| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 8 | TIME TRAVELS | CULBERT, J. | Time machines are the 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. 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. Literary authors will include H.G. Wells, Martin Amis and Octavia Butler. Critical theory will include Freud, Jean Laplanche and Cathy Caruth. Two films, La Jete and Terminator will also be screened.
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| COM LIT 9 | NATVE AMRCN LIT/FLM | TANNER, T. | What do we imagine when we think of Native Americans? There are many assumptions that fuel our imagination regarding America’s First Peoples: nobility, savagery, nature, etc. Where do these assumptions come from, and how do they prevent Native Americans from participating in the present? How do social institutions replicate these assumptions, and how are Native Americans contesting them?
In this course we will explore the history of representation in Native American literature, film and photography to begin to address these questions. Our objective will be to understand how “Indianness” is figured in a variety of media, and for what social effects. We will contest the givenness of culture by showing how Native identity is a product of history and mediation. This approach will enable us to think about Native culture in a dynamic rather than static way. To this end, we will look at how Native American representation functions in literature, film and photography from different angles, including: gender and sexuality; nature; beauty; foreignness; and the divine. Because our trajectory is so diverse, this course will be ideal for students interested in ethnicity from many different backgrounds and departmental affiliations.
Course requirements: Weekly blog entries on the class website (1 page), a short mid-term paper (5-7 pages), and a comprehensive final exam.
Literature
▪De Las Casas, Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542)
▪Montaigne, On Cannibals (1580)
▪James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans (1826)
▪N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968)
▪Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977)
▪Simon J. Ortiz, From Sand Creek (1981)
▪Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)
Film
▪Victor Masayesva, Imagining Indians (1995)
▪Pocahontas (1995)
▪Zacharias Kunuk, The Fast Runner (2001)
▪Randy Redroad, The Doe Boy (2001)
Photography
▪Edward Curtis, Sacred Legacy (2000)
▪Victor Masayesva, Husk of Time (2006)
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| COM LIT 10 | LIT & HUMAN RIGHTS | WANBERG, K. | Why should we be concerned with literature and human rights? Currently we are seeing a resurgence in the global sphere of acts of torture, genocide, the indefinite detainment of political prisoners, displacement of populations, their dispossession from their land and resources, trafficking and commodification of individuals, and the production of an apathetic conscience with regard to these crises and the efforts to fight them. The role of literature in helping us to define and contest these realities in the language of human rights is vital. In recent years, efforts to understand the category of "the human" in both human rights and the humanities have been growing in currency and urgency. In times of shifting global networks of power, we can read notions of human rights in the context of international crises and of world literature. This course will analyze works of World Literature through the lens offered by human rights discourse. In so doing, we will examine the potential for interdisciplinary work in literature and human rights, exploring how the two disciplines might inform each other. We will consider contributions to literature in art, narrative, poetry, film, and song as cultural approaches to human rights practice and theory. Focusing on human rights concerns found in these texts, we will engage with the ethical dimension of literature in the current global context.
Students will be required to complete short weekly reading responses, and there will be a final paper of 5-7 pages in length.
Texts will include, but are not limited to:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony
A Report from an Academy
J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek
Roman Polanski, Death and the Maiden
Jean Genet, 4 Hours in Shatila
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| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | Sections A-F, please contact instructor for more information: barker@uci.edu. |
| COM LIT 60C | READNG GENRE/MEDIUM | SCHLICHTER, A. | This class is part of the CL 60 introductory series to the Comparative Literature major and revolves around the notions of Genre and Medium. We will approach the concept of genre through its intersection with ideas of selfhood. We will read various kinds of autobiographical narratives - in the form of written texts, documentary film and radio narratives - in order to discuss how they use different strategies to represent a self, or how they problematize such self-representations. The materials will range from the 18th to the late 20th century, and include Rousseau's Confessions, a foundational text for the genre of autobiography, as well as slave narratives, testimonials, autobiographies by women, queers and people of color. An important question here is how sexual and cultural difference is important for the construction of subjectivity.
Requirements: Regular attendance, several short writing assignments, midterm, final.
