’s dreams (also Jack Kerouac’s and Leonora Carrington’s, plus some of Freud's own dreams), Henry Darger’s private fiction, Fletcher Hanks’ “Phantoma,” Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and Maya Deren’s films. We will read essays by Fanon, Bateson, Klein, and others from the period to help understand this work. We will also consider some later vernacular art that reflects on the period, such as Oesterheld/López’s “The Eternaut,” Steven Wiltshire’s memory painting, Andy Goldsworthy’s ice sculpture, and Michael Grab’s balancing rocks project. |
| COM LIT 160 | NEW CHINESE CINEMAS | ABBAS, A | 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 210 | REALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: FROM LUKACS TO OOO | NEWMAN, J. | This seminar will trace debates about realism in literary and cultural studies (with some attention also to philosophical and political realist theories), looking to the ways in which the contests staged between "totalizing" vs. "dispersed" theories of realism (Shaw) can account for the ways 'realist' projects (magical, speculative and otherwise) can (or cannot) be said to intersect with or challenge, confirm or denaturalize existing social, cultural, and political conditions and norms of representation. Of particular interest will be realism's relation to historicisms new and old, to the question of the modern (and of modernism), and to the chronologies of literary, cultural, and political history that dominate the public and the academic imagination. Readings will include: Lukacs, Jakobson, Brecht, Auerbach, Macherey, H. White, and Jameson (among others) and Whitehead, Bergson, Harmon, Bennett, and Shaviro (among others). |
| COM LIT 210 | DELEUZE, CINEMA II | ABBAS, A | This is the second of a 2-part seminar on Deleuze’s groundbreaking cinema books. Each seminar can be taken independently. Fall 2016 will focus on Cinema 2. For Deleuze, philosophers construct concepts, while filmmakers construct images, so much so that filmmakers can be classified in terms of the type of image they create. The cinema books do not give us a ‘philosophy of cinema’, or treat filmmaking as ‘thinking in images’. Rather, ‘thinking’ and ‘image-making’ are seen as independent but related activities; which is why the books on cinema can complement and extend Deleuze’s philosophy in important ways. Taking a hint from Bergson, Deleuze organizes cinematic images into two main types, the Movement-Image (Cinema 1), and the Time-Image (Cinema 2). Like in Cinema 1, Cinema 2 contains many provocative analyses of particular films, including the work of the Italian neo-realists, Godard, Resnais, and Welles. At the same time, the rethinking of the nature of cinema begun in Cinema 1 is taken further when Deleuze broaches topics like ‘ the powers of the false’, ‘thought and cinema’, and ‘cinema and politics’. The seminar will not encumber students with excessive readings. The stress will be on discussing and thinking through the many seminal ideas—in philosophy, in cinema—in Cinema 2. Students are required to keep a journal, and to submit an essay at the end of the quarter. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE POST- NATIONAL AND THE POST-HUMAN | RADHAKRISHNAN, R | Why indeed the term post-national when nations are well and alive and show no sign of disappearing, and why post-human when human is all we have been, are, and will be? Does the post- indicate a critical desire that the Age of the Nation State deserves to come to an end, and the hegemony of the human erase itself? The purpose of this seminar is to examine post-humanism and post-nationalism with reference to each other; for indeed, the two isms are reciprocal and mutually constitutive. If nationalism marks political sovereignty, humanism defines ontological sovereignty in the name of the human both in relationship to itself and in relationship to Being in general. If political being would seem to reach its plenitude in the template of the national citizen, ontological being or Being with a capital B is held captive to the human hegemon. Both orders are sovereign are exceptionalist in nature. Nationalism reduces by violence the “human” to the national while humanism, underwritten as it is by the deeper rationale of anthropocentrism, reduces, as Martin Heidegger would have it in his critique of Jean-Paul Sartre, the _Dasein _to the human, and in so doing forgets the “prior question of Being.” Giorgio Agamben would argue, in advocacy of “bare or naked life,” that political being drives a deep wedge between _bios _and _zoes, _and thus makes “inclusion by exclusion” and “abjection” the corner stone of political sovereignty and governmentality. When we study humanism and nationalism conjuncturally, what emerges into view is the tenuous space of the “onto-political” that demonstrates that the violence that separates the citizen from the immigrant, the non-citizen (who after all is human) is the same violence that separates “human life,” or what Kalpana Rahita Seshadri terms the “humanimal” from the animal, the plant, the rock, the rest of Life. The Age of the Anthropocene is surely the culmination of this ongoing _hubris _in the name of the sovereign human Cogito. Both humanism and nationalism function like the _pharmakon: _they are both the poison and the remedy. Nationalism, for example, accommodates the human being as a normative sovereign citizen but only on the basis of an Us-Them divide: some one else has to be an exile, an immigrant, a stranger, an ethnic other so that the citizen may enjoy the plenitude of his/her political being. In the ongoing crisis the world over of refugees, the rationale of the nation state builds walls, separating the human from the citizen; and political leaders of countries who are responsive to the plight of refugees instantly fall foul of their national citizen subjects who demand protection from “the inhumanity” of the refugee. The calculus of the nation state brainwashes the citizen subject into the ratio that “national life” is the proper currency of the value of human life, and that it is perfectly legitimate to claim exceptional privilege for one’s own nationality. The accommodation of the human being as citizen-subject and the violent creation of the nation state as political home un-homes the human being ontologically with the result that “exile” and “nationalism,” as Edward Said would theorize poignantly, sustain each other in a relationship of chronic pathology. Even though humanism grandstands as a philosophical worldview, it is constrained to instrumentalize itself via nationalism, its politically ally and executive. Humanism in history has an ambivalent history as both a good and a bad “ism.” Eurocentrism, Anthropocentrism, Colonialism, and Racism have all been valid and intended manifestations of humanism; and the challenging question is the following. Is it possible to transform humanism in the name of humanism; or has the time come to reject humanism (and along with it, nationalism) _tout court _and look for a new _imprimatur: _in the name of the exile, the refugees, the animal, planetary being, deep ecology? Would a new _imprimatur _inaugurate its own regime of “othering” and abjection? Or is the only available option an “exilic” praxis of a given hegemonic location: a Derridean double session of a radical ongoing dualistic deconstruction from within? Or, is the “Open” imaginable, along the lines of the great Siddha Tamil poets, as naked under the sky, absolutely non-sovereign,singular as the body and the truth of the body? This seminar should be of interdisciplinary interest, particularly to students and scholars in Literature, Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, and the Fine Arts. Tentative Readings: Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Louis Althusser, Rabindranath Tagore, Etienne Balibar, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Donna Haraway, Adrienne Rich, Rosi Braidotti, Sylvia Wynter, Edward Said, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe. Expectations and Requirements: Attendance, participation, class presentations, and 2 papers: 1 Short (10 pages) and I Long (20 pages). |