| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 10 | CYBORG CULTURE: THE ADVENTURES OF A DIGITAL READER | CHAHINIAN, T. | Over the last several decades, the Digital Revolution has changed the way we produce and practice culture, which is increasingly run through software. Com Lit 10 traces the development of literature, visual arts, and popular culture in the digital world to ask a) how do we make sense of our experience in the world and b) how do we represent our experience of the world in the digital era? We will consider our changing reading practices, the politics of digital participation across social media platforms, the performance of online identities, and new challenges to our understanding of reality to critically examine how we engage with multi-media culture. |
| 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, Argentine, English, French-Caribbean, German, Irish, Nigerian, Persian, and U.S. traditions – in dialogue with one another as a way of answering these questions. Texts will include the poems of the 14th century Persian poet and mystic Hafiz in various translations and as they were read by the 19th century German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; 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 British medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales as they have been taken up by the British-Nigerian rapper and performance artist Patience Agbabi (b. 1965); the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles’ Antigone (442 b.c.e.) as it is retold in Argentine 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) and the U.S poet Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty One Love Poems” (1974-76); Euripides’ Bacchae (405 b.c.e.) in conversation with Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973), and Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611) in dialogue with French Caribbean writer Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969) and as it was performed by inmates at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in La Grange, Kentucky, in 2005. - These dialogues will help us understand the many ways that the traditions we study can have multiple afterlives across traditions and around the world. 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. Requirements for this course include: Doing the assigned readings, watching the lecture videos, watching supplemental (not optional) videos, Quizzes, Discussion Board posts on the readings, and Workshop Exercises on the readings. There is no midterm and no final in this course. |
| COM LIT 107 | GLOBALIZATION | AHMAD, A. | The term ‘Globalization’ was rarely used until about 1990. By now, a quarter century later, the term is used widely in the social sciences as much as in studies of culture, literature, film, media, ecology the arts and so on. What was new in the world that accounts for this sudden popularization of this concept? It is also true, though, that the United States has been the world’s most globalized country in its very formation, with settlers and slaves arriving in the earliest phase, followed by migrants and refugees from all corners of the world. ‘Globalization’ can then be seen not as not just a recent phenomenon but as something much older that begins with the beginning of Europe’s world-wide colonial expansion several centuries ago. The course will be structured along these two emphases: (1) the historical processes that account for long-term but very unequal social, cultural and economic integration of the world across continents; and (2) the historical changes unfolding very rapidly over the past few decades. Globalization is thus seen not as a static contemporary condition but a dynamic process involving continuous change. |
| COM LIT 123 | MEDEA THRU THE AGES | GIANNOPOULOU, Z. | This course on re-imagining the classics will explore how and why the classics have been retold, reformed, invoked, reinterpreted, and received from antiquity to the present day. We will use the mythological figure of Medea as our case study. Beginning with some theoretical orientation and reading Euripides’ Medea, we will survey the various literary versions of the myth in Roman literature. In the latter part of the course, we will turn to Medea’s place in modern and contemporary literature, theater, and film. While discussing the various reinterpretations and reinventions of Medea, we will remain mindful of issues of intertextuality. How for instance, do later versions of the myth engage with and prefigure earlier works? How might contemporary media reflect upon and suggest new meanings for their classical source texts? The methods and approaches used in this course should provide a model with which to approach other mythological, literary, aesthetic, and philosophical topics in classics and beyond. |
| COM LIT 143 | EDGE OF THE SEA | FARBMAN, H. | The border of land and sea is a key scene of climate change. Slight changes at this margin have large consequences. Indeed, if the largeness of the consequences is hard to fathom, this may be partly because the changes are so slight when measured against the vastness of the ocean. Even in the age now commonly called “the anthropocene,” when capitalist production fundamentally alters the ocean’s basic conditions, threatening all of the life forms it supports, the ocean remains in some part unfathomable. This course gathers literary and visual resources for thinking about climate change from the point of view of the edge of the still unfathomable ocean, which remains strangely stable, even in the worst-case scenarios. Reading and viewing will include Native American, ancient Near Eastern, and ancient Greek flood myths; historical writing by Michelet; fictional writing by Jules Verne; nature writing by Rachel Carson; theoretical writing and photography by Alan Sekula; selected surrealist and proto-surrealist poems; selected early cinematic representations (Williamson, Marey, and Méliès); selected later cinematic representations (The Endless Summer, The Big Blue, and an ocean disaster movie tbd); and selected televisual and journalistic representations of recent disasters. This is a lot, but care will be taken to keep reading and viewing assignments manageable, partly in order to open up time and space for exercises in viewing and writing about the coastal environment of Orange and Los Angeles counties. The course will be taught entirely in English, but, upon agreement with the instructor, French majors who do the writing and the relevant reading in French may count the course as taken in French. |
| COM LIT 144 | NARR ENVR DISASTER | JOHNSON, A. | In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), Amitav Ghosh raises the question about the role of literature and the arts in facing processes of climate change and environmental degradation and the increased perception of fragility of the world. How, he asks, do the forms and genres we have inherited limit our capacity to engage with phenomena that seem too improbable or unthinkable, too other-worldly or uncanny, or which simply belong to time-scales so vast that we don't have the means to handle them? Starting with Ghosh’s question, this course will explore the representational and conceptual challenges presented by environmental and material processes that fall outside the scope and scale of our practices of representation and how artistic practices might help rework the perceptual and conceptual habits that have dominated our relationship to our environment. Our main theoretical texts will be Ghosh and Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, but we will also read a series of novels from around the world as well as examples of visual culture (films, photographs and other artistic exhibits). |
| COM LIT 200B | THRY OF TRANSLATION | NEWMAN, J. | 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. It is in terms of this in-between of textual studies 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. Post-colonial theorists, students of cultural studies, and practitioners of interdisciplinary approaches to problematizing race, class, and gender codes all agree that studying both literal and figurative translation – in its successful iterations and in its failures – is central to what they do. Literary translation—and the translation of literature—is, finally, both a major field in itself and a highly politicized activity in an increasingly interconnected world. This seminar will examine some of the fundamental questions about the practice, art, and politics of translation on an intra- and international stage. Readings 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, as well as feminist and post-colonial approaches to the ethics of the often asymmetrical practice of translating. Theories of authorship and the cultural authority of ‘originals’ and translated texts, and 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 will also be studied. Finally: The application of psychoanalytic theory to translation studies, the refusal of translation evident in the recent turn to Untranslatability Studies, and the challenges of translation in war zones and in domestic surveillance will form part of the course. Students may fulfill one of the Comparative Literature language requirements by enrolling in this class and completing a translation project (with supervision from additional faculty when the translations are from languages other than French and German); the translation must be accompanied by a substantive preface that engages the theoretical materials covered in the course to satisfy the requirement. 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 | INTERSECTIONALITIES | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | The temporal "after" in the title of the course could also be read spatially as "beyond": the time-spaces or the chronotopes beyond INTERSECTIONALITIES. And as for INTERSECTIONALITIES, you all know what I mean. For more than an academic generation now, this term/concept/paradigm has been unfailingly effective in helping us understand, both theoretically and historically-experientially and discursively, the multiple but simultaneous nature of oppression-domination-colonization along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, colonization, and more. Thanks to intersectional analysis as initiated by Critical Race theory, it became possible to produce sophisticated analyses and interpretations, both aggregated and disaggregated, of different trajectories of the emergence of "subjugated knowledges," their modes of identity and subject formation, their preferences of representational, post-representational, and coalitional practices. Thanks to intersectional awareness, hegemony could be read symptomatically even in its imperceptibly unsutured articulations and complicities. But the time has now come to ask the following questions: has intersectionality itself become hegemonic? Has intersectionality enabled dubious notions of fungibility, facile formulations of post-identitarian, post-representational neoliberal coalitional practices that shore up and perpetuate deep structure imbalances and unevennesses and asymmetries? Has intersectionality been seduced by the political mantra of "winner take all" and thereby turned traitor to its original impulse of incorruptible critical negativity in the name of one and all? In other words, has intersectionality now found a proper, exceptionalist, and sovereign agent-subject-owner, in violation of its originary commitment to non-sovereign ways of living and thinking? This seminar will be an attempt to revisit intersectionality and read its history both with and against the grain, and to speculate what the future may hold after/beyond. After such knowledge, what can "after" and "beyond" mean? Tentative Readings: Readings: Kimberle Crenshaw, Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Denise de Silvia, Sylvia Wynter, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, Saidia Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Lata Mani, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Jacqui Alexander, Helene Cixous Donna Haraway Angela Davis, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldu |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | NOLAND, C. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | THIONG'O, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | SCHLICHTER, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | MOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | ABBAS, M. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | AHMAD, A. |