| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | |
| COM LIT 60C | READNG GENRE/MEDIUM | JOHNSON, A. | This is part of the Cl 60 introductory series to the Comparative Literature major and revolves around Genre and Medium. In this class 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 or from online avatars? 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 102W | VOICES IN NARRATIVE (LITERATURE, FILM, AUDIO) | 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 of “ 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 does not consider its material aspect: sound. In this class, we will examine how 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, 12pp final paper and several short writing exercises in preparation of the paper, regular postings on class note board. |
| COM LIT 122 | RHETORIC&PUBLIC SPEECH | JARRATT, S. | This course offers an introduction to rhetorical theory as the study of language in action and to speaking publicly as rhetoric’s practical extension. Our reading and discussion will explore public speech as the enactment of human relationships, the force and limitations of rhetorical conventions, and the expression of culturally inflected performance styles. Topics will include persuasion and propaganda, identification, ethical advocacy, public spheres, “free speech” and symbolic violence, among others. Readings may include excerpts from 20th and 21st-century rhetorical theorists including Kenneth Burke, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Wayne Booth, with some reference to ancient Greek sources. We will read view performances of famous speeches, as well as materials from contemporary mass media and popular culture, and analyze them through rhetorical frameworks. About half the course time will be devoted to instruction and practice in oral presentation. Each student will make two speeches--one an advocacy speech--designed for academic or public presentation and based on topics of the student’s choice. There will also be short writings based on the readings and a final exam. |
| COM LIT 132 | POLICE & STATE | AMIRAN, E. | This group-taught course, like last year’s course on Civil Disobedience, considers current social issues from a theoretical perspective. It combines critical cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and social theory to examine regulatory and policing mechanisms in society in relation to the State. We will ask how a science of policing arose in Germany in relation to private property, will consider the prison complex in the US as it is understood in new media, and will study contemporary Argentinian politics that is challenging models of governance. Our main emphasis, however, will be on less codified structures of governance, including psychological structures, that work in service of or (often) in other relations to the State. This larger scope will focus on the role of student protest in Iran; the Israeli military’s use of anthropology; policing in the novel as a literary form, which arose in part to reinforce the idea of social order; the autoimmune mechanisms of social regulation that appear in newspaper comics; the British TV police serial of the 60s and 70s; and specific instances of surveillance and the workings of the security apparatus, for example as featured in WikiLeaks about the US war in Iraq.
Student input will be important in shaping discussion and the curriculum. Critical texts include Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Freud, Jameson, D.A. Miller, Schmitt. The course will feature lectures by professors including Dina al-Kassim, Eyal Amiran, Susan Jarratt, Adriana Johnson, Horacio Legras, Nasrin Rahimieh, and Rei Terada. |
| COM LIT 132 | PRIVACY&SURVEILLNCE | LIU, C. | This course will introduce advanced undergraduate students to some of the critical issues at stake in the theoretical, narrative and historical configurations of power, privacy and surveillance. We hope to arrive at a more nuanced and bettered informed idea of what privacy and private life has been and is becoming as a function of cinema, narrative and new technologies. This course is interdisciplinary in nature and takes on primary texts in film theory political science, history, media theory and literature. How and why are privacy and surveillance aesthetically constructed as socially valuable or politically dangerous?
We will first deal with private life as a spatial and historical concept, related to problems of the power of forensic evidence. Close readings of George Orwell's 1984, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation as well as Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Other readings will include works by Gilles Deleuze, Jodi Dean, Beate Roessler and Beatriz Colomina.
This course has a non-refundable Lab Fee. |
| COM LIT 132 | LITERATURE FEATURE FEUILLETON | GELLEY, A. | COM LIT 132/ LIT. JOURNALISM 103,
While the word "feuilleton," widely used in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, is no longer current, the form of short prose essays -- personal, humorous, topical -- is still a staple of feature writing in newspapers, magazines, and blogs. The "Talk of the Town" which ran for years in The New Yorker is one example of this form. This course will look at a some samples from the 20th century in continental Europe (Marcel Proust, Joseph Roth, Walter Benjamin), England (Virginia Woolf, George Orwell), and the United States (H.L. Mencken), right up to very recent writers (Zadie Smith). Course requirements: Responses on messageboard to the readings, oral reports, term paper and/or final exam.