This course was previously offered as ComLit 50C. Students with credit for CL 50C canNOT take this course. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| COM LIT 100A | CARIBBEAN LIT | CULBERT, J. | The reading for this course will range widely from the 16th to the 20th centuries and includes European and Caribbean texts of English, French, Spanish and African heritage. With its diverse cultural influences and languages, the Caribbean provides a rich context in which to explore questions of race, cultural identity, colonial heritage and literary production. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which Europe has viewed and imagined the Caribbean region and how Caribbean writers have responded to these ideas, whether contesting, rewriting or reinventing them. Examples of the type of questions we will be posing are: How does Caribbean writing reflect the legacy of colonialism and the slave trade? How are cultural and literary identity fashioned in a context of racial, cultural and linguistic mixing? What are the strategies by which Caribbean writers challenge Euro-American cultural domination? How does literature contribute to the work of history and cross-cu! ltural dialogue? Authors include Shakespeare, Montaigne, C.L.R James, Aime Casaire, and Jamaica Kincaid.
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| COM LIT 102W | VAGABONDS | CULBERT, J. | Misfits, outcasts and vagabonds, the authors and characters in the texts for this course are at odds with society. What reasons do these vagabonds have for leaving home? If they reject society, how and why do they speak to us? What forms of society and community do these solitary characters ask us to imagine? Authors include Joseph Conrad, J.M. Coetzee, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean Genet, and James Clifford. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| COM LIT 105 | ASNAM LIT MULTIRACE | PAN, A. | This course situates Asian American literature and culture in the broader framework of racial formations in the United States, addressing a range of themes fundamental to the study of the topic: interracial and cross-cultural contact, immigration and transnationalism, identity politics and stereotyping. We will not only study the work of Asian American writers, but also the ways Asian Americans have been portrayed in the U.S. cultural imaginary from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Rather than understanding Asian Americans as belonging to a discrete, self-defined racial category, the class offers a comparative approach that examines the political, legal, and economic structures that shape the social experiences of Asian Americans in relation to other racial groups. We will explore how cultural production by and about Asian Americans has been crucial to the constitution of American national identity for over a century. The objective of this course is for students to think critically about the relationship between race and culture in comparative, multiracial contexts.
Grading and course requirements
Short paper (3 pages): 25%
Long paper (5 pages): 30%
Final exam: 30%
Class participation: 15%
Books
Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Stories, ISBN: 0-252-06419-4
(University of Illinois Press)
John Okada, No-No Boy, ISBN: 0-295-95525-2 (University of Washington Press)
Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker, ISBN: 1-57322-531-2 (Riverhead)
Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats, ISBN: 0140280464 (Penguin)
Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange, ISBN: 1-56689-064-0 (Coffee House
Press) |
| COM LIT 107 | GLOBAL ISLAM | AL-KASSIM, D. | This course approaches the phenomena of globalization through the theme of transnational and postcolonial forms of Muslim identity. Beginning with the "clash of civilizations" narrative and European legislation outlawing religious garb, we will examine the construction of Muslim identity underway in Western attempts to police and suppress Islamic practices, and we will investigate the claim of liberal secularism that underwrites these forms of repression. Arabic literature, in its many languages, the work of major Arab/Muslim/South Asian postcolonial critics and novels from national literatures for which Islam is an important cultural reference will occupy us in these ten weeks. Through a series of novels and short stories we will examine the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, nation and religion that attend the transnational migrations of formerly colonized people to Europe and America and back again to the homeland. Our readings include an array of theoretical approaches from anthropology, history, feminism, literary criticism and media studies.
