| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 60A | WORLD LITERATURE | NEWMAN, J. | People call movies like Avatar (dir. James Cameron) (2009) ‘epics’. Do post-modern movies like Avatar mimic the ancient Greek poet Homer’s pre-modern epic, the Odyssey? What can we learn about any nation’s interests and concerns today from its engagement with the masterpieces of either its own tradition or with other traditions from a different time and place? How do the world’s literatures circulate around the globe? In Comparative Literature 60A, we will read some of the greatest texts of World Literature – from the ancient Greek, Argentinian, English, Irish, Nigerian, and Persian traditions – in dialogue with one another as a way of answering these questions. Texts will include the 13th century Persian and Sunni Muslim poet Rumi’s texts with and against 20th century U.S. translations of his work by Coleman Barks; the Persian poet Firdowsi’s 10th century epic, the Shahnameh, and its afterlife in miniature illustrations, oral recitations in coffee houses, and re-significations as Iran’s national epic; the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles’ Antigone (442 b.c.e.) as it is retold in Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa play (1986); Sophocles’ Philoctetes (409 b.c.e.) as it dialogues with Irish playwright Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990 /1991) (itself said to commemorate the work of South African Nelson Mandela); Euripides’ Bacchae (405 b.c.e.) in conversation with Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973); and parts of medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1476) with and against selections from David Herd’s and Anna Pincus’ Refugee Tales (2016), in which contemporary British writers and poets retell the stories of immigrants seeking asylum in England today, stories that the refugees have told themselves. These dialogues will help us understand the many ways that the traditions we study can have multiple afterlives across traditions and around the world. On-line quizzes on lecture material, weekly Discussion Board posts on the readings, and short comparative writing assignments. Comparative Literature 60A is the first quarter of the “World Literature” track in the Comp. Lit. major, but the course is open to all students. It fulfills the GE IV and VIII campus-wide requirements. |
| COM LIT 102W | MELODRAMA | TERADA, R. | Film melodrama is known for depicting emotions that seem at once extravagant and overly scripted, leading some to see these emotions as false. But hyperbolic emotions and the restricted possibilities of melodrama scripts reflect normative models of self, concepts, and possibility, and show that the ordinary life that people are supposed to be leading ("drama" that is not melo-) is also an idealization. Often, melodrama’s world of people who can’t seem to produce the “right” emotions suggests criticism of the society that demands certain emotions, even as the films seem to lack a vocabulary for protest. For the reason that ordinary life is supposed to be (but isn't) within reach within melodrama, it may also be that melodrama racially and otherwise centers parts of society where the illusion of ordinary life can exist. (In other words, can melodrama exist when ordinary drama isn't even an illusory possibility, because what there is is so much worse?) We’ll watch several films from the period of classic melodrama and some that comment on it: Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows (1954), Todd Haynes, Far from Heaven (2002); Alberto Gout, Aventurera (1950); Ki-Young Kim, The Housemaid (1960); Ritwik Ghatak, The Cloud-capped Star (1960); Vincent Minnelli, Two Weeks in Another Town (1962); Barbara Loden, Wanda (1970); Mick Jackson, The Bodyguard (1992). The class format will be student-driven discussion. This course fulfills the upper-division writing requirement and so often we will work through ideas in various forms of writing. |
| COM LIT 105 | CONTEMP AFRICAN LIT | THIONG'O, N. | The course examines themes in African Writing in English and translations into English: drama, poetry and fiction. It is both an introduction to the field and an in-depth look at the issues animating the African imagination. The relationship between language, literature, aesthetics, ethics, and power in society is the connecting thread. The course introduces some key literary movements, such as negritude, as well as writers of the new generation and looks at new trends such as crime fiction. |
| COM LIT 142 | 20TH C. LIT. GEOGS | AMIRAN, E. | The rise of an increasingly connected world has intensified the search for what Hakim Bey called “temporary autonomous zones,” spaces that have their own logics or ways of doing things and that are set apart from the normative world. Children’s literature and travel literature are two kinds of works that try to construct separate geographies. Occupy Wall Street has reminded us of the political valence of such spaces, which reposition us in social space. Here fantasy is not self-delusion but a constituent part of creating social space. We’ll read literary and cultural works that explore these kinds of geographies. How do they try to change us? What is the political potential of fantasies of public space? Texts may include Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist; Coover, Spanking the Maid; Darger, In the Realms of the Unreal; Eberhardt, Nomad Diaries; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Grahame, The Wind in the Willows; Kirby, graphic art; Koolhaas, “Junkspace”; magazine travel stories; Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress; Naimy, The Book of Mirdad; West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Readings will include political theory about social geography. This course requires frequent in-class writing, oral presentations, and a final exam. |
| COM LIT 160 | LYRICS IN POP&FILM | AMIRAN, E. | Pop lyrics are the poetry of the mediated world, telling our stories and telling us how to live these stories, how to process romance, personal crisis, war and disaster. They often help us think through and call us to action about social and political events. The course focuses on several key cultural moments from the pop era, including the rise of pop culture in the 1960s (especially Lennon and McCartney lyrics), auteur figures like Gil Scott-Heron, Leonard Cohen, and Nina Simone, and new social music today, particularly west coast rap. The course includes poetry adapted into pop, such as Anne Sexton’s “Mercy Street,” lyrics that are transformed by new musical versions (for example, “Cry Me a River”), and song lyrics from the Caribbean, Algeria, Mexico, and France (in translation where needed) to ask what social and personal work they do. Film lyrics studied could come from The Lion King, Straight Outta Compton, and Children of Men, among others. |
| 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 210 | READING VICO / (RE)READING VICO | NEWMAN, J. | The eighteenth-century Neapolitan scholar Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is best known for his Principles of [the] New Science…Concerning the Common Nature of the Nations (1725 /1744), in which he develops an anti-progressivist theory of history based on the permanent tug-of-war between human civilization and its barbarisms that he claims orders human history. It is for this reason – and alongside his oft-stated antipathy to Descartes – that Vico can be understood as the ‘father’ of a kind of anti-Enlightenment cultural anthropology. In this context, it is not surprising that his work became the object of fascination for an entire generation (or two) of some of the most famous thinkers of the early to mid-twentieth century, including Croce, Gramsci, and Lukacs, Horkheimer and Adorno, Collingwood and Joyce, Arendt, Bultmann, Löwith, Auerbach, and Said, as they grappled with the consequences of humanity’s expression of its darker sides in their own times. In this course, we will study several of Vico’s often cited, but seldom read texts, including the New Science, On Humanistic Education (1699–1707), On the Study Methods of our Time (1709), and The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (1725-31) with and against readings of his corpus by some of these thinkers. Among the questions we will ask will be, on the one hand, what were the philosophical and textual origins of Vico's system and when and why has it so often dropped out of intellectual history's sight, and on the other, what about Vico’s philosophy of history so fascinated these theorists that they turned to it again and again (often in conversation with one another)? Finally: Why might we in turn want to re-center his work as we try and understand the contours of the apparently unavoidable (and anthropogenic) flaws of our own politically, ecologically, and socially damaged world? The Baroque Vico found the origins of his theory of history in Providence, or God’s grim plan for the world; returning to him in our own post-secular age, even if it means reconceptualizing 'Providence’, might make sense as a way of rethinking the place of the human in history. Additional readings of selected texts by surrounding thinkers with whom Vico’s work has been associated (Descartes, Herder, Michelet, Hegel, and Marx) will help set the stage. |
| COM LIT 210 | ECOLOGICAL IMAGINARY | SCHWAB, G. | This course explores the ecological imaginary from a double perspective: on the one hand, we will look at ecology proper and the way sites of ecological devastation are envisioned in critical discourses as well as literary texts (and to a lesser extent, film and art). On the other hand, we will revisit Bateson’s Steps toward an Ecology of Mind to ask how ecological hotspots (oil, water, air and related issues of toxicity, including nuclear and chemical contamination) impact mind and psyche, emotion and affect, transgenerational memory and visions of the future. Tracing the entanglement between ecology proper and a concomitant “ecology of mind,” the course focuses on literary and artistic figurations of today’s most far-reaching ecological challenges. I have selected theories that frame current ecological debates in order to provide conceptual tools to analyze the impact of ecological violence on mind, affect, and psychic life as well as the mobilization of resistance, resilience and creativity. The following text basis is subject to minor revisions (mainly cutting a few texts and possibly substituting one of two). Theory: Selections from: Gregory Bateson, Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (“Form, Substance, and Difference”; “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art”) Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood, eds., Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (Chapters: Introduction, David Wood, Timothy Clark, Karen Barad, Cary Wolfe, Kelly Oliver) Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, (Chapter 1 “The three Figures of Geontology;” Chapter 3 “The Fossils and the Bones” Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, (Chapter 7 “Humans and Terrans in the Gaia War;” “Conclusion: World on the Brink.) Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Introduction and Chapter 8: “The Camille Stories”) Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Chapter on Munif’s Cities of Salt) Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (selections) Literature: Oil: Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, (creative nonfiction) Toxicity: Indra Sinha, Animal’s People Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream Film: Estamira Water: Emmi Itäranta, Memory of Water Frank Schätzing, The Swarm Nuclear Power: Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl Film: Into Eternity Experimental Ecological Visions: Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods Samuel Beckett, Happy Days |
| COM LIT 210 | MELODRAMA/THEORY | TERADA, R. | Film melodrama depicts emotions that seem at once extravagant and scripted, leading to the assumption that the films' deployment of emotion is cathartic and escapist, and ideologically so. The reception of film melodrama accepts a normative notion of social emotion in order to argue that melodrama presents moralized dichotomies and visual extravagance to channel disquiet and license forbidden desires. Almost all of the criticism theorizing melodrama connects its excitement to its (that is, criticism's) historical, globalized, and technological vision of modernity. These accounts of melodrama position it at the intersection of morality and sensation. It either symptomatically deflects the anxiety of modernity or asks a critical question about it. Melodrama appears differently, however, when theses of modernity are more in doubt. Conceiving the "hyperbolic" emotions and "restricted" possibilities of melodrama scripts requites normative models of self, concepts, and possibility, and suggests that the ordinary life that social actors are supposed to be leading ("drama" that is not melo-) is also an idealization. Often, melodrama’s world of people who can’t seem to produce the “right” emotions erodes the assumption of working social order in its various locations. Its effect is to project an unconvincing image of a missing center even more irreal than melodrama's visual surface. For the reason that an irreal image of ordinary life is projected beside melodrama, film melodrama racially and otherwise focuses only those parts of society from where such an image can be projected during the high growth era (about 1945-1965). Further, most of the films of melodrama's peak lack a vocabulary for dissent. Their visual and other perplexities resist separation from filmic and directorial consciousness that can be imagined to be arranging them from a position of reason. Melodrama's immanence and lostness--its having already "lost it," let go--appears as a possible alternative source of its enormous pleasure. Because melodrama's immanence has been difficult to register from within film studies that look for possibilities of political reform, its appearance of having given up also offers leverage on aspirational paradigms of the political in the post-melodramatic period. Melodrama is not merely a critical commentary on social roles. What is it? We’ll read the film and narrative literature on melodrama while watching several films from the period of classic melodrama and some that comment on it or stand necessarily elsewhere: for instance, Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows (1954), Todd Haynes, Far from Heaven (2002); Alberto Gout, Aventurera (1950); Ki-Young Kim, The Housemaid (1960); Ritwik Ghatak, The Cloud-capped Star (1960); Kent Mackenzie, The Exiles (1961); Vincent Minnelli, Two Weeks in Another Town (1962); Barbara Loden, Wanda (1970). |
| COM LIT 210 | INFINITY: FROM BRUNO TO BADIOU | SMITH, J. | The concept of the infinite has gotten a lot of play in recent French philosophy: Gilles Deleuze expounds on calculus in his book on Leibniz; it is central to Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, who envision the demand of contemporary philosophy as challenging fixations on finitude. And Jean-Luc Nancy, in a chapter called “Infinite Finitude,” makes the startling claim: “Everything at stake at the end of philosophy comes together … in the need of having to open the thought of finitude.” This course will explore what is at stake in embracing the concept of infinity (and its necessary counterpart, we will see, the infinitesimal). We will begin with a story about how the infinite came to be a part of modernity itself, looking at the following stages. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, in large measure for his heretical view that the universe is infinite and contains an infinite number of worlds (On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds). Leibniz’ and Newton’s simultaneous (independent?) discovery of calculus introduced the most powerful mathematical tool since Euclid’s geometry by finding a way to work with the infinite and “infinitesimals.” Fontenelle encouraged a “marquise” to overcome her terror at the thought of an infinite “plurality of worlds” in his 1686 dialogue of that name. By the early 19th century (in part thanks to 18th-century developments in theology and religious poetry), the infinite is no longer terrifying but comes to be embraced by Romanticism and Idealism. (We’ll look at Kant’s ambivalence toward the infinite in the Critique of Pure Reason and his use of it in his theory of the sublime. Also samples of Romantics’ writings.) Indeed, Hegel famously has a long section of his Science of Logic (which we will read with other selections) that discusses calculus and he claims: “The essence of philosophy [is located]…in the task of answering the question: How does the infinite go forth out of itself and come to finitude?” By the end of the century, Georg Cantor, the inventor of set theory, developed a conception of levels of infinities which has been crucial for Badiou. (We’ll supplement these primary historical readings with Alexandre Koyré’s From a Closed World to an Infinite Universe and selections from Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.) This historical discussion of how the infinite, so to speak, comes to be “at home in the world” will form the foundation for a discussion of the French thinkers mentioned above. For fun background reading, I’d suggest David Foster Wallace’s, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. |