| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT Cl 103 | MEMORY AND HISTORY | AL-KASSIM | Who or what dictates the memory of history? What political and cultural assumptions underlie our official histories? How might personal recollection and encounter augment or challenge the official archive? In the case of South Africa these questions are particularly relevant as the new nation must find ways of accounting for, commemorating and forgetting the violence of the apartheid era. We will explore these questions through a series of recent South African novels representing various ethnic, religious and racial communities and social classes, and through a detailed consideration of the political relations made visible when the state and communities commemorate history. Public monuments, museums and other locales will be read alongside novels, short stories and critical essays.
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| COM LIT CL 104 | COMICS & SURREALISM | AMIRAN, E. | Comics and Surrealism, 1880-2006
Beginning around the late nineteenth-century, avant-garde art set out to decenter the human mind--from conscious to unconscious thought, from waking to dreaming, from belief to performance. The new terms did not replace the old ones, but revised them. Newspaper comics and surrealism both grew out of this movement and related developments in psychology and the anthropology of "primitivism" and of "race." We will read early comics like The Yellow Kid, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and Krazy Kat alongside written and graphic work from Surrealist authors (Breton, Artaud, Dali, Duchamp, Ernst) to figure out logics that animate them. What do they say about agency, desire, creativity, authorship, intentionality, legibility, sincerity, discipline, and mental economy? How do they challenge the reader's perceptions of reality? We will read essays about these movements and ideas and will also consider some early and late texts around our period (Lautréamont's goth nightmare Maldoror, symbolist poetry and prose, outsider art, and recent comic work such as Woodring's Frank and Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead). Students will write two papers and a final exam. |
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | |
| 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. We will read various kinds of first person narratives such as autobiographies, picaresque tales, memoirs, captivity and slave narratives, testimonial narratives and novels. 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 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? |
| COM LIT 101 | THEORIZING DIFFERENCE | SCHLICHTER, A. | The class will look at various concepts of difference in critical theory as well as feminist, queer and critical race theory. In particular, we will discuss various attempts to theorize multiple differences in the production of subjectivities and knowledge and explore political and institutional consequences of those models. A course reader will be available at the beginning of the quarter. Requirements: Midterm, final, oral presentation, brief writing assignments.
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| COM LIT 102 | NARRATIVE THEORY | GELLEY, A. | What’s the point of a story? Partly, to convey a message, to provide a moral lesson. There is a long tradition of narratives with a pragmatic (real-life, practical) application. In the exemplum (as it was known in classical rhetoric) a narrative incorporates such a performative intention. This course will look at some relevant theories of rhetoric and argumentation and then examine instances of this form in classical writing (Aesop, LaFontaine), Tolstoy, some recent short stories (e.g., Mahfouz, O’Connor, Lessing, Singer) and films (from Kieslowski’s Decalogue). |
| COM LIT 103 | WOMEN AND MADNESS | SCHLICHTER, A. | Are women crazy? Popular opinion certainly assumes that they tend to be "hysterical." And since antiquity, writings in Western philosophy and medicine have produced a myriad of theories about a specific feminine predisposition to madness. However, in literary and theoretical writings women authors have critically responded to such theories. This class will look at the figure of the madwoman in 20th century writing. After a brief introduction to the history of women's insanity, we will focus on literary texts that undermine the myth of feminine madness. We will discuss how they present the madwoman as a critical figure in order to question - and eventually rewrite – dominant notions of gender. Of particular interest is the role of racialization in that critique of gender.
The reading list will include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Calixthe Beyala, Your Name Shall Be Tanga. In addition, we will consider movies such as Allie Light's Dialogues with Madwomen and Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Edge of a Nervous breakdown.
Requirements: regular attendance, take-home midterm, take-home final, brief writing assignments.
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| COM LIT 103 | QUEER ID, RACE REP | MIMURA, G. | Same as Asian Am 164 and Women's Studies 155. This course will examine the intersections between queer sexualities and race, and their significance for struggles by sexual and racial-ethnic minorities for historical and cultural representation. Course will draw on literary and filmic texts to examine issues of identity, history, adolescence, and popular culture. Grading will be based on attendance and participation, including pop quizzes (20%); midterm exam (40%); and final exam (40%). The midterm exam will be comprised of in-class short identifications and one take-home essay topic. The final exam will be comprised of two take-home essay topics. |
| COM LIT 104 | FANTASY & FANTASTIC | CULBERT, J. | |
| COM LIT 104 | WHERE DO WE STAND? | SCHWAB, M. | Four countries, four cultures, theee novels and a memoir. The seminar analyzes four texts that trace the profile and discuss problems of their countries and cultures, set in the present and recent past. We will before all be interested in the relation between the fiction and fictional construction and elements of political and cultural crisis, both in the collective and the individual. The regions highlighted are: South Africa, Turkey, Cuba and California. |
| COM LIT 105 | RACIAL BLACKNESS | BARRETT, L. | This course will survey some of the economic, geographic, and psychic principles conscripting African-derived persons for the purposes of the emergent "New World," in which African-derived persons are husbanded under the condition of enslavement and the rubric of "racial blackness." The course considers the way in which this dispersal of African-derived persons is fundamental to the emergence of Western "modernity," by entertaining such fundamental formations of "modernity" as autobiography, the slave trade, the triangular trade, and the emergent nation-state (as exemplified by the U. S.). The course will emphasize, ultimately, the discursive self-construction of African-derived persons in these emergent terms of modernity. Readings will include: William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano; Robert Harms, The Diligent; Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean; Sidney Mintz, Sugar and Power; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade.
