| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 9 | IMMIGRATION | GAMBER, J. | Immigration The United States imagines itself to be a “nation of immigrants,” a phrase that abounds in mainstream and political discourses. The reality of this nation is more complicated, of course. This class examines contemporary narratives of immigration, relocation, and diaspora by Indigenous authors and authors of color as well as the legal and political contexts that inform those narratives. Texts will come from an array of genres by Native American, Asian American, African American, and Latinx authors. We will examine the ways these texts construct modes of belonging in place, of establishing or reestablishing that belonging in the face of chosen, coerced, and forced relocations. How do we maintain, reconstruct, or reinvent community when we move (or flee) from nation to nation? |
| COM LIT 10 | LATIN AM CITYSCAPES | COLMENARES GON, D. | |
| COM LIT 10 | REFUGEES AND DETENTION | MOR, L. | Refugees and Detention CL10, Hum10 Fall 2023 Liron MoR Course Description The present moment is characterized, once again, by the displacement of large populations from their land and by their internment on the frontier. War, violence, poverty, and extreme weather events are driving millions to migrate across borders, sometimes at great risk, in search of futures elsewhere. Bereft of state protections in a world neatly organized into nation states, such displaced individuals are often known as “refugees.” Engaging a wide array of texts—memoirs, films, novels, visual art, legal and academic writing—this course explores the 20th century formation of the figure of the refugee, its construction as a problem, and the solution that Europe offered to this problem: the camp. What does the legal term “refugee” imply and what might it conceal? What spatial, temporal, social and economic conditions are produced by the camp? How is encampment related to race and colonialism, and why might “refugee camps” prove such a source of anxiety for settler colonial states? What might we learn about the figure of the refugee if we reorient our gaze and look at it from outside this European tradition, from the point of view of the camp? Finally, what are the effects of the 21st century shift to an explicitly carceral attitude toward refugees, now held in “detention centers,” often outside and before the border? This interdisciplinary course explores these issues in various contexts, from the US-Mexico border to the Middle East. It emphasizes close readings of written and visual texts, as well as collaborative thinking on urgent contemporary matters. |
| COM LIT 60A | WORLD LITERATURE | CALL, A. | WORLD LITERATURES IN DIALOGUE (on-line course) People call movies like Avatar (2009) “epics.” Do postmodern movies like Avatar mimic the ancient Greek poet Homer’s pre-modern epic, the Odyssey? What can we learn about a 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 tradition to the Persian, German, British, Nigerian, Argentine, French-Caribbean, Irish, 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 interpreted 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 performance artist Patience Agbabi; the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles’s Antigone (442 BCE) as it is retold in Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa play (1986); Sophocles’s Philoctetes (409 BCE) 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’s Bacchae (405 BCE) 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 or final exam in this course. |
| COM LIT 121 | CALIFORNIA LIT | GAMBER, J. | California Literature “California is a story.” So begins Deborah Miranda’s Indigenous memoir Bad Indians. What kinds of stories shape our state? What do those stories tell us about our relationships to place and to each other? This course will examine both realist and speculative literatures not only set in California, but in which the state plays a major role. We’ll pay attention to texts by Native American, African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Arab American authors and the ways their narratives augment and complicate mainstream constructions of what California is, has been, and should be. Texts will include: Bad Indians, Miranda, Deborah When Rivers Were Trails (video game) Tropic of Orange, Yamashita, Karen Tei Under the Feet of Jesus, Viramontes , Helena Maria Parable of the Sower, Butler, Octavia When the Emperor Was Divine, Ostuka, Julie The Other Americans, Lalami, Laila There There, Orange, Tommy |
| COM LIT 140 | WATER WARS | JOHNSON, A. | WATER WARS/THINKING WITH WATER The class poses the question of how, from the humanities, and from a discipline like comparative literature, we can have something to say about a topic that seems, at first glance, to be far removed from our area of study: water. Water might seem to be unambiguous, something that is “out there”, part of nature and best studied by biologists or engineers or, perhaps, by historians. Part of the challenge involves a question of what we mean by water, what theoretical tools we use to conceptualize it, what narrative forms are used to talk about water (by whom and when?), and what aesthetic resources are brought to bear in the way we represent water. After an introduction into the question of water through the documentary Watermarke and Veronica Strang’s Water: Nature and Culture, we will turn to the history of water in California. We will then move to the Bolivian Water Wars as a case study of the struggle over water in the global south and current discussions over privatization and “the commons” as two political and economic paradigms for understanding water. This will be followed by a more thorough consideration of Native American perspectives and poetics on water. The last readings center on more explicitly theoretical and aesthetic questions: what are aesthetic choices and conceptual models that are marshaled in artistic pronouncements on water, including poetry, photography and film? What are the theoretical underpinnings of our discourse on water; how might other theoretical models offer us alternative ways to imagine a relationship to water? |
| COM LIT 143 | DRAMA&POLITICS 1960 | HARRIES, M. | The 1960s were a period of decolonization, mass movements of students and workers, and liberatory projects across the globe. They were also a period of reaction and colonial warfare. The historians Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, describing the United States in the period of a radicalized struggle for Black power and the war in Vietnam, describe the “Civil War of the 1960s.” The 1960s were also a period of intense experimentation in the theater. This course will explore aspects of the theater’s engagement with political questions in this period. The course will largely focus on Europe and the U.S., but we will also necessarily expand beyond those borders, following routes mapped by the plays. We will trace conflicts about the political role of theater and the possibilities of theatrical politics. Readings will mostly be texts of plays, augmented where possible by films and other documentation. Texts will include: The French wrier Jean Genet’s The Screens, on the French colonial war in Algeria; two plays by the German writer Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade, his play on the French Revolution, and The Investigation, a “documentary drama” based on the 1963–1965 trials of German perpetrators of genocide at Auschwitz; The Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro’s The Camp, on Argentine militarism; Paradise Now, by the international theater collective the Living Theater, on “the Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution”; The German playwright Heiner Müller’s Mauser, on the necessity of revolutionary violence. Written work will include research/analytic papers. |
| COM LIT 150 | QUEERS & WMN ON WAR | MOURAD, G. | This course focuses on the works of Arab women and queer authors that revolve around wars. We often hear about the war on women, the war on the LGBTQ+ community, but what happens to these wars during armed conflicts that are waged by men against other men? How do women and queers experience, write about, and make films about wars? Through an interdisciplinary lens, students will explore the diverse literary and cinematic expressions of Arab women and queer writers in response to the experiences, consequences, and reflections on war. By examining a range of films and literary genres, including novels, short stories, poetry, memoirs, and essays, students will gain insight into the lived experiences, emotions, and perspectives of these writers and filmmakers during times of war. Students will critically engage with texts and films that explore topics such as gender roles, sexuality, identity, nationalism, trauma, resistance, displacement, and memory. The literary works covered in the course come from late 20th and early 21st century texts about the wars in Palestine, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, enabling students to discover and reflect on Arabic and Francophone war literature by women and queer authors and filmmakers from the Arabic-speaking world. In addition to examining the films and literary texts themselves, the course will provide a broader context by integrating interdisciplinary readings on feminist theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and critical war studies. By incorporating these theoretical frameworks, students will develop analytical skills to interpret the complexities of the selected films and texts. |
| COM LIT 150 | TRANSLATION | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | THIONG'O, N. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | VAN DEN ABBEEL, B. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | VAN DEN ABBEEL, G. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | ABBAS, A. | |
| COM LIT 200A | THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY | MOR, L. | 200A: The Intentional Fallacy Liron Mor, F23 The author’s intent and interiority, or their presumed irrelevance, have long been key to theories of reading literature and the arts. Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as divine intention and universal categories have been dethroned, authorial intent has come to be perceived as a fallacy by various schools, from formalism and New Criticism, through structuralism and post-structuralism, to deconstruction and postcolonial theory (with translation studies and psychoanalysis serving as somewhat of outliers). Today, authorial intent appears to be completely sidestepped by such theoretical trends as distant reading and digital humanities, which employ statistics and big data as means of interpretation. At the same time, however, intent is also making a comeback in the form of autotheory and of scholarly attention to the lived experiences of authors from various racialized, gendered, and classed positions. Designed to introduce graduate students in the department to the discipline of Comparative Literature, this seminar will explore the history of literary and critical theory through the prism of intent. What is authorial intent? Should it guide literary and political readings, or should those be limited to the interplays between texts and contexts? How do various perceptions of literary intent resonate with the role of intentionality in broader political practices and juridical debates (such as phenomena like algorithmic societies and biopolitics or arguments about the right to choose)? This seminar is strongly recommended for first- and second-year students before the MA review, yet it is open to all. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE UNCONSCIOUS | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 210 | TRANSSPECIES IMAGINARIES | SCHWAB, G. | CL 210 Transspecies Imaginaries Instructor: Gabriele Schwab Course Description: In this course we will work on developing an “ecology of mind” (Bateson) based on multispecies imaginary ethnographies and transspecies relationalities. We will open with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts, including “biocultural creatures” (Samantha Frost), “animacies” (Mel Chen), “chemical infrastructures” (Michelle Murphy), “the molecular turn in the life sciences” (Nikolas Rose), and “the agency of trees and insects” (Hugh Raffles and Eduardo Kohn). Our discussion will be grounded in close readings of literary texts that span across a wide range of transspecies imaginaries such as the viral imaginary, the insect imaginary, and the imaginaries of transspecies futures. We will end with a reading of Daniel Wilson’s Robocalypse, linking it to the discussion in robotics about robo sapiens as a new species. Theory:
Literature:
Tentative Syllabus (subject to revision) General Intro – Introducing ourselves; Overview of texts; sign-up for class presentations Theoretical Debates Introductory Lecture on Transspecies Imaginaries Class presentation on Viveiros de Castro and Flusser Insects The Insect Imaginary: Kafka, Metamorphosis (with Roberto Fabelo’s sculptures and Hugh Raffles) Class Presentation on Hugh Raffles Lecture on The Metamorphosis The Insect Imaginary II: Lispector, Passion According to G. H. Class presentation My lecture Trees Maria Whiteman, Guest Speaker, Zoom Presentation of her work with trees and fungi Whiteman Presentation Discussion Richard Powers, The Overstory Class presentation on The Overstory and Eduardo Kohn Lecture on Powers and Whiteman Transspecies Futures (SF) Primo Levi, Science Fiction Stories (Selections) Class presentation on Levi Lecture on Levi’s Transspecies Imaginary : Octavia Butler, Dawn (With Haraway) Class presentation on Dawn Lecture on Haraway’s Camille Stories Robo Sapiens Daniel Wilson, Robocalypse (with Menzel/D’Aluisio) Class presentation on Robocalypse My lecture on the controversy about robots as a new species. Mar. 09: Wrap-Up Session: Readings of Creative Work |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | NOLAND, C. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | COX, 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 | AHMAD, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | MOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | ABBAS, A. | |
| 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 | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | MALABOU, C. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | AHMAD, A. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | LONG, M. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | SCHLICHTER, A. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | ABBAS, A. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | VAN DEN ABBEEL, G. | |
| COM LIT 292 | TEACHING PRACTICUM | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | AHMAD, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | LONG, M. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | COX, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | MOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | JACKSON, V. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ALLEN, E. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ABBAS, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | TERRY, J. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | FARBMAN, H. |