| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 101A | RENAISSANCE EUROPE GOES TO THE MOVIES | NEWMAN, J. | “History does not exist until it is created.” -- Robert A. Rosenstone In his essay in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1996), scientist Stephen Jay Gould writes that the film Jurassic Park contains several errors, but that these errors “belong to the juicy and informative class of faults” that has been described in the following way: “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, and look at them in conversation with primary and secondary historical and literary texts from and about the period. We will ask what role cinematic representations of the European Renaissance and European early modernity (c. 1500-1650) played in the fashioning of modern and post-modern political, religious, cultural, and scientific identities in the West from the Cold War up through the aftermath of 9/11 (c. 1945-2007). Among the topics we cover will be the persecution of witches, female leadership, Machiavellianism, the Reformation, Dutch and Italian Renaissance art history, contact with the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and the endless series of wars. Lecture attendance, completion of short reading assignments, and watching the films mandatory; on-line quizzes, two movie reviews, and short final paper. Enrollment in discussion is required |
| COM LIT 102W | VOICES IN NARRATIVE (LITERATURE, FILM, PERFORMANCE) | SCHLICHTER, A. | The study of "the voice" in literary and cultural productions becomes an investigation into central notions of our culture, such as identity, representation, narrative. In philosophy and critical theories, the "voice" has predominantly served as a metaphor for the representation of a subject (think of "the voices" of the marginalized, the "voice" of an author, the "voice" of poetry), but such an understanding of voice does not consider its material aspect: sound. In this class, we will examine the productive tensions of different notions of "voice," and investigate how speaking and singing voices are staged in different media, such as literary texts, film and audio narratives. How can literature, a medium of writing, stage "voicing"? How do "voice techniques" in movies, e.g. the voice-over, reinforce or undermine the visual narrative? How does the voice operate in performance genres (stand-up comedy or critical performance)? What is the relationship between productions of "voice" and "identity"? Grades will be based on midterm, final, class participation and a longer writing assignment. An academic essay (12-15 pp final paper based on individual research) is one option. Students will be encouraged to experiment with alternative forms, such as a critical or creative project that uses the material voice (e.g. a sound essay). Projects will be work-shopped in class. |
| COM LIT 105 | COLONIZER&COLONIZED | THIONG'O, N. | The course examines the dialectics of the colonizer and the Colonized in the making of Europhone African literature. The two linked social forces have impacted the ethics, aesthetics and politics of contemporary African literature including choice of themes, language and even publishing options. Though the course is based on individual texts and writers from the colonial to the post-colonial period, the connecting link is the struggle between the two forces, whose consequences underly the anxieties globalization today. |
| COM LIT 140 | OUTSIDER LITERATURE | AMIRAN, E. | Outsider artists and writers by definition do not have significant exposure to mainstream art and writing, or operate so far outside the norms of other literature as to seem that way. Generally they work alone and for themselves. Many have been lifelong inmates of hospitals for the insane, or have lived in isolation. The work we will read is sought out and collected, often after the authors’ death. Does it embody social obsessions, reflecting society back to itself in a raw form? Or does it show inclinations of the human mind toward the paranoid fantasies that often structure this work? Or maybe these are the same? This course will ask such questions by focusing on religious vision, paranoia, and ideas of space, capital, identity, and the law in the mostly 20C American work. Authors studied will include the amazing writer and painter Henry Darger, body artist Yayoi Kusama, paranoid racist Frances E. Dec, preacher and spaceman Howard Finster, pacifist topiary artist Pearl Fryer, songwriter Daniel Johnston, worst writer ever Amanda McKittrick Ros, Watts Towers builder Simon Rodia, and hallucinatory spiritualist Hannah Weiner, along with theoretical work by Artaud, Klein, and Laplanche, and McLuhan. |
