| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 8 | MODERN PERSIAN LITERATURE | RAHIMIEH, N. | This course introduces students to developments in modern Persian literature. We will begin with a broad historical and cultural survey of the trends that led up to changes in the genres of poetry and prose. We will read short stories, novels, and poems by major writers of the modern era. Texts will include Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl; Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Plagued by the West; Simin Daneshvar, A Persian Requiem; Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men; and poetry by Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamlu, and Simin Behbahani. Grading will be based on two short finals, a take-home final, and in-class responses. |
| COM LIT 9 | SELF IMAGING | TAMEDA, A. | “I just wanted to see how transformed I could look…” - Cindy Sherman
This course will explore images of the artist’s body in contemporary art practice. We first look at Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Mariko Mori, Yasumasa Morimura, Catherine Opie, and other contemporary artists whose artwork surfaces the urgency of self-image. In class, we analyze and discuss the way such artists use their bodies and how their visual language generates meaning. We also examine the subgenre of self-portraits that are composed with an absence of the artist. Critical readings help us approach the notion of self and identity in relation to visual imagery. In addition, course readings focus on feminism, race, politics, and gender in contemporary art. Expressions of identity (ethnic, racial, sexual, etc.) are explored in work by American-based artists Ali Dadgar, Adrian Piper, Kerry James Marshall, and Byron Kim. Alongside the critical readings, students explore their own image by producing visual representations in a studio practice of different media. Students are expected to enrich and refine the idea of their own images in the context of visual arts and visual culture.
This class is crosslisted between Comparative Literature and Studio Arts and will attract students from the Arts, the Humanities, and beyond. Course requirements - three short critical essays (2-3 pages) and one final in-depth research paper (7-8 pages), four studio assignments, and one final studio project.
Book
Picturing the Self, Gen Doy
Future Face, Sandra Kemp
Just Love Me, Reinald Schumacher, ed
Andy Warhol, Rava Wolf |
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | 40 C is the third of a three-quarter series of courses examining the development of Western drama from the ancient Greeks to the present. Through in-class discussions of the readings and written assignments, students are encouraged to consider the plays under investigation from their sociohistorical and theatrical perspectives, as well as from the texts’ relation and relevance to the present. This quarter will focus on plays that are representative of the major styles, genres, and authors from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. Since the plays considered this quarter were written for performance, particular emphasis will be placed on the theatrical aspects of the texts. Readings will include Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and selections from the Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. Course requirements include attendance and participation in class, short written assignments and quizzes, a 5-6 page term paper, and a comprehensive final exam. |
| COM LIT 50B | PERIODS & MOVEMENTS: ROMANTIC AND MODERN | GELLEY, A. | The concept of periods is usually understood in terms of historical chronology, but this does not altogether apply to the idea of literature. What characterizes a literary period is not a unitary world-view but rather variable notions of literature itself and of its relation to other products of culture. What counts as literature at a given period involves features like genre, style, and themes, but also conceptions of time and history, readership (who is reading what?), dissemination, and competing media (pictorial, performance, etc). So rather than using a normative definition of periods we will approach works inductively and compare works from two different periods (Romantic and Modern). Writers will include Goethe, Keats, Baudelaire, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, Bertolt Brecht, and Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. |
| COM LIT 101 | MEMORY, TRAUMA, TESTIMONY | GELLEY, A. | This course will investigate the problem of memory and its representation of the past, as well as the difficulties that arise when memory is recast, or reframed within a personal and historical narrative. Where are the boundaries between history and memory? How useful is it to investigate the transmission of historical data in the light of trauma theory? In what ways is the concept of traumatic experience – a retroactive processing of experience – related to mythic and metaphoric elements in literature? How can we move from the intimate quality of individual recollection to the public and deeply social dimension of cultural tradition? The core readings for the course will draw on writings by Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, Barthes, Benjamin, and Caruth, with additional selections in literature and the philosophy of history. We will also view and discuss some movies (e.g., Muriel, Shoah, L'Avventura). |
| COM LIT 102W | TIME TRAVEL | CULBERT, J. | Time machines are an invention of modern science fiction, but the idea of time travel has a longer history in literature and culture. This class will examine time travel in literature and film in order to explore its relation to broader questions of history, memory, desire and fantasy. Additional readings in psychoanalysis and cultural theory will allow us to consider time travel in the light of such concepts as “afterwardsness,” traumatic experience and the return of the repressed.