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| 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”
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| COM LIT 200D | RHET&PUBLIC MEMORY | JARRATT, S. | “Although we do not consciously seek hegemony over other nations and covet no other territory, there is more than one kind of empire, more than one way of exerting control over others, and more than one justification for doing so.”
Ronald Steel, Pax Americana (1967)
In his Vietnam era work, Steel inaugurated an analogy that, since the end of the Cold War, and more pointedly after September 11th, has struck scholars, journalists, and political actors from widely divergent points on the political spectrum with its aptness. Postcolonial studies has for the most part drawn on the European empires of the second millennium as a point of departure. This course moves between empires in the first and the third millennia--from Pax Americana to Pax Romana and back--employing ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric as both repository of imperial discourses and as a critical resource.
We will begin by reviewing topoi of space, benevolence, and order as both legitimation and critique as they are taken up in contemporary political discourse (presidential addresses and policy statements), journalism (Lapham, Mendelsohn), and postcolonial theory (Hardt and Negri; Coopan). We’ll then turn back to debates about the Athenian empire, an inescapable point of reference for the Romans, engaged or recorded by figures who also played significant roles in the inception of rhetoric as a field of performance, political deliberation, and pedagogy (Thucydides, Demosthenes, and Isocrates).
The primary focus of the seminar will be the writings of Greek intellectuals under Roman rule during the 1st through the 4th centuries C.E. Considered by earlier generations of scholars to be an “embarrassing epilogue” (Whitmarsh) to the literature of the classical era, the wildly exuberant writings of the culturally Greek but ethnically diverse writers and performers of the Second Sophistic have generated exciting work critical work based in critical geography, gender studies, the politics of paideia, the history of sexuality, and studies of public memory. Through a colorful mix of genres--public declamation, encomia to provincial cities, memoir, travel writing, advice to the ruler, political pamphlets, and the newly invented genre of prose fiction--we have an extensive record of a colonized population who at the same time constituted a cultural elite, moving between the Roman center and their provincial cities across the empire. Constantly recirculating the history, myth, and literature of classical Athens--already an “ancient” legacy in their era--Greco-Roman rhetoric and literature have provoked heated critical debates about the functions of memory and the authors’ political allegiances. To enter into those debates, we will read selections from authors including Dio Chrysostom, Philostratus (Lives of the Sophists), another Philostratus (Imagines), Heliodorus (Ethiopian Story), Libanius (ally of the pagan emperor Julian) and others, using a selection of rhetorical strategies invented by the ancient Greeks and Romans and revived by contemporary critics.
Our critical resources will include Foucault’s lectures on “free speech” (parrhesia) collected in Fearless Speech, classical studies of “figured discourse” (Ahl; Quintilian), W. J. T. Mitchell’s analysis of ekphrasis in Picture Theory, analyses of gender and sexuality in the Greek novel (Haynes; Konstan; Winkler), and rhetorical approaches to public memory (Cicero; Arendt; Yates). Finally, we’ll return to the anti-imperial rhetoric of our own era to try out the analytic potential of “free speech” and “figured discourse” in a speech by Arundhati Roy (“Come September”) and a novel by Ian McEwan (Saturday).
The readings and topics of discussion are selected to serve as an introduction to ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric for those with no prior experience in this area. All works will be read in translation, and most will be available through electronic reserve. Each student will present a class presentation on one week’s readings. Students seeking proseminar credit will write brief reading responses and a take-home exam. Those enrolling for seminar credit will write a 15-page paper. (Students interested in U.S. political rhetoric will be given the option of contributing to an NEH curriculum project, Voices of Democracy, for their final project.)
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| COM LIT 210 | ALTRNTV GENEALOGIES | JOHNSON, A. | This course addresses the debates on how to describe and conceptualize the practices called cultural studies as they have emerged and taken form in different institutional and political contexts. We will specifically take into account debates on cultural studies in the English speaking world (England, the United States and Australia) and Latin America. Some of the questions we will consider include: How do we understand the relationship of culture to power and why does this matter to cultural studies? Is the emergence of cultural studies as a (quasi) discipline a symptom of broader, historical changes in the relationship of the university, and within the university of the humanities, to the reproduction of power? Is cultural studies tied to changes in the constitution and location of culture? How does the relationship of cultural studies to political projects vary geographically and what, if any, are the consequences of such differences? What are some of the assumptions about “culture” and “society” held by Anglo-European cultural studies which must be questioned when considering a postcolonial situation? Readings include Stuart Hall, Larry Grossberg, Bill Readings, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Tony Bennet, Ernesto Laclau, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Meaghan Morris, Neil Larsen, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Angel Rama, John Kraniauskas and others.
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| COM LIT 210 | HAUNTS: SPACE, MODERNITY AND CULTURAL MEMORY | CULBERT, J. | “Memory is only a function of architectural spaces, places that haunt the collective unconscious.”
Philippe Hamon, Expositions
Critical theory has taken an uncanny turn in recent years. Literature, cultural analysis, philosophy and psychoanalysis have increasingly invoked ghosts, specters and phantoms in theorizing modern and contemporary aberrations of psychic and social memory. Beginning with Freud’s texts “The Uncanny” and “Mourning and Melancholia,” this course will examine the long shadow cast by Freud in recent critical literature, from Derrida’s “hauntology” and Abraham and Torok’s “cryptonymy” to recent texts on “the phantom public sphere.”
Ironically, in a contemporary time of inflated memorial culture, there is a sense that social space and the public sphere may themselves be dead or moribund. To what extent, we might ask, is memorial culture a displaced mourning for social space itself? Likewise, in the recent spatial turn in critical theory, the replacement of history as critical paradigm seemingly inscribes the latter as space’s haunting remainder. With such questions in mind, this course will focus in on urbanism and spatial theory in order to theorize uncanny spaces as distinctive features of psychic, social and political haunting. ‘Haunts,’ as contemporary spatial predicament, will provide the means to articulate what could be called the poststructural transformation of the public sphere. Readings in spatial theory will include Situationist psychogeography, Marc Augé’s subway journeys and Georges Perec’s stories and texts haunted by the legacy of the Second World War.
Texts may include:
Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom”
Augé, Non-Places
Derrida, Specters of Marx; The Work of Mourning
Freud, “The Uncanny”; “Mourning and Melancholia”
Foucault, “Different Spaces”
Gordon, Ghostly Matters
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
Hamon, Expositions
Huyysen, Presents Past
Krell, The Purest of Bastards
Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory
Perec, Species of Spaces
Robbins, The Phantom Public Sphere
Royle, The Uncanny
Stoler, Haunted by Empire
The Situationist International
Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny
Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings
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| COM LIT 210 | FOUCAULT | POSTER, M. | This class explores the works of the last decade of Foucault’s life. It focuses on concepts of discipline, bio-power and the care of the self with an aim to clarify and to advance the theoretical problem of the relation of poststructuralism to cultural studies in the current conjuncture of globalization and media. It also explores Foucault’s efforts at developing a form of cultural history that takes into account the material effects of language and raises, thereby, the question of all media in relation to culture. |
| COM LIT 210 | COMPARATIVE STUDIES | SPIVAK, G. | This course will look closely at some classic texts of feminist psychoanalysis in relation to the texts of Freud and Lacan.
Our intention is to ask what is feminism as well as how does feminism read psychoanalysis. In other words, the title is not Feminism and Psychoanalysis.
As usual, if some people in the class can help along with the original texts our gains will be livelier.
One final paper, generally no incompletes because my schedule is so varied. The last session will be public. The last contact is Anna Cavness acavness@uci.edu
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| COM LIT 220 | TRANSLATION THEORY AND PRACTICE: EQUIVALENCE, NORMS, ETHICS | VENUTI, L. | This seminar will explore the relations between translation theory and practice by considering the advances and limitations of three influential theoretical positions: Eugene Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence, Gideon Toury’s concept of translation norms, and Antoine Berman’s concept of a translation ethics. Some attention will be paid to the contribution of the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Theoretical concepts will be considered in relation to case studies involving various text types: sacred texts, prose fiction, poetry, film screenplays, philosophy, history, and psychology. The languages will include English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Biblical Greek.
The core readings are: Eugene Nida, “Principles of Correspondence” (1964), Gideon Toury, “The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation” (1978/1995), and Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign” (1985), all reprinted in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 153-167, 205-218, 276-289. Translation extracts for analysis will form a body of supplementary materials.
Recommended collateral readings are included in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. For the issue of equivalence, consider Jerome, “Letter to Pammachius,” and Philip E. Lewis, “The Measure of Translation Effects”; for norms, Ezra Pound, “Guido’s Relations,” and André Lefevere, “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System, and Refraction in a Theory of Literature”; for ethics, Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” and Annie Brisset, “The Search for a Native Language: Translation and Cultural Identity”
To receive a grade, students must submit an assignment that engages with the issues discussed in the seminar. There are two options:
(1) a translation with an introduction (approximately 5 pages) in which the translation strategies are explained. If the foreign text is prose, students must translate a minimum of 5 pages; if poetry, 3-4 poems, depending on their complexity;
(2) a brief essay (6-8 pages) in translation analysis where a translation or translation extract(s) are studied from one or more perspectives, linguistic and literary, cultural and theoretical, ethical and political.
All assignments must receive the instructor’s approval before students begin their work. Students intending to enroll in the seminar should contact the instructor by 31 March to propose assignments (Lvenuti@temple.edu). The deadline for submitting assignments is the end of the spring quarter. Opportunities for publishing the translations and essays will be discussed.
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| COM LIT 220 | TRANSLATION WORKSHOP | ALEXANDER, ZAIA | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | HALL, J.M. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | GELLEY, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | TERADA, R. | |