| COM LIT 160 | JAPANESE 60S CINEMA | TERADA, R. | 1960s Japanese Cinema This course considers how both art cinema and popular cinema (yakuza film and "pink" film [soft porn]) explored the limits of work, sexuality and politics in 1960s and early 70s Japan. Filmmakers whose art we'll view formed live/work collectives, engaged in physical revolutionary activities, and turned their own lives into art. Topics likely to come up include women's labor; the sexualization of politics; Japanese citizens' struggle with Japanese racism, classism, misogyny, and colonial mentality; psychedelia; and communism. Discussions of film will also make room for discussions of art and performance (A. Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama). Directors and films likely to be included are: Naruse, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs; Suzuki, Tokyo Drifter; Imamura, Intentions of Murder; Wakamatsu, Sex Jack; Adachi, A.K.A. Serial Killer; Ogawa, The Front for the Liberation of Japan – Summer in Sanrizuka; Teshigahara, White Morning (short); Matsumoto, Funeral Parade of Roses. Requirements consist in posting on a messageboard, midterm, and final writing project done in stages. As ever, I hope for low-key, low-stress and collaborative social relations among us. |
| COM LIT 200A | HIST&THEORY COM LIT | AHMAD, A. | Debating World Literature The title of this course might have been “Is there a world literature? If so, what is it?” Some would claim that this is the field that Goethe desired, Marx predicted, Auerbach conceived, and just the right way to do comparative literature in this age of globalisation. A further claim would be that there once was a time when comparative literature was a story of Europe while excluding its Others; that comparative literature has now expired and, rising out of its own ashes, it is re-born as World Literature that seeks to cut Europe down to size while including great many of its Others. Multicultural on the world scale, as it were. A related, more modest claim would be: This is how we now do what was once called ‘Third World Literature’. We will study the genealogy of these claims. Increasingly, though, the field has come to be constituted not so much by these claims but by debates interrogating them. What is the status of translation versus the original text in this field? Does the teaching of world literature amount to much more than doing globalisation’s work for it in the literary field? In what language would the archive of this world literature be assembled and taught? Presumably in English. What are the critical and theoretical apparatuses to which these texts, culled from all over the world, would be submitted for scrutiny? Presumably Euro-American. Is world literature then not just an “Anglo-Globalism”, as Jonathan Arac once asked? Starting with the founding texts of Said, Jameson, Moretti, Spivak and others, these debates have produced a distinguished body of critical thought. The course will engage with the complexity of that thought. |
| COM LIT 200B | THRY OF TRANSLATION | NEWMAN, J. | An Introduction to Theories of Translation: Fidelity, Treason, and the Question of Voice(s) Wednesdays, 2-5 p.m. Comparative Literature, with its proclivity for crossing borders of all sorts—linguistic, medium-specific, and theoretical—has long emphasized the centrality of translation as a concept and practice crucial to the field. Indeed, there could be no “comparative” literature without the implicit attempt to bridge, or to “translate,” the space between languages, cultures, nationalities, and traditions, on the one hand, and theories and methodologies, on the other. It is in terms of this in-between of literary-textual-theoretical studies, also in other media, across a wide range of languages and cultures that scholars of Comparative Literature have been occupied by the inherently intercultural questions of translation theory and methodology. Moreover, post-colonial theorists, students of cultural studies, and practitioners of interdisciplinary approaches to reading writ large all agree that both literal and figurative translation is central to what they do. Literary translation—and the translation of literature—is, finally, both a major field in itself and a pre-condition of much that we do in our courses. This seminar will examine some of the fundamental questions about the practice, art, and politics of translation. Readings will address the history of translation theory, historical and recent problematizations of the use of translations in Comparative Literature as a discipline and the often minoritized place of translation studies in the field, feminist and post-colonial approaches to the ethics of what is often the asymmetrical practice of translating, theories of authorship and the cultural authority of ‘originals’ and translated texts, the challenges of creating ‘domesticating’ or ‘foreignizing’ translations that render original and translation visible or invisible in both the texts themselves and in the marketplace of ideas and material goods, and questions of multi-voicedness as both a political and an aesthetic position and act. Students may fulfill one of the Comparative Literature language requirements by enrolling in this class and completing a translation project, which must be accompanied by a substantial preface that engages the theoretical materials covered in the course. If the original text is in a language other than French or German, the instructor will help the student locate a faculty member competent to supervise the project. Seminar options include such a project or a research paper. Pro-seminar options include two translation exercises and a short essay that embeds the student’s translating practice in the materials covered in the course. The pro-seminar option will not fulfill a Comparative Literature language requirement. |