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| COM LIT 120 | MELODRAMA | TERADA, R. | In this course we look into the philosophy of melodrama, inquiring how to think about emotions that seem extravagant, excessive and sometimes even false, and investigating the place outsize emotions occupy in aesthetic genres, especially drama and film. Philosophical reflection on inauthentic emotions produces normative models of self, concepts, and feeling. Melodrama is therefore also a social issue: often, depiction of a world of people who can’t seem to produce the right emotions seems to suggest criticism of the society that demands certain emotions and yet has produced these people. Philosophers that may help us toward a theory of melodrama include Plato, Walter Benjamin, and Stanley Cavell. We’ll watch several films from the period of classic Hollywood melodrama or reflecting back on it, probably including Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows (1955) and There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), Michael Curtiz, Mildred Pierce (1945), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Veronika Voss (1982), and Todd Haynes, Far from
Heaven (2004). The class format will be student-driven discussion; requirements include regular postings on a website, two 5-pp. papers, a midterm, and a final. |
| COM LIT 130 | ASAM WRITERS GENDER | KATRAK, K. | This course explores the intersection of gender and generation in Asian American Cultural Expression. The importance of gender (first, second, third, and beyond) is a significant theme along with male and female parameters of gender identity in the representation of Asian American lives. Our study includes the portrayals of different generations within one family as well as cultural politics of tradition and innovations in South Asian American dance and music, and responses from youth and elders within the community. Selection of literary texts include Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Denise Uyehara's performance writings that include personal memory, family history and political realities in post 9-11 times. We read a selection of Vietnamese- American writers and expressive art (dance) by second-generation South Asian Americans. Requirements include class presentation, in-class writing, midterm and final exam. |
| COM LIT 132 | IDEOLGY,CLASS, MASS | GELLEY, A. | General Will, proletariat, masses, Volk, peuple, people B are terms used to designate the social collective in its generality have in every case a marked ideological cast. Each of the terms lays claim to agency and sovereignty "in the name of" a collective posited by the very name. "Every interpretation of the political meaning of the term 'people' must begin with the singular fact that in modern European languages, 'people' also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. One term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics. . . . Such a diffuse and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it must reflect an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the concept 'people'." (Giorgio Agamben) It is revealing that recent treatments of this issue have foregrounded exclusionary formulations, e.g., Spivak=s Asubaltern@ or Rancière=s Athe part of those who have no-part.@ This course will examine versions of the collective from Rousseau to the present and try in each instance to understand the rhetoric underlying the claim to agency.
Requirements: Two oral reports. One short paper, one longer term paper. Final exam.
Texts:
Mass Psychology by Sigmund Freud
On Populist Reason by Ernesto Laclau
Crowds , eds. Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews
Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
The Philosopher and His Poor by Jacques Rancière,
On the Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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| COM LIT 142 | COUNTRY & THE CITY IN LIT HISTORY | GELLEY, A. | This course will explore the significance of the city as a Amemory theater in the sense that Frances Yates analyzed for an earlier period, that is, as a repertoire of cultural sites situated in historical cities and at the same time deployed in an intertextual network linking geographical and social data with fictive constructs. We will trace how the new forms of city-space that became prominent around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries became available as cultural narratives during the 19th and 20th. The course will begin with a consideration of the pre-Romantic and Romantic concept of landscape, especially as a touchstone of aesthetic experience and judgment in the period. In the wake of the aesthetization of landscape in Romanticism, there emerged a consciousness where Acityscape served as both a reaction and an alternative to landscape. The flight from the city articulated in Wordsworth's A Residence in London (The Prelude, Bk. 7) leads to a differentiated yet pervasive theme of anti-nature in Baudelaire. In the writings of Poe, and then in the fiction of the mid-century (Dickens), the aura of landscape as a sheltering precinct, a site still touched by traces of a divine providence, came to be replaced by the phenomenon of the metropolis as site of new forms of human agglomeration and cultural commerce. Our course will study this development in literature dealing with three metropolitan centers B London, Paris, and New York, with works by Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Poe, Dickens, and Bellow. Critics and theorists will include Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and T.J.Clark.
Texts:
Raymond Williams, The country and the city, Oxford U.P.
Baudelaire, Baudelaire in English, Penguin
W. Benjamin, Reflections, Schocken
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Penguin
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, Princeton U.P.
Dickens, Bleak House, Penguin
E. A. Poe, Selected Tales, ed. D. Van Leer, Oxford World Classics
Wordsworth Prelude Bk.7 (Electronic Reserve)
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| COM LIT 143 | SCI FI&URBN DYSTPIA | LIU, C. | This course will examine science fiction narratives and their projection of the geography of utopias and dystopias. Students are expected to have experience with film and literary theory and will be asked to consider the role of science fiction as cultural criticism and urban geography. Beginning with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward that dates from the turn of the last century, we will focus on the work of science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick and examine his preoccupations with and visions of a nightmarish future for California. Critics we will be reading include Fredric Jameson, Mike Davis and David Harvey.
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| COM LIT 143 | MONUMENTS, MEMORIALS & MONSTROSITIES | AL-KASSIM, D | Monuments and memorials mark heroic turning points in the life of a nation, state or people and purport to be the final word in social struggle. But how do we memorialize a war or a fact like slavery or colonization when the argument and the wounds are still open? Architecture and museums are called upon more than other forms to draw such periods of trouble to a close, yet memorialisation can take many forms: statues, installations, museums, exhibitions, film or literary works. We will read literary accounts that register the trouble with memory alongside interesting cases of politically charged memorials. To approach this question we will look at 4 cases: South Africa after apartheid, USA after Vietnam, Algeria after revolution and Lebanon after civil war. Works by Annie Coombes, Yvette Christiansen, Lauren Berlant, Assia Djebar and Rachid Daif along with short essays in architecture and urban studies. |
| COM LIT 190W | CRITQNG SEXUAL POLITICS | SCHLICHTER, A. | The dynamics between power and sexuality have been of critical interest to feminist, lesbian and gay as well as queer theories. The class will discuss constructions and critiques of the hegemonic apparatus, which has been called "institutionalized heterosexuality" or "heteronormativity", in order to illuminate the continuities and differences between the different approaches. The theoretical text will be put in dialogue with literary writings. By looking both at normativity and at 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. Our reading list will include texts by Kathy Acker, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Elfriede Jelinek, Gayl Jones, Kate Millett, Hortense Spillers, Monique Wittig.
Requirements: 12-15 pp. final paper (with research component); midterm, several short writing assignments, regular participation. Same as Womn St 139W. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| COM LIT 210 | COLONIALITY AND POSTCOLONIALITY IN THE AMERICAS | JOHNSON, A. | Course Code 22810, M, W, 10:30-11:50AM, HIB 341
The course will take up a comparative approach to colonialism and its legacies in the Americas. Of particular importance will be theories about the technologies and genres of representation and knowledge (writing, mapping, literature) as well as theories about “the human”, ethnicity and race. Specifically we will ask questions about slavery and its legacies, differences in the construction of a concept of “race” and “racial difference” throughout the Americas, the relationship of writing to the colonial project, the provincialism of literature as a historical project, and the interaction between colonial forms of knowledge with idiosyncratic discourses and forms of knowledge produced both by the indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as those forced to migrate through the slave trade. Looming over these specific questions will be three broader ones: How can we confront a postcolonial theory has evolved largely out of reflections on British and French colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Africa and Asia with the much earlier colonization of the Americas in order to “decolonize scholarship and to de-center epistemological loci of enunciation” (in Walter Mignolo’s words)?; How can we keep visible the politics behind the production of knowledge in the relationship between US. American Studies and Latin American Studies?; To what extent do contemporary forms of empire rehearse the earlier imperial projects in the Americas? We’ll be reading texts from the 16th century to the present, written originally in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and which range from literary texts, historical accounts to theoretically informed ethnographic approaches. (Likely texts include: Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance, Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo’s Writing Without Words, Bartolomé the Las Casas Destruction of the Indies, Serge Gruzinski’s The Conquest of Mexico, José María Arguedas The Fox from Up Above The Fox From Down Below, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Michael Hardt Empire). All seminar participants will be required to write five short (2 page) reaction papers. Seminar credit will be given to those who write a final 15-20 page paper; pro-seminar participants have the option of either turning in an annotated bibliography or writing a 8-10 page paper. |
| COM LIT 210 | DUBOIS & GRAMSCI | SPIVAK, G. | Course Code 22812, Friday, 11:00AM-1:50PM, 338 Aldrich Hall (HRI Conference Room)
(**Please note: this seminar will not meet throughout spring quarter. It will meet for five weeks in May and early June. Enrollment is limited and by instructor's permission only. Please contact Arielle Read--HIB 416; ; 824-6718--regarding schedule and deadline for submitting seminar request form.**)
DuBois and Gramsci belonged to relative privilege within underprivileged groups. They worked to transform their race or ethnicity of origin within a commitment to Marxism, which also they transformed.
