| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | |
| COM LIT 60C | READNG GENRE/MEDIUM: NARRATING THE SELF | 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. Important questions are how different genres and technologies shape the narratives and how sexual and cultural differences are important for the construction of subjectivity. We will read various kinds of autobiographical 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 autobiographical writings, such as Rousseau's Confessions, Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative, testimonials, and contemporary memoirs, autobiographical documentary films and examples of self-representations on the web (think Facebook).
Requirements: Regular attendance, midterm, final (take home), short writing assignments (5 pp).
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| COM LIT 105 | MINORITY AUTOBIO | LIU, C. | In this course, we will investigate autobiographical writing and deal with questions of genre and rhetoric of confession. This course will be historical and theoretical in nature and will investigate a number of autobiographical texts from Augustine and Rousseau, to Frederick Douglass and Mary McCarthy. |
| COM LIT 150 | ANIMLS URBAN SPACES | BURT, E. | |
| COM LIT 150 | ANCIENT GREEK NOVEL | JARRATT, S. | This course offers an introduction to a little-known genre of post-classical Greek literature: long prose fictions. These stories of romantic love, slavery, death and resurrection, chastity and lust, piracy, slavery, and despotism were widely circulated in the ancient world and remained popular in translation during the European Renaissance. Most follow the fortunes of a beautiful young heterosexual couple, involve fantastic episodes, travel to exotic and dangerous locales, and humorous exaggeration. Composed by Greek intellectuals during the period of Roman empire, the novels invite consideration of power, geography, and cultural difference, including racialization. Women play a more active role in these fictions than in many other ancient works and sexual encounters abound, so we will attend to representations of gender, sexuality and power. Narrative structure, rhetorical performance, and the use of visual description are a third nexus of critical inquiry.
We will read four works: a simple romance, Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe; a pastoral by Longus, Daphnis and Chloe; the first work of science fiction, Lucian’s A True Story; and a tale of love in black and white: Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story. The course will be conducted in a seminar rather than lecture style, so attendance and participation in discussion are required. Other requirements include regular reading quizzes, a collaborative oral report on a literary critical essay, a take-home midterm, and an open-book final exam.
(This course fulfills the English major requirement for literature in translation.)
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| COM LIT 150 | PARIS NOIR/BLCKPRIS | NOLAND, C. | During the period between the two World Wars a large number of Africans, Caribbeans, and African-Americans arrived in France either to visit or reside permanently. Paris was especially central to the literary imagination of francophone and anglophone Blacks, and Blacks were an important part of the French re-imagining of the exotic and modernity. We will read English texts and French texts in translation written during this unique period in the history of the African diaspora. Readings include: Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Léon Damas. Films by Josephine Baker and Melvin van Peebles.
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| COM LIT 210 | VOICE IN THEORY | SCHLICHTER, A. | In recent years, an interest in sound and, more specifically, in the material voice has surfaced within various fields of study, such as film and media studies, musicology, the study of African-American modernity etc. This new focus inspires a reflection on the question how theories of the subject (or of its impossibility) and its embodiments integrate the notion of voice into their thinking of speech, language, and the body.
The class will both present different theoretical/methodological approaches to voice and auditory perception and try to develop new perspectives on a subject of voice/ voicing subject. The reading list will include Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology, Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Boyd, Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, Audio-Vision, Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, Judith Butler on gender performativity and Gayatri Spivak on the subaltern. (Please not that this list is not exhaustive.) Copies of assigned books will be available from the UCI bookstore. In addition, a course reader will be provided at the beginning of the spring quarter.
Requirements: 20pp final paper for seminar option, three 7-8pp. position papers for pro-seminar option. One oral presentation, regular postings of analytical comments or discussion questions on class message board. |
| COM LIT 210 | PREMODERN LESSONS | NEWMAN, J. | This course has two foci. We will revisit some of the core texts of pre- and early modern political theory (Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Calvin, Hobbes; selections from Aquinas and Luther). We will then turn to their reception by twentieth-century theorists (Arendt, Gramsci, Weber, Schmitt, and potentially Lyotard) when, as Hans Jonas said of Hannah Arendt’s choice to write her dissertation on Augustine in 1929: “[S]uch a topic would not have been all that unusual in the [German] universities of the time.” We will consider the reasons why this was the case, and why we may want to return to such topics today. Of central concern will be the concepts of the sacred versus the temporal ‘kingdoms’, the ministry of churches versus the ministerium and offices of civil “regiments,” and the emergence of the thinking and believing subject out of the habitus of political duty and subjection. How were the divine and secular orders, and the rules of what Meinecke defined as ethos and kratos, related to one another? Other questions of interest will be: justice versus political wisdom (prudentia), the legitimate uses of violence, the jurisdiction of clerics versus magistrate-governors, the roles of discipline and punishment in the state per se, and differing conceptions of sovereignty from before, during, and after the emergence of the nation-state. Check course website on eee for readings and syllabus. |
| COM LIT 210 | COMP MODERNISM | AL-KASSIM, D. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ABBAS, M. | |