| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 10 | CONTAGION | MOR, L. | It seems like the entire world has gone viral. The language of viral contagion is consistently used to describe, regulate and legislate a wide array of issues—from the spread of ideologies, fashion and digital memes, through terrorism and migration, to sexuality and so-called racial impurity. In a time of a global pandemic, it seems particularly urgent to ask: what is contagion? What are some of the reasons for this pervasive use of the concept of contagion and what are its implications? Why are some contagions perceived as requiring containment while others are encouraged, and why are some populations quarantined for their own protection, while others are confined as carriers of viral risk and still others are left exposed? This course will explore these questions through film and media, as well as historical and theoretical writings, from different contexts around the world. We will begin by considering the notion of contagion within the framework of communicable diseases, its historical definition and management, and the kinds of affects and practices it invoked. We will then turn to investigate the operation of the concept of contagion as it has been transposed into the discursive realms of the “war on terror,” anti-immigration, and capitalist consumerism. Does contagion mean the same thing in these diverse realms or does it function rather in completely different manners? How do these disparate realms inform each other through this shared concept? By stressing human exposure and interdependence, what other—possibly desirable?—forms of collective being or action might contagion suggest? This course will emphasize close readings of both written and visual texts, as well as collaborative thinking on a contemporary matter. To complete this course, students will write two short papers and develop a final project. |
| COM LIT 60A | WORLD LITERATURE | CALL, A. | 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 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 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 contemporary 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 two movies and short film clips, 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 100A | PALESTINIAN LIT | MOR, L. | This course surveys modern Palestinian cultural production from the late Ottoman period to the present moment. How do Palestinian authors, film makers and artists record, respond to, and communicate their personal and collective experiences? Thematically, this course focuses on representations of disappearance—due to expulsion, settler colonialism, and appropriation—and of the fragmentation of Palestinian lives and temporalities—through checkpoints, refugee camps and sieges. Methodologically, this course investigates the particular ways in which literature coveys past events and allows for experiences and insights that are different than those produced by historical documentation. It further explores the tension between the political and the aesthetic: how have Palestinian authors and artists dedicated their works to shaping their nation and its struggle, while at the same time insisting on the aesthetic and psychological values of their work, situating themselves in relation to other literary traditions, or expressing their discontent with nationalism as a framework? Readings and viewings may include works by Khalil al-Sakakini, Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habiby, Sahar Khalifeh, Elias Khoury, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Adania Shibli, Ibtisam Azem, Elia Suleiman, Scandar Copti, Mona Hatoum, Larissa Sansour, Hana Farah and others. All works will be discussed in their English translations; students are welcome, however, to read them in the original Arabic. |
| COM LIT 102W | SURVEILLANCE | AMIRAN, E. | The course examines the convergence of military and media technologies as ways of seeing and understanding the world. This convergence assumes a panoptic view of the world that increasingly penetrates every part of social space. We will discuss the use of visualization, gaming, social credit, and military technologies, and theories of the social construction and use of space. Surveillance media give rise to a space that is at once psychological and political, personal and social. In digital media in particular, material and psychological ideas of space converge. We consider both popular representations of mediated social space and the relation of subjectivity to emergent military media technologies. Readings include theoretical texts by Heidegger, Virilio, Mbembe, and Warren, films including Dr. Strangelove and Code 46, video game play, science fiction by Philip K. Dick, experimental video, and cultural theory. Assignments are graded equally and include in-class essays and a final presentation. |
| COM LIT 150 | LATIN-AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION | JOHNSON, A | This course offers an overview of Latin American science fiction, including short stories, novels and film, with a special emphasis on the way Latin American writers engage critically with the dominant modes of the genre, challenging science fiction’s associations with colonial discourse or the North American technological imaginary. |
| COM LIT 150 | READING IRAN | FARBMAN, H. | Following the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis, the predominant image of Iran in the West has been that of a theocratic, pariah state, loath to adhere to international conventions. The severing of diplomatic ties between Iran and the US, which limited direct access and exchange, further contributed to stereotypical representations of Iran and Iranians as not only hostile to but also unreadable by Western norms. The question at the center of our inquiries in this course is how we might read Iran through its own cultural artifacts produced over the past four decades: poems, short stories, flash fiction, blogs, public speeches, short films, and cartoons. Our readings will explore whether these forms of representation engage Iranian audiences or aim for a broader global reach. While our readings will be mediated through translation, we will explore what resists translation or appears to be untranslatable, and how might we tap into moments in social cultural and political history to make them legible. |
