| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 8 | WITNESSING THE HOLOCAUST | OSTER, S. | What does it mean to “witness” the Holocaust? Whether understood as a set of events, as a historical moment, as an object of knowledge, or as a cultural metaphor, the Holocaust poses severe challenges to representation, to knowledge and, therefore, to pedagogy. Although the Holocaust defies representation, in the past several decades, the cultural output aimed at representing this very event has proliferated exponentially. Histories, films, memoirs, diaries, testimonies, fictional accounts, memorials and museums aimed at capturing aspects of the truth of the Shoah invariably struggle with problems of witnessing. This course is intended as an introduction to fiction, film, and testimony about the Holocaust, and an historical overview of the events which comprise it. As we try together to grasp these events in their complexity, we will address some of the following questions: How do those who survived the Holocaust, or those who live long after, communicate clearly what happened? How do traumatic events resist acts of remembering? How does one “recollect” such a past without distorting it? Put another way, what are the ethics of Holocaust representation? How do visual genres such as film or pictorial essays compare with narrative in their ability to describe and represent the violent horror of the Holocaust? How do we distinguish between more or less authentic accounts? And exactly what can we expect to learn about in a class on the Holocaust?
Once considered a taboo, or “sacred,” subject, the province of survivors alone, in recent years scholars and teachers have been taking up problems the Holocaust poses to understanding, to teaching and to learning, in growing numbers. We will thus address new questions that scholars have raised about “trauma” in the classroom, and the ethics of Holocaust pedagogy, as well as some of the more extreme problems including “Holocaust denial” in the public, and what we might call “Holocaust cynicism”—the response of students frustrated by their inability to do anything about the past, and who therefore reproduce institutionally sanctioned responses to this event without really learning about it.
This course will not be easy. Individually and collectively, we will confront difficult, challenging, and often disturbing material. Within the context of history, and theories of trauma and its representation by scholars such as Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman, and Cathy Caruth, we will examine testimonies such as those of Anne Frank, Elie Weisel, Primo Levi, and Tadeusz Borowski, and fictional representations by Art Spiegelman, Cynthia Ozick, and Jerzy Kosinski. Films may include Au Revoir Les Enfants, Enemies, A Love Story, Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, and excerpts from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. The class will involve extensive writing: regular reading responses, two papers, and a final exam. |
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | Same as Drama 40C. Contact Arts for description. |
| COM LIT 50C | GENRE AND MEDIUM | JOHNSON, A.M. | This is the last course of the Cl 50 introductory series to the
Comparative Literature major and revolves around Genre and Medium. This year we will approach the concept of genre through its intersection with notions of selfhood. The reading will range widely from the 13th to the 20th centuries and include European, African, North and South American texts. We will also do some work with film and comics. Examples of the type of questions we will be posing are: How different is the subjectivity constructed in a classic autobiography, like that of J. J. Rousseau’s, from cases of slave narratives. What does the 20th century South African novel Waiting for the Barbarians allow us to think about the way the writer of a sixteenth century U.S. captivity narrative deals with cultural difference? How is cultural difference important for the construction of a first person narrator? How can the relationship between the first person narrator and society differ in testimonials and autobiographies? Aside from reading, coursework will include seven short writing assignments and a 5-7 page final
paper. Grad Course (I can\'t remember the number!)Coloniality and Postcoloniality in the Americas (Please note that the title of this
course has changed!)To a large extent, postcolonial theory has evolved out of reflections on British and French colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Africa and Asia. Some of the aims of this course will be, first, to confront these theories with
the much earlier colonization of the Americas and to ask, second, how
the cultural and intellectual configuration of sixteenth-century Europe shaped the forms of coloniality taken in the Americas. Some questions we can pose include: why has the theorization of postcoloniality emerged so strongly in work on British and French colonialism and not on reflections on Latin America, for example? What are the differences between the colonial and the postcolonial in the different contexts? Are there other ways to theorize the ways some regions of the Americas are haunted by a colonial past? We’ll be reading some primary colonial texts, investigating conceptions of writing, and mapping and debates on “the human” in the sixteenth century, both to reflect on how they impacted the forms taken by colonization as well as to reflect on how the discovery of the Americas contributed to what we now recognize as European modernity.
We’ll confront theories of hybridity and subalternity with examples from Latin America and read some debates on the applicability of the term “postcoloniality” to the Americas. Finally we will consider two contemporary novels in Peru and a Mexican vampire film (Cronos) and essays that reflect on the ways these texts remain moored in a world still defined by a colonial experience. Authors include (but are not limited to): Columbus, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Karl Marx, Walter Mignolo, Anthony Pagden, Homi Bhabba, Serge Gruzinski, Gyan Prakash, Alberto Moreiras, Mario Vargas Llosa, José María Arguedas. |
| COM LIT 102W | CITY & LIT IN FILM | GELLEY, A. | The experience of the city or, more specifically, what may be termed urban consciousness, has become a major component of western culture in the last two centuries. The city has been viewed from varying perspectives--as a repository of culture, an arena of alienation and degradation, and an agency of technocratic organization. As a theme in literature and the other arts it has given rise to a distinctive fusion of aesthetic and sociological imagination. This course will study writings and pictorial works (including film) dealing with the city by, e.g., Wordsworth, Poe, Baudelaire, Balzac, Saul Bellow, and filmmakers Fritz Lang and Jean-Luc Godard. There will be assignments drawing on the required texts and other materials in the Reserve Book Room, and also viewing of assigned films (available in the Media Center). |
| COM LIT 103 | FATE & FREEDOM | REGOSIN, R. | Contact instructor for description: rregosin@uci.edu. |
| COM LIT 103 | DAMNED HEROES | SMITH, J.H. | Beginning in the 16th century, two “myths of the modern individual” (Ian Watt) emerged: Faust, the academic, who in his thirst for knowledge and experience of the world sold his soul to the devil; and Don Juan, the ultimate seducer of women, who would rather go to hell than deny his carnal pleasures. The representations and variations of these figures down through the ages tell us something about modern Western culture. Why are we so fascinated by them, despite (or because) of the fact that they lead such damnable lives? How can their stories be used at different times to depict essential aspects of a period and place? What do these figures, and their variations, relate to us about human desires, contradictions, moralities, and art?
We will address these questions by looking at versions of the Faust and Don Juan stories in early 17th-century, i.e. Renaissance, England (Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus), late 18th-early 19th-century, i.e. Enlightenment, Germany (Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni and Goethe’s Faust, Part I), 19th-century, i.e. post-Idealist, philosophy (a selection from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or), late 19th-century, i.e. “decadent,” England (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray), and Nazi Germany (Klaus Mann’s Mephisto). |
| COM LIT 104 | IDEAS OF EUROPE: MODERNITY/POSTMODERNITY | GEARHART, S. | In this course we will study the transformation of the modern idea of
Europe from the late eighteenth century to the present. It will focus especially on the birth and transformation of the idea of the nation (and thus of modern Europe) at particularly divisive moments of modern European history. It will deal with issues such as: 1) the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the birth of the modern European nation-state; 2) the struggle during the nineteenth century among conflicting notions of nationalism and the wars fought among the European nations for dominance in Europe; 3) the growth of colonial empires throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their demise in the mid-twentieth century; and 4) the idea of a postcolonial, multicultural Europe. By reading historical, political, and literary texts from various periods of the
complex history of modern Europe, the course will analyze how national identity is constructed and represented in various national contexts and how the idea of Europe is questioned and transformed throughout the modern period. |
| COM LIT 105 | MLTICLTRL WOMN WRTR | SCHLICHTER, A.M. | This class will discuss the structures and the conflicts of U.S. multiculturalism through literary and theoretical writings by women of color. We will take their critiques of white feminist theories and practices as a starting point, and then explore how the writers appropriate and contest constructions of gendered and sexual identities in different cultural traditions, and how their representations gender, ethnicity and sexuality have changed the debates around identity, difference and power relations.
The reading list will include texts by Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lord, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen an others. A class reader will be available at the beginning of the quarter from the reserve desk.
Requirements: regular attendance and reading, midterm, take-home final, 2 short writing assignments |
| COM LIT 106W | ARABIC LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION: BEIRUT RIFTS | AL-KASSIM, D. | A course that deals with the literature and arts of Beirut during and after the civil war through the themes of memory, loss and reconstruction. We will be using the case of the Lebanese Civil War as a way of approaching the subjects of imperialism, colonialism, war and identity as these themes relate to the Middle East and to our global world more generally. We begin with a set of novels by Lebanese, Palestinian and Armenian men and women which negotiate the disembodying effects of violence in urban warfare. In these texts urban space, transformed by combat, becomes the terrain of an enforced territorialization of the self completely at odds with the dismemberment of self and history simultaneously underway. We then move through a series of diasporic texts attempting to redress the condition of loss through a writing that can materialize a different landscape, memory and history. We will consider war and memory through the psychoanalytic theory of trauma, and we will study Lebanese projects of reconstruction, rebuilding and urban renewal in the postwar period. Is “memorycide” a remedy for the contest of nations as Naccache seems to claim? How does writing reterritorialize the cityscape harnessed to the project of history (Darwish)?
No prior acquaintance with the region’s history is expected. Instead, students will be asked to research historical topics for short assignments, and historical lectures will supplement our literary/film discussions. Flexible assignments e.g. students can opt to write a formal final paper or create a website that provides information on the topics raised in class or of relevance to current political affairs. All readings in English.
Hoda Barakat, The Stone of Laughter
Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose
Of Cities and Women
Elias Khoury, Little Mountain
Mahmood Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness
Rabih Alameddine, I, the Divine
Liana Badr, The Eye of the Mirror
Reader: essays on library reserve
Adonis, “The Desert: Diary of Beirut Under Siege, 1982”
Albert Farid Henry Naccache “Beirut’s Memorycide: Hear no Evil, See no Evil”
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, “Reflections upon War and Death”, “Why War?”
Judith Butler, “Psychic Inceptions”
Jacqueline Rose, “Why War?”
Jean Genet, “Four Hours at Shatila”
Abdallah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual
Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, selections
Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices, selections
Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture, selections
Jean Said Makdisi, “The Mythology of Modernity: Women and Democracy in Lebanon”
Fawwaz Traboulsi, “Beirut-Guernica”
Lamia Shehadeh, Women and War in Lebanon, selections
Films: “Our Heedless Wars” Rosemarie Sabbagh
“The Dead Weight of Quarrel Hangs” Walid Ra’ad
“The Dupes” Tewfik Saleh. |
| COM LIT 210 | CITY LAT-AM LIT&FLM | JOHNSON, A.M. | |
| COM LIT 210 | PRE-MODERN EMPIRES | NEWMAN, J.O. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ROWE, J.C. | |