They thought that no change would last without epistemic change.
Gramsci lived 46 years, 9 of them in prison. DuBois lived twice as long, in the world, active upon many different terrains, an international intellectual, devoted to African unity, and to
anti-colonialism in general. Yet Gramsci's work did travel into international postcolonialism through South Asian and Latin American Subaltern Studies.
We will look at their theories of culture, politics, and education. In conclusion, we will consider their work through the prism of gender.
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| COM LIT 210 | THINKING VISUALITY, VISUALIZING THOUGHT | ABBAS, A. | Course Code 22814, Tuesday, 12:00-2:50PM, HIB 411
“All that you see is according to your metaphysic,” wrote William Blake. Is seeing always a question of “seeing as”? Is it possible to see other than what “visual ideology” allows? While visuality cannot be cut off from language and meaning, it is not completely translateable into them either. This seminar will explore—through a number of specific topics in painting, cinema, architecture, fashion design, language, and ideology—the productive tensions between visuality and thought.
Topics discussed will include: visual ideology, or the vision machines of pure war; the “hallucinatory” in Blake’s poetry and paintings; Magritte paints Edgar Allen Poe, or “The Domain of Arnheim”; the film-maker as philosopher—Deleuze and Žižek on Hitchcock; constructions and deconstructions in architecture; fashion theory from Baudelaire to Zhang Ailing to Baudrillard; the problem of metaphor.
Evaluation will be based on class participation and on a term paper or appropriate project (e.g., a film, a painting, a design, an installation), to be submitted a week after the last teaching week.
Readings will mainly be in the form of handouts or photocopied essays. A recommended text that covers some of the ground is Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes, University of California Press, 1994.
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| COM LIT 210 | RELIGION, POLITICS, & RISE OF THE (NATION) STATE, 1550-1648 | NEWMAN, J. | Course Code 22816, Thursday, 3:30-6:20PM, HIB 411
Is it time to abandon “the Westphalian label” of territorial states as the main actors on the global stage? The question is justifiable at a moment when corporate and civic, religious and secular (as well as academic) “globalizers” all around see the trans-nation as the only real present and the only possible future political form. In this course, in addition to actually reading the Treaty of Westphalia, we will consider how a series of literary and visual texts as well as texts of political theory from the period responded to nearly a century of modern European political and confessional turmoil, asking what it was that called for the erection of the (nation) state as a legitimate source of sovereignty. Readings will include select narratives of the tensions between the Church, the Empire, and the (national) State and, within the State, between the center and its internal and external peripheries, in texts by Tasso, Marlowe, Cervantes, Calderon, and Corneille, as well as the devastating account of the Thirty Years War in Grimmelshausen’s novel, Simplicissimus, and the artist Diego Velazquez’s highly ambiguous image of Spinola’s siege of Breda in the painting, “Las Lanzas.” Using works by Machiavelli, Erasmus, Luther, Bodin, Hobbes, and Grotius, we will also investigate how, at a rhetorical and ideological level, the realm of the secular state eased its way into the shaky monopoly on power that the literary texts so often address. Among topics to be discussed: the shift from sacred to temporal legitimations of the polity and the ensuing new definitions of sovereignty, the rise of modern military and bureaucratic cultures in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the spilling over of internal European conflicts into politically and commercially motivated colonial enterprises across the Atlantic and into the Pacific as well, and the inconvenient truth that the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and the lingering Islamic threat from North Africa, on the other, may well have been the only reasons that select European states occasionally saw themselves as allied. PLEASE NOTE THIS SEMINAR WILL MEET FOR THE FIRST TIME ON THURSDAY, 10 APRIL. Please read 1. Richard Falk, “Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-Westphalia” (The Journal of Ethics 6, 2002—accessible via JSTOR) and 2. Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (in BOOKSTORE) for the first day of class. Starting Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, would be a good idea as well!
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