| COM LIT 200A | HIST&THEORY COM LIT | TERADA, R | Object Relations - Comparative Literature 200A R. Terada, terada@uci.edu The points of an object which make up the illuminated surface are laid out in ordered perspectives and open up for us the way to the object, putting a limit to the risks and fancies. (Levinas, Existence and Existents) Most of the unpleasure we experience is perceptual unpleasure. It is the external perception of something distressing. (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle) The fact of being alone is that he belongs to "that within" who is not himself, or anyone else. (David S. Marriott, Haunted Life) This course is an introduction to and close textual reading of psychoanalytic theories of object relations, and at the same time a questioning of its anxieties and implications. Object relations theory is both a relatively under-read psychoanalytic world and one that lies especially close to current clinical practice. In this school of thought "objects" refer solely to interpersonal relations that are not ideal nor empirical, their interiorization or not, and the environment created by the vicissitudes of ongoing disturbance. The readings follow a thread inaugurated by Freud and Melanie Klein, which then moved with them to mid-20th c. England through the writing and practice of D.W. Winnicott, W.R. Fairbairn, Wilfrid Bion, Paula Heimann, and others. These readings will be framed for discussion by earlier and later approaches to object relations: selections from Kant, Jean Laplanche, David Marriott, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Some of the figures and problems original to this field that will come up include: arbitrarily "good" and "bad" objects, manic defense, the productivity of destructiveness, the structure of breakdown, the false self, persecutorial fantasy, and the capacity or not to be alone. All texts will be provided. |
| COM LIT 210 | EXISTENTIAL REALISM | NEWMAN, J. | In his 1954 “Epilegomena to Mimesis,” the German-Jewish Romanist and Comparatist, Erich Auerbach (1895-1957), wrote that he could have just as easily described the project of his soon-to-be famous book as “existential realism.” The apparent ease with which he yokes together what might appear to be quite different ways of “interpreting human events” and representing the human “situation” in the world asks us to consider the relation between Existentialism and the analysis of representation in the early to mid-twentieth century, a moment whose social and political turmoil quite resembles our own. Can this relation justifiably be reanimated today as a way of addressing what role the techniques of representation in any medium play in the shaping of our upended material-social and psychic-affective lives? In this course, we will begin with several overviews of both the Realism debates and the contest between theological and ‘atheistic’ Existentialism in the early 20th century, and then consider some of the foundational texts in both canons – Heidegger with Lukacs, for example – in dialogue with one another. We will then read a series of paired sets of texts from both well- and lesser-known corners of the Existentialist and ‘realist’ worlds – among them, Kierkegaard and Auerbach on Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac; Heidegger, Arendt, and Auerbach on Saint Augustine; Hugo Friedrich and Auerbach on Montaigne. Finally: We will examine the possibility that Existentialism had a poetics (Fredric Jameson’s Ph.D. dissertation on Sartre’s style will be our guide here) and how close reading might be understood as a philosophical and theoretical – and perhaps also political – act. Weekly discussion board posts, annotated bibliography or research paper options for final work. |
| COM LIT 210 | PLATO'S CAVE | GIANNOPOULOU, Z. | This course foregrounds three appropriations of Plato’s Cave in the second half of 20th century European literature and film: Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995), and Jose Saramago’s The Cave (2000). Mining the Cave’s epistemological and sociopolitical implications, I examine the ways in which these textual and cinematic narratives use Plato’s allegory to reflect on intertextuality, illusion and reality, power and ideology, utopia/dystopia/heterotopia, the apparatus, borders, social space, fiction and memory, and the politics of desire. Readings include: Plato, Republic VII; Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays; Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology; Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense, Cinema II; Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology; Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier”; Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” |
| COM LIT 210 | ADVENTURES OF THE POSTCOLONIAL | AHMAD, A. | As a figure of thought, the term postcolonial was first used in the early 1970s not in cultural discourses but in the field of political theory when there was a famous debate on the nature of the postcolonial state-- the type of state that arose in the former colonies after the dissolution of state systems of the colonial period. By the late 1980s, the same term re-emerged but now in several disciplinary fields across the Humanities, together with other post-marked words such as post-Marxism, post-feminism etc, in an intellectual milieu very much re-structured by postmodernism and poststructuralism. As the term was adopted in very many kinds of academic work, the meaning became more expansive but less clear. It could be a periodizing concept, with the prefix ‘post’ simply meaning ‘after’. Or, the term ‘postcolonial literature’ could be a new name for what used to be called Third World Literature. Or, ‘postcolonial theory’ could be that branch of poststructuralist theory which takes the literatures and cultures of the former colonies as its primary object of analysis. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah asked, already in 1991: ‘Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonialism?’ The earliest debates in the field occurred around these very issues and postcolonial studies started taking a richer and more complex form as a result of those debates, as well as through its encounters with new theoretical work in diverse fields such as feminism, cultural Marxism, Subaltern Studies, critical race theory, history and anthropology of the colonial formations. By now, the field has in fact become so vast that it is now difficult to say what it is in the history of Modernity that may not be within the purview of postcolonial studies. The course begins with some of the earliest texts of writers such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, Simon During and Helen Tiffin who shaped the terms of thought of what came to be known as postcolonialism. Then we will examine some of the earliest anthologies which begin the task of canonisation in the field. This will be followed by close examination of some of the early critics of the field such as Arif Dirlik, San Juan Jr., Benita Perry, Neil Larson and Neil Lazarus. Some of my own work will be discussed in this part of the course and we shall also be asking whether or not it is appropriate to designate Edward Said a postcolonial thinker. Those issues will be covered in the first four weeks of the course. During the later weeks, we shall examine a range of broader questions such as the relationship of postcolonialism with postmodernism on the one hand, Marxism on the other. And, we shall also examine some work that purportedly belongs in the field, such as Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony, but observes none of its established protocols. |