| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 8 | TIME TRAVELS | CULBERT,J. | Time travel is a major theme in fantastic literature and science fiction. In this course we will study a variety of texts and films to explore the following topics: time, history and memory; the temporality of fantasy and desire; historical trauma and the compulsion to repeat. |
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | |
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | |
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | |
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | |
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | |
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | The 40 series is a survey of dramatic literature from the Greeks to the present day. While we cannot possibly include all the great works within the time constraints of the quarter, we will look at pieces which are representative of the major styles, authors, genres, and movements within the theatre. Our investigations will focus on literary construction, socio/historical contexts, and performance. Students will be provided various means with which to access and demonstrate mastery of the target material i.e. group presentations, activities, discussions, debates, written assignments, quizzes, and traditional lectures.
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| 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.
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| COM LIT 101 | THEORIES OF CULTURE | AL-KASSIM, D.L. | |
| COM LIT 103 | QUEER ID, RACE REP | MIMURA, G. | |
| COM LIT 103 | CONTEMP JPN FILM | HALL, J.M. | |
| COM LIT 103 | CONTEMP JPN FILM | HALL, J.M. | This course examines Japanese film from 1970-now. Finding its theme in the concept of isolation, the course looks from the abandoned state of Japanese cinema in genres of sex and violence in the1970s or science and school-girl romance in the 1980s to its re-emergence as one of the most vibrant global cinemas in the 1990s and beyond. Narratives of isolated children, lonely violent men, and contrary single women prevail. One-to-two screenings per week (listed as the studio time for the class) are mandatory, Feature films screened for the class include work by auteurs such as Kitano Takeshi, Morita Yoshimitsu, Miike Takashi, Koreeda Hirokazu, Aoyama Shinji and others. Weekly online responses, two short papers, and a final are required. Students will engage narrative, genre, and auteur analysis. Although the course follows from the Fall Quarter class “Japanese Cinema,” the latter is not a prerequisite.
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| COM LIT 103 | CANNIBALISM | JOHNSON, A.M. | The well-publicized case of the German software specialist who mutilated and ate a microchip engineer in 2002 and the comments of incredulity and horror it elicited are just some of the latest examples of the taboo nature of cannibalism. Cannibalism seems to literally trace a no-man’s land, somewhere one goes only at the peril of losing one’s humanity and turning into a monster. In this course we will be looking not so much at actual acts of cannibalism but at how it functioned as the signpost of a frontier between the properly human and the non-human during the expansion of European colonialism and at how twentieth century thinkers, writers and filmmakers have reworked or responded to that legacy. We’ll be reading fragments of Columbus’s diaries and other colonial travellers, a novel by the Argentine writer Juan José Saer, essays by Montaigne, Levi-Strauss,Michel de Certeau and Jacques Derrida and watching movies like How Tasty was my Little Frenchman, Delicatessen and Hannibal Lecter; grades are based on class participation, a writing journal and final 5-7 page paper. |
| COM LIT 103 | TRNSNTLSM&DIASPORAS | RADHAKRISHNAN | |
| COM LIT 103 | FICTIONS OF EMPIRE | FERREIRA | This course will introduce students to a set of literary and visual texts from Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone Africa featuring empire as fantasy to be fulfilled and/or ever returning unsettling phantom in relation particularly to changing ideologies of 'race', gender, and nation. Primary readings will follow a chronological order, starting with the early modern period and ending with the so-called postcolonial period. Two partial exams and one short final paper. Course taught in English. |
| COM LIT 104 | EUR:MDRNTY/PSTMDRNT | 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. COURSE TAUGHT ENTIRELY IN ENGLISH. |
| COM LIT 104 | SEX IN MODERN JAPAN | HALL, J. M. | Does sex have a history? If so, how could we analyze sex in modern Japan? This upper-division course uses literary, historical, and visual texts to examine three interrelated but shifting terms: sex, modernity, and Japan. We examine sex and sexuality alongside other critical axes of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries: gender, the nation-state, economy, war and violence, teleologies of progress and modernization, as well as the seemingly omnipresent languages of confession, perversion, and liberation. Topics addressed will include prostitution, Japanese female drag performance, "confessional literature," medical and psychological discourse,1920s and 1930s popular culture, the legal and social status of male and female homosexuality, wartime sexual slavery, as well as contemporary media.
Course requirements include short response papers, a midterm, and a final
paper. |
| COM LIT 105 | LATIN-AM FLM&HLLYWD | JOHNSON, A.M. | In the early 1960s, Latin America witnessed a series of movements in
film-making which conceived of themselves in various ways as an
anti-Hollywood. The films and theorists of this movement, often called the New Latin American Cinema, linked aesthetics to politics, calling for a new revolutionary practice of making films which would produce an “imperfect cinema” or an “aesthetics of hunger”. The focus of this course will be to understand what “imperfect cinema” or “third cimena” means, how it was understood as a challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood, and how its legacy impacts the new ‘new cinema’ coming out of Latin America today. We will analyze some Hollywood films as well as films from Cuba, Argentina and Brazil from the 1960s to the present-day. We’ll be screening approximately one movie a week and reading essays on history and film; grades will be based on class participation, a writing journal, midterm exam and a final paper of 5-7 pages. |
| COM LIT 106W | CITY AND LITERATURE | 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 200B | MULTICULTURALISM REVISITED | SPIVAK, G. | Please note: In order to enroll in this seminar, students must submit a seminar request form by Tuesday, March 8. Please contact Arielle Read for more information.
SCHEDULING NOTE: Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's seminar, "Multiculturalism Revisited," will meet on four Tuesdays in May, on the following dates: May 3, May 10, May 24 and May 31.
In the theoretical establishment, multiculturalism is no longer fashionable. Yet in the world of war and law, it is still an important issue. My mini-seminar this year will consider the two worlds together. There is a good bit of reading for each session. I hope students will have read the material ahead of time. I will try to run the seminar reading group style, which requires that everyone read the material carefully before class. My sub-focus is the usefulness of the Humanities. How do we use literature in seemingly rational-choice legal situations which write our world?
I. Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition,"in Multiculturalism and "The politics of recognition" : an essay / by Charles Taylor ; with commentary by Amy Gutmann, editor ... [et al.].
Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, Culture, Chs. 7-8
Joseph Raz and Avishai Margalit, "National Self-Determination," - in Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures [RMC]
Joseph Carens, Culture Citizenship and Community, Ch.3
Leslie Green, "Internal Minorities and their Rights,"
Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," in Cherrié Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. This Bridge Called My Back [BCMB]
Paul Gilroy, "On Living With Difference," Postcolonial Melancholia -
Tahar Ben Jelloun, Racism Explained to My Daughter,
Samuel Huntington, "Deconstructing America," from Who Are We? -
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 244-311
Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy
I AM TRYING TO GET COCO FUSCO TO DISCUSS HER ONLY SKIN DEEP IN THE EVENING. I HOPE STUDENTS WILL HAVE LOOKED AT THIS BOOK AHEAD OF TIME.
II. Raymond Williams, "Culture," from Keywords over against wikipedia entry on "culture"
----------- Marxism and Literature, p. 121-135
[you may read Antonio Gramsci. "Some Aspects of the Southern Question" as background - available on the web]
Jeremy Waldron, "Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,"Univ. of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25 (1992), p. 751-92.
Seyla Benhabib, Claims of Culture, Chapter 1
Spivak, "Culture and Class in the Diaspora," "Future of the Humanities in A Fragmented World," attachments will be forwarded
Samuel Huntington, Who Are We?, p. 141-177.
A very general discussion of Bessie Head, The Question of Power to ask the question of literature as evidence, in this case of a critique of identity politics
III. UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Granville Austin, Working A Democratic Constitution: the Indian Experience, p. 7, 450-451, 638-639, 650.
Cori Hayden, Benefit-sharing: The Public at Stake available at http://www.sarai.net/events/ip_conf/ip_conf.htm
Jacob Levy, "Three Modes of Incorporating Indigenous Law"
Darlene Johnston, "Native Rights as Collective Rights," in RMS
Benedict Kingsbury, "Indigenous Peoples in International law," on web-site
Kant on the Maori, excerpt from The Critique of the Power of Judgment, pages to be announced, PLEASE USE THE NEW PAUL GUYER EDITION tr. P. Guyer and E. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000, p. 114-117.
Keywords: Identity (New York: Other Press, 2004)
Lawrence Venuti, Scandal of Translation, Introduction
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other
Ngugi, Decolonising the Mind, p. 1-3, 87-109.
Conclusion to Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds. After Empire
General discussion of Mahasweta Devi, "The Hunt," Imaginary Maps
lV. This is a public occasion so it will be a summary of what has gone before with emphasis on some new material on feminism:
Volpp, Leti"Talking Culture: Gender, Race, Nation, and the Politics of Multiculturalism," Columbia Law Review (1996).
Anne Phillips, "Democracy & Difference: Some Problems for Feminist Theory," in RMC
Iris Marion Young, "Together in Difference," in RMC
Susan Moller Okin, "Feminism and Multiculturalism: Some Tensions" Ethics 108(July 1998), p. 661-84.
