| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | |
| COM LIT 60C | READNG GENRE AND 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. Important questions are how different genres and media 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, contemporary memoirs, autoibiographical novels and 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 108 | LATIN AMERICAN JEWISH WRITERS | SEFAMI, J. | This course is devoted to Jewish Latin American writing in the 20th century. It will cover a wide variety of texts from different countries, and in different genres. We will also discuss a few films. Some basic information about Judaism will be provided; we will use as well some readings on a number of Jewish topics, including kabbalah and religion, alterity, diaspora and errancy, and anti-semitism. Some of the writers to be discussed in class are: Alberto Gerchunoff, Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Goldemberg, Margo Glantz, Juan Gelman, José Kozer, Gloria Gervitz, Ruth Behar, and Rosa Nissan. Short paper, and two exams.
TO BE TAUGHT IN ENGLISH
cross listed with SPN 130C
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| COM LIT 132 | IDEOLOGY, CLASS ,MASSES | GELLEY, A. |
General Will, proletariat, masses, Volk, peuple, people – these terms have been used to designate the social collective as a whole. They 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 that 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 subaltern or Rancière’s “the part of those who have no-part.” This course will examine versions of the collective from Rousseau to the present and try to understand, for each instance, the rhetoric underlying the claim to agency.
Requirements: oral report, 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
Essays and articles, tba
CL 132/ History cross listed 180: Ideology, Class, Masses --
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| COM LIT 140 | CRITICAL STUDIES | JOHNSON, A. | Toys, the French critic Roland Barthes once wrote, prepares the child to accept the world of adult functions “by constituting for him, even before he can think about it, the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas. Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians etc.” This course has two aims. The first is to introduce students to the field of cultural studies through one of its central concepts: “popular culture.” The second is to suggest the value of developing a critical eye for many of the objects (like toys) and practices that seem so natural to us today that we may not pay too much attention to them. Questions we will be looking at include: What is the difference between popular culture, high culture and mass culture? What can we discover about a society from an analysis of movies, magazine photography, cars or toys? Do we understand popular culture as a tool for social control or a place for resistance to a social order? How does culture function in the periphery? In addition to reading theories of popular culture we’ll be watching 2 movies and reading a novel. Coursework includes two take-home assignments, an oral presentation and a final paper. |
| COM LIT 141 | GOLDEN AGE COMICS | AMIRAN, E. | FMS114/CL141
Surrealist Film, Art, and Comics
Beginning in 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. New ideas about sexuality, the mechanical self, automatism, and the place of fantasy in culture suggested that the arts were a new science of culture. Newspaper comics of the “Golden Age” and surrealist film and art grew out of this movement and related developments in psychology, media, and philosophy. Surrealists didn’t just make fun of the old logical society and of its bourgeois values, but also met in serious groups to discuss sex as a social topic. Comic artists didn’t just entertain children but examined the mind and the structures of modern fantasy. We will read early comics like The Yellow Kid, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Little Sammy Sneeze, and Krazy Kat alongside film, graphic, and writings by Surrealist authors including Andre Breton, Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dali, Maya Deren, and Marcel Duchamp to figure out what animate them. How do they challenge the reader's perceptions of reality? Are they just effing with us or do they have a serious research agenda? What do they say about agency, desire, creativity, authorship, intentionality, legibility, sincerity, discipline, and mental economy. We will also consider some early and late texts around our period (Lautréamont's goth nightmare Maldoror, Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, and recent comic work such as Woodring's Frank and Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead).
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| COM LIT 143 | VOICES IN NARRATIVE | SCHLICHTER, A. | The examination of "the voice" has been largely neglected in a culture dominated by the visual. In this class, we will listen to the complex and elusive phenomenon "the voice" and examine how it is related to such central notions as narrative, identity, representation. We are familiar with the "voice" as a metaphor of the representation of a subject (e.g. the voices of the marginalized, the voice of an author), but such an understanding of voice disregards its material aspect: sound. What happens when we begin to think about the voice in its materiality? In this class, we will examine how the metaphorical and the material intersect, might complement and contradict each other in the use of voice in literature, film and other media. How do speaking and singing voices function in literary texts, film and audio narratives (music and sound art)? How does literature, a medium of writing, stage "voicing"? How do "voice techniques" in movies, e.g. the voice-over, reinforce or undermine the visual narrative? And, how might narratives in sound media (pop songs, radio drama) make use of the voice to tell their stories? We will look at a range of 20th century literary and theoretical texts as well as films and will listen to singing and speaking voices.
Requirements: Midterm, final (take-home); final paper or creative project. |
| COM LIT 190W | ASIAN CIT ASIAN CIN | ABBAS, M. | The course is not concerned with asking what is specifically ‘Asian’ about Asian cities but with testing the assumption that the urban concepts useful for thinking the Asian city are likely to be the concepts crucial for an understanding of urbanism today. It is arguable that Asia is where some of the most radical urban and cultural experiments of the twenty-first century will be taking place. Transformed at unprecedented speed by new forms of capital, politics, media, and technology, the Asian city today threatens to outpace our understanding of it. The Asian city reminds us that the city exists not just as a physical, political, and economic entity, but also as a cluster of images, a series of discourses, an experience of time and space, and a set of practices that do not necessarily add up. Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Istanbul—each of these cities is like a jig-saw puzzle of the mind, made up of cognitive/experiential fragments, of historical residues and aspirations. We need to provide new terms to describe Asian cities and re-think old terms. The course will draw on films, novels and memoirs, urban and cultural theory, architecture, music, and performance art to evoke the Asian city today. Topics will include:
1/Simmel and Benjamin on the modern city
2/Koolhaas’s ‘China’ and the warped space of ‘globalization’ : Zhang Yuan’s film “Crazy English’
3/Affective spaces in Hong Kong cinema: Wong Kar-wai’s film ‘2046’
4/Writing the city: Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul’ ; Dervis Zaim ‘Somersault in a Coffin’
5/Beijing: Liu Sola’s novel ‘ Chaos and All That’; Ning Ying’s film ‘I Love Beijing’
6/Taipei : Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film ‘Millennium Mambo’
7/Shanghai,Capital of the 21st Century? Lou Ye’s film ‘Suzhou River’
8/Chinese Architecture and Chinese Cities
Course Requirements: Attendance, a short mid-term test, final 15-20 page term paper
Some references:
Gary Xu:’ Sinascape: Contemporay Chinese Cinema’
John R. Logan(ed) : ‘The New Chinese City’
Tsung-Yi Michelle Huang : ‘Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers’
Sheldon H. LU : ‘Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics’
Bishop, Phillips, Yeo (eds) : Postcolonial Urbanism’
Josef Gugler : ‘World Cities Beyond the West’ |
| COM LIT 210 | CRITIQUES OF SOVEREIGNTY | AL-KASSIM, D. | Professor Dina Al-Kassim
Dept. of Comparative Literature, MK 420
“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 postcolonial studies, 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 critiques 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, anti-colonial
resistance) and theoretical readings (philosophy, political theory, anarchist anthropology,
queer and feminist theory, psychoanalysis) will be wide ranging. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil
on the Cross, Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness and Genet’s Un Captif
Amoureux/Prisoner of Love will serve as literary landscapes for our considerations. Please
note that the Genet is very long and, for that reason we will read it over the course of several
weeks alongside critical theory texts.
Weekly 1 page position papers to be posted online 24 hours before class, an oral report
and a final 15 page paper.
(Same as Human 270, Sem C) |
| COM LIT 210 | MODERNISM:FRANCE AND THE CARIBBEAN | NOLAND, C. | Graduate Seminar: French and Francophone Modernism: How to Write in a Colony?
Spring, 2010
Professor Carrie Noland
In this course, we will look at modernist texts—primarily poetic—through the lens provided
by francophone thinkers. Edouard Glissant, a critic, novelist, playwright, and poet from
Martinique, will serve as our guide. His Poétique de la relation defines a postcolonial,
postmodern poetics through readings of French modernist poets Arthur Rimbaud, Saint-
John Perse, and Victor Segalen. We will read volumes by each of these poets (alongside
Poétique de la relation), then see how Glissant revises their work in his own poetic volume,
Sel noir. Glissant’s poetry and his criticism both ask the question: How is it possible to
“dwell” in a colonized space? We will therefore focus our reading on spatial theories of
poetic practice, beginning with Martin Heidegger’s essays on poetry as dwelling and ending
with Patrick Chamoiseau’s Ecrire en pays dominé.
Same as French 225, Sem A) |
| COM LIT 210 | HISTORY, MEMORY, AND SUBJECTIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY AF AM LIT | KEIZER, A. | History, Memory, and Subjectivity in Contemporary African American Literature
Prof. Arlene Keizer, Department of English
Steering Committee Member, Program in African American Studies
History, especially the history of slavery, haunts contemporary African American literature.
As the experience of American slavery recedes further into the past, it seems to loom larger
in the black literary imagination. This course will examine novels (and some visual
artworks) published from the 1970s through the 1990s and the ways in which they address
memory (especially the memory of trauma), oral and written history, and the formation of
black subjectivity. If, as novelist Charles Johnson argues, “each plot. . . is also an
argument,” then a major function of this course is to analyze the arguments—about
memory, history, and identity—embedded in contemporary African American fiction, as well
as the idea of literature as a form of theory. Our critical readings will include trauma theory,
theories of “racial melancholia,” and contemporary analyses of the ontology of the enslaved
(e.g., “social death”).
There are three major requirements for this seminar: 1) an in-class presentation of one
week’s reading, including a set of questions to help guide the discussion, 2) a 20-25-page
research paper, and 3) a short prospectus (about 5-6 pages) for the research paper.
Students taking the class as a proseminar will write a shorter paper.
Books:
“The Education of Mingo,” Charles Johnson (short story)
Corregidora, Gayl Jones
A Visitation of Spirits, Randall Kenan
Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Kindred, Octavia Butler
The Known World, Edward P. Jones
Pictures from Another Time: The Art of Kara Walker
“The Attendant,” Isaac Julien (film to be shown in class)
Critical essays to accompany the literary works will be distributed as PDF documents
(Same as English 210, Sem B) |