| COM LIT 210 | HAITIAN REVOLUTION | CHANDLER, N. | Haitian Revolution: Historiography, Literature, Philosophy This seminar will investigate the contemporary theoretical implication of the terms of an intervention into contemporary historiography offered by the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James during that momentous decade of modern world history, the 1930s, building from a theoretical account of a little known dialogue between them that stretched across the 1960s. The course will do this by examining the contemporary resurgence of engagement of the legacy of the Haitian Revolution across literature, philosophy, and historiography, in particular since the 2003 bicentennial of the Haitian revolutionary declaration. This seminar will thus bring the investigation of this early dialogue and the recent scholarship and discussion into dialogue with certain nodal references on the horizons of a contemporary thought – from theories of historiography across the twentieth century and into the present, critical theory (both the 1930s emergent moment, and the efflorescence of the past half century), to theories of colonialism and post-colonial studies, to the “black radical tradition” then and now, and beyond, to contemporary accounts of globalization, to theorizations of radical or new forms of democracy, and theories of historical social difference, as they may yet arise across the decades of the twenty-first century yet to come. This seminar follows out and complete two previous seminars on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James. |
| COM LIT 210 | CRITICAL ECOTHEORY | SCHWAB, G. | In this course we will use the concept of an “ecology of mind” (Bateson) to explore the entangled relationship between two major dangers to planetary life: nuclear necropolitics and climate change. With a focus on the psychopolitical implications of these forces, we will deal with issues such as deep history, scale and the limits of human imagination as they manifest themselves in the politics and limits of representation, the politics of denial and splitting, or in imaginaries and phantasms of extinction, in species life, trans-species lives and subjectivities. We will discuss selections of the following texts. 1. Günther Anders, The Obsolescence of Man 2. Horkheimer/Adorno, Negative Dialectic of Enlightenment 3. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement 4. Arundati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story 5. Charmaine White Face, Indigenous Nations’ Rights in the Balance 6. Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert 7. Kate Brown, Plutopia 8. Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy 9. Sally Weintrobe, Engaging with Climate Change 10. William Connolly, Facing the Planetary 11. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter 12. Mel Chen, Animacies Essays: Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now” Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History” Mbembe, “Necropolitics” Film: Michael Madsen, Into Eternity |
| COM LIT 210 | ROUSSEAU:ANTHRO&POL | LITWIN, C. | Perhaps no one in the 18th Century has been more influential and more controversial than Rousseau. While Claude Lévi-Strauss viewed the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality as seminal to modern anthropology, Rousseau’s political reflections, and the issues they continue to raise, have been and still are at the center of political philosophy. In this course, we will first examine the method of his anthropology, which, before Nietzsche, he described as a moral “genealogy”. We will then address the problematic articulation between this method and his “Principles of Political Right”, which is to say the normative political theory exposed in the Social Contract and in other less well known political writings. In the last section of the seminar we will discuss how this problematic articulation of Rousseau’s anthropology and politics plays in the hermeneutics of his later improperly called “auto-biographical” writings. All these texts and issues will be examined in light of their historical context as well as their longer and broader intellectual legacy (Kant, Hegel, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, Strauss, Rawls, Shklar, Walzer, Schmitt…). The seminar is conducted in English. Reading comprehension of French secondary sources is useful but not required. |