Sumit Sarkar, "Postmodernism and the Writing of History," in Beyond Nationalist Frames -
Patricia Grace, Baby No-Eyes, Conclusion [you are free to read the whole novel of course]
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| COM LIT 210 | CRITIQUES OF SOVEREIGNTY | AL-KASSIM, D.L. | Please note: In order to enroll in this seminar, students must submit a seminar request form by Tuesday, March 8. Please contact Arielle Read for more information.
"Sovereignty does not know itself to be unsovereign."
The translation of the influential seminar Society Must Be Defended has prompted renewed interest in the late Foucault at a time when the entanglements of sovereignty, security and subjectivity take on a new urgency in the political landscape. While political philosophy has attended to intensifications and alterations in the contemporary framing and embodiment of state sovereignty, going so far as to suggest that the "state of exception" has become the rule in a more ruthless form of the biopolitical, recent work in critical races studies, feminist philosophy, queer studies, anthropology, third world cultural studies and literature offers nuanced and complex analyses of life in the margins, analyses that demonstrate the inextricability of state sovereignty and subjectivity. Such work contends that considerations of sovereignty which foreclose or ignore the many forms of subjection (sexual, racial, gendered, religious, class based, to name a few) cannot answer to the demands of description nor can they yield new resources for thought or action. In light of these complex critiques of sovereignty and of a particular strain in political theory, an approach that returns to the themes of subjection, subjectivation and state power becomes newly compelling. In this class we will foreground this productive imbrication of sovereignty and subjection.
To this end we will amplify the consideration of sovereignty-after-Foucault through selective soundings of theoretical reflections on the body, the speaking subject, the sovereignty of the aesthetic, the politics of resistance and the uncanny echoes of the Schmittian political imaginary in present racial and imperial politics. Topics (torture, death penalty, Palestinian resistance) and theoretical approaches (philosophy, political theory, anarchist anthropology, queer and feminist theory, psychoanalysis) will be wide ranging. Genet's Un Captif Amoureux/Prisoner of Love will serve as a landscape for our considerations and for that reason we will read it over the course of several weeks alongside critical theory texts.
Weekly 1-page position papers, an oral report and final 20-page paper.
Students are encouraged to read or reread Foucault's History of Sexuality, Vol I before the first meeting. Other readings may include:
Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol I
Society Must Be Defended
Keenan, "Foucault on the Bias", Fables of Responsibility
Agamben, Homo Sacer, selections
Derrida, Rogues, Without Alibi selections
Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State
Mbembe, "Necropolitics", Public Culture
"Aesthetics of Vulgarity", On the Postcolony
Butler, Antigone's Claim
The Psychic Life of Power, Chs. 3, 6
"Bodies and Power Revisited", Feminism and the Final Foucault
Genet, Prisoner of Love, Declared Enemy selections
Bataille, "Letter to René Char on the Incompatibilities of the Writer"
"Hegel, Death, and Sovereignty"
Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia
Seshadri-Crooks, "Deciphering Whiteness", Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race
Al-Azmeh, "Postmodern Obscurantism and the Muslim Question"
Islams and Modernitites, selections
Talal Asad "Reflections on Cruelty and Terror", Formations of the Secular
Ziarek, "Toward an Experimental Ethos of Becoming: From Docile Bodies to Ethical Agency", An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy
Butler "Giving an Account of Oneself", Diacritics Winter 2001, Vol. 31 #4
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| COM LIT 210 | ATLANTIC RACIAL BLACKNESS | BARRETT, L.W. | Please note: In order to enroll in this seminar, students must submit a seminar request form by Tuesday, March 8. Please contact Arielle Read for more information.
This course theorizes the codification of racial blackness as a fundamental "event" of Western modernity. This perplexity is phantasmatic, geo-political, economic, and racial, at once, because the impossibility of racial blackness seeming to lie within the limits of the economic fundament of the modern West as well as the limits of modern psychic rudiments belies the signal importance of the emergent circumstances of the concept of racial blackness: the rise of the Atlantic system of trade on which the articulation of the modern depends. Conscripted under the rubric of racial blackness for the labor forces central to mercantile capitalism, the first phase of capital accumulation, African-derived populations become the decisive point of nullification in the geo-political, economic, and phantasmatic "event" that is Western modernity. The course will consider such episodes as the displacement of earlier international arenas of trade by the Atlantic circuit of commerce, the importance of sugar in articulating the contours of Western modernity, the textualization of African-derived voices, and the relation of African-derived persons to the elaboration of the revolutionary modern nation-state and its definition of the public sphere.
Pro-seminar: mid-term and final paper.
Seminar: oral presentation and final paper.
Readings include Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavsa Vassa, Robert Harms, The Diligent, Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade; Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power, Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New World Order among others.
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