Texts will include:
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder”
Théophile Gautier, “Arria Marcella”
Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Films will include:
Chris Marker, La Jetée
Shane Carruth, Primer
James Cameron, Terminator |
| COM LIT 104 | IMAGES OF JAPAN | FUJII, J. | Cross-listed with East Asian 120, Lecture A. Images of a nation, be they generated from within or without, in times of peace or conflict, are always “interested” (motivated) and contingent (utterly changeable). Through periods of intense worldwide interest in Japan during the bubble-economy years of the 1980s, and a precipitous decline in US mainstream media attention once Japan was deemed no longer a threat to US economic domination of the global capitalist system, representations of Japan in this country on the one hand remain imbedded in the grooves of stereotype carved over a century ago and reinforced over the five decades since the end of World War II, and on the other hand, subject to constant reformulation. This course will explore images of Japan, understood in the inclusive sense of the term “image” ranging from ideas, to propaganda, self-images, representations by enemies—in short, a range of perceptions whose very contexts warrant close study. Literature, academic studies, media accounts, and film will be the materials by which we examine selected images of Japan. |
| COM LIT 105 | RACIAL BLACKNESS | BARRETT, L. | Cross-listed with African American Studies 130, Lecture A. 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. |
| COM LIT 200D | CULTURAL RHETORIC AND RHETORICAL THEORY | JARRATT, S. | This seminar concerns theories and analyses of rhetoric as a practice of public discourse in a post-9/11 global context. Beginning with Arendt's mid-20th-century articulation of the public as a space of appearance, we will spend most of the quarter reading about and discussing dilemmas or points of tension built into the grounding concepts of publics and emerging from recent events. These include the incompatibility of liberal assumptions about the necessity for civil exchange and consensus-formation with agonistic conceptions of the public; dilemmas concerning rationality, both in relation to faith, belief, and fundamentalisms and as the tenuous foothold of an "ambiguous" modernity in some versions of the public; and, the challenge posed by reconciliation as a framework for public discourse in the South African context. Finally, we will explore debates around the use of images to make arguments and construct public memory.
Readings will be drawn from the following texts:
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Patricia Roberts-Miller, Deliberate Conflict
John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition
Sharon Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism
Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation
Judith Butler, Precarious Life
Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholy
Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, eds., Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation
Essays by Erik Doxtader and Philippe-Joseph Salazar on rhetoric and reconciliation
Essays on visual rhetoric and public memory by Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, Cara Finnegan, Diana George, Susan Sontag, and others
Each student will make a presentation on one week’s readings and write a short (5-7 page) rhetorical analysis. Students seeking proseminar credit will write another short paper or take-home exam. Those enrolling for seminar credit will write a longer paper. My hope for the writing is that we use it to think about the publics constructed by our own texts. Students may write critical or reflective pieces about the theories under consideration, or they may analyze a case or occasion of public rhetoric. |
| COM LIT 210 | DERRIDA | SPIVAK, G. | For this five-week seminar, we will follow the trajectory of the double bind in Derrida. The method will be close reading of extracts, with text summaries interspersed. We will read texts in English translation, with reference to the originals in class discussion. Seminar participants will write a 13 page term paper, engaging with issues raised in class and dealing with texts not read in class.
Texts will include Rogues, Spurs, Glas, Ear of the Other, "Circumfessions," Resistances to Psychoanalysis, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Archive Fever, "Mochlos," "University Without Conditions," The Politics of Friendship, and "Plato's Pharmacy."
This course meets for the later five weeks of the spring quarter. An optional, but recommended, reading group will convene weekly in the first five weeks of the quarter to discuss the texts before Professor Spivak's arrival in Irvine. Please contact Tamara Beauchamp ( tamara.beauchamp@gmail.com) for additional information. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE DECEPT AND DECEPTION IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY | ABBAS, A. | This seminar will investigate the notion of 'the decept' not as something
untrue but as what challenges systems of syymbolization even while it
alludes to the truth of desire. One familiar example is the witches'
prophecies in Shakespeare's 'Macbeth'. What would the play be without the
witches?--A story about an over-ambitious hero. What the witches add is
the element of deception, of a particular kind: the witches tell Macbeth a
truth which he misconstrues; hence, if he is deceived, it is by truth not
lies. What the witches introduce is in fact not deception at all, but
something that must be distinguished from it, namely, what the seminar
calls 'the decept', which can be characterized in a preliminary way as
follows : 1/ The decept is not deceptive, only not yet readable. 2/
However, it is unreadable not because it is vague. The decept is precise
but illegible,or better still, precisely illegible. 3/ If there is
equivocation, it is the equivocation of the pun ( eg., Beckett punning on
fundament/buttocks in the statement ' My work is a matter of fundamental
sounds, no pun intended...'), where 'the same' is also 'the different',
where signification bifurcates, where words enfold us in their du-plicity.