cross listed: COM LIT 132/ LIT. JOURNALISM 103, |
| COM LIT 150 | KOR WOM FILM &NARR | CHOI,C. | In the past two decades a new generation of women writers and film makers have emerged in Korea in the wake of the robust feminist movement and film industry in South Korea. This course explores the themes and issues, and styles which women writers - some more established and some new - and film directors raise and employ through their respective medium. We will analyze the novels and short stories by such writers as Pak Wan-so, Choe Yun, Kong Chi-yong, Sin Kyong-suk, and Cho Kyong-nan, and the films by women directors including Im Sun-rye, Yi Chong-hyang, Yi Kyong-mi, Pak Chan-ok, and Kim So Yong. Some of these film makers will visit the class for film screening and interaction. |
| COM LIT 160 | LATIN AMERICAN FILM | JOHNSON, A. | This course has three interrelated objectives: to teach something about film analysis, to teach something about the history of cinema in Latin America and to teach something about Latin American history through film. We’ll be concentrating on three of the four major national cinemas in Latin America (Cuba, Brazil and Argentina) from the 60s to the present day. Our starting point will be a movement which began in the early 60s called the New Latin American Cinema movement which produced what are still considered the great classics of Latin American film and whose legacy is still felt in even the most recent films. New Latin American Cinema (which includes Cinema Novo in Brazil, revolutionary cinema in Cuba and Third Cinema in Argentina). This movement linked aesthetics and politics in conditions of scarcity and underdevelopment (hence the subtitle of this course and hence the need to know something about Latin American history) and called for a new revolutionary practice of making films which would produce an “imperfect cinema” or an “aesthetics of hunger”. We’ll be screening 1-2 movies a week and reading essays on history and film; grades will be based on participation in class, short weekly writing assignments, a final paper and final exam |
| COM LIT 190W | ANIME/ANOMIE | TERADA, R. | “Anomie” is a sociological term for a sense of purposelessness and
alienation that people supposedly feel in a society in which norms are
failing to function. Arguably, anomie pervades the dystopian landscapes
and societies of anime, especially in the feature films of Mamoru Oshii.
In this course, we’ll discuss some major (and mostly older, classic) works
of anime along with critical theory, film theory, and philosophy in a
small seminar setting, with the goal of developing new ideas about the
politics and aesthetics of anomie. The main requirements are a midterm; a
15-20 pp. research paper on a project of your choosing, done in stages;
and collaborative seminar participation including oral presentations and
contributions to others’ projects. Anime works in the course may include
Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s short film Aquatic Language and his OVA Pale Cocoon;
Oshii’s Sky Cralwers and Avalon or Patlabor 2; Rintaro’s Metropolis; Kon’s
Paprika; and anime works suggested by seminar members. Theoretical texts
may include Durkheim, On Suicide; Adorno, Minima Morolia; Jameson,
Postmodernism; Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”; Deleuze,
from Cinema Two; etc. In all, this course is meant to be an intensive
collaborative experience. |
| COM LIT 210 | VISIBLE & INTELLIGIBLE | ABBAS, M. | '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 Zizek 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 ( eg, 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.
(same as Visual Studies 295) |
| COM LIT 210 | THE 1980'S | LIU, C. | This course will take a look at the cultural political and economic landscape of the 1980s in the American Academy. The Cold War, the Culture Wars and backlash politics will be evaluated in light of the unresolved conflicts emerging from campus unrest and revolt of the 1960s. We will look at how "high" theory and cultural studies contested traditional notions of humanities work, inaugurating a self-critical and Utopic idea of scholarship and research. The intellectual ferment of post-modernism and its rediscovery of the popular and the vernacular and the rejection of "grand narratives" will be considered alongside the maturity of countercultural and New Left figures from Stuart Hall, Sylvere Lotringer to Dick Hebdige to Fredric Jameson to Jean Baudrillard and Greil Marcus to Rosalind Krauss and the October group. The course will also try to account for the speculative and destructive energies unleashed by great political and economic upheavals inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as the "post-war settlement" came under attack from both the Left and the Right in the US and the UK. Along with the authors mentioned above, we will also look at David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism and critic of the New Left, Christopher Lasch. The course will encourage students to create a critical timeline of historical, intellectual, cultural, economic and political events that will build a better understanding of the decade.
(same as Visual Studies 295) |
| COM LIT 220 | TRANSLATION WORKSHOP | NGUGI, W. | This is a hands on, a work-in-progress translation workshop. Participants will work on a project of their own choice. While theoretical texts will be discussed, the emphasis is on what participants are working on. Class discussions of each others works are vital to the success of the workshop. Participants will therefore present their work-in-progress twice at least; at the beginning, when they present their project, and towards the second half of the workshop. The finished project, which should have benefited from class discussions, will carry a theoretical introduction with the translator explaining their task as translators; why they chose the texts/and authors they chose for their project; how they went about translating; the choices they had to make; the difficulties, and any other material relevant to the project. In the introduction they can engage in any theories of translation they have found using or from which they have made significant departure |