The cultural dialectic that the seminar will trace is not so much the
'dialectic of enlightenment'-- where reason as the overcoming of
domination by myth and superstition becomes itself, in the form of
'instrumental reason',a means of domination; but rather a 'dialectic of
deception', which poses the question ; Can the false and the meretricious
become a form of knowledge? Or, how can we relate to and learn from those
elements in cultural life thatwe do not yet fully understand? These
questions are particularly important for emergent cultural sites ( whether
it is Hong Kong cinema. DJ culture,or something else) which tend to look
alien, derivative or 'commercialized'--until we learn how to read them in
all their falsity. 'Critique' becomes not a matter of separating true from
false, but a means of imagining and constructing other spaces and
possibilities. |
| COM LIT 210 | RE-THINKING SEX: FEMINISM, QUEER THEORY, HETEROSEXUALITY | SCHLICHTER, A. | The class aims at revising the radical critique of sexuality through a re-reading of various feminist constructions and critiques of heterosexuality after queer theory. I find such a revision necessary because historical narratives of sexual radicalism present queer theory as the dominating, even the sole agent of a critique of heterosexuality. While the queer critique of the concept of gender has alerted us to the problematic, heteronormative aspects of feminist analysis, it has also occluded feminist contributions to critique of sexual normativity. Positing queer theory as an interlocutor, we will read feminist theoretical and literary re/constructions of heterosexuality by authors such as Kate Millett, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, and Elfriede Jelinek. By reading normativity as well as heterosexual identities and practices in interarticulation with a range of socio-cultural identities (African-American, white U.S., French, Austrian), the class will explore differences in the conditions of straight subject formation and in notions of heterosexual subjectivity. The readings will also be situated in relation to various theoretical approaches (poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, race theory, pro-sex/anti-porn feminism etc.) in order to reevaluate the intervention of literary performances in a radical critique of sexuality. |
| COM LIT 210 | GLOBAL LIT., INC. | NEWMAN, J. | In the fall and winter, 2006, editions of the MLA Job Information List, there were some 20 job announcements that contained language regarding a preference for candidates able to teach “World Literature.” Even without further gloss of what the specific departments meant by the term, this number of openings suggests that the issue and debates about World Literature, which peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s, warrant revisiting. (Given the context, let me be clear that students in the later stages of their course of study at UCI are as welcome to join this seminar as those in the earlier ones.) In this course, we will examine these debates and consider their material, intellectual, and methodological impact on the U.S. academy of the 21st century. We will begin by reading a series of plays by the Attic playwrights, Sophocles and Euripides, and by contemporary authors, Seamus Heaney and Wole Soyinka, and (following Gayatri Spivak’s lead), three narratives by Joseph Conrad, Tayeb Salih, and Mahasweta Devi, in order to have a common frame of reference. We will then turn to selected essays and articles, and excerpts from books, by Apter, Casanova, Jameson, Asad, Miyoshi, Moretti, Shih, among others, to examine the debates. Also of interest will be some of the ‘founding’ texts of this debate by Goethe, Strich, and Auerbach, whose nineteenth-and early twentieth-century theorizations of the issues were as caught in their vexed times as today’s debates are in ours. Among the topics to be covered in the individual seminar meetings are: Where is “the World”? Diaspora, Diffusion, and the Trans-/International; Temporal Provincialism and Geographic Exoticism; Universalism, Humanism, and the ‘Internationalist Aesthetic’; The Native, the National, and the Local: Alterity and Essentialism; Poiesis, Close Reading, and ‘World Literature’; The Minor, the Marginal, and the Mixed; The Mono- and the Pluri-: Major Authors, Recognition, and the Canon; The Question of Medium: Literacy, Orality, Visuality; The Challenge of Translation; World Literature Pedagogies.
While it is my intention that class discussions will cover such issues as: the implications of these debates for our understanding of literary history and the history of the discipline(s) of literary study, the relationship of theory and literature, concepts of literacy and literariness, the politics and ethics of publishing, and the chronology and topography of cultural inheritance, dependence, autonomy, and transfer, I would also like to have the seminar be of some practical use. Thus, each student (also auditors) will be asked to lead the class discussion on one-two of the assigned readings in terms of their usefulness as the organizing principle for an undergraduate class on World Literature. Proseminar students will then be asked to compose a syllabus for an undergraduate course in World Literature (with the student’s own field of expertise as a guide), with complete reading assignments, explanations of the readings, and accompanying ‘headnote’/course description. Seminar students will write a longer research paper on the debates, with their own focus and expertise as the frame and with the additional goal of explaining the place of World Literature in their field. |
| COM LIT 210 | SUBALTERNITY, COMMUNITY, MULTITUDE | JOHNSON, A. | This course will consider various contemporary attempts to move the theorization of politics away from the representational categories that have constituted the backbone of political philosophy in the Western tradition (the state, sovereignty, hegemony etc.) In particular we will ask about the articulation between challenges to a representational notion of politics that have come out postcolonial criticism in the form of subaltern studies (where the subaltern is understood as what remains outside hegemony) and other models such as Agamben’s theorization of community, Laclau’s radical democracy, Foucault’s bio-politics or Paolo Virno’s formulation of the multitude. Readings include Guha, Chakrabarty, Spivak, Agamben, Laclau, Foucault, Virno, Prakash, Butler, Zizek and others. All participants will be asked to write 4 response papers and make 2 oral class presentations. Seminar participants will write a final paper of 20 pages; pro-seminar participants will write a final page of 8-10 pages based on the last oral presentation. |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |