| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | |
| COM LIT 60C | 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 narratives, testimonial narratives, novels as well as presentations of the self on the internet. The reading will range widely from the 13th to the 20th centuries and include European, African, North and South American texts. 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 that of people who tell stories of political subjection in testimonials? 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 can the relationship between the first person narrator and society differ in testimonials and autobiographies? How can we describe the stories that circulate under the heading “We are the 99%” in terms of a genre? What difference does online or visual media make for how selves are constructed and staged? |
| COM LIT 102W | “EUROPE”: FACT OR FICTION | NEWMAN, J. O. | In January, 2012, an op-ed piece ran in The New York Times under the headline: “Why is Europe a Dirty Word?” While acknowledging the challenges that present-day Europe faces concerning the economy, unemployment, and immigration, for example (challenges often uncannily like our own here in the U.S.), the piece also pointed out the prevailing tendency, especially among U.S. politicians, to represent “Europe” only via caricature and over-simplified cartoons. In the first part of this course, we will consider some of the most common myths associated with Europe’s – and our own – “Eurocentrism” via the study of historical maps, artistic and literary representations, and historical, philosophical, and political theoretical texts, and ask what the relationship is between these myths and the complexities of a “European” identity produced through contact with Islam, Asia and “the New World.” In the second half of the course, we will dig below the surface of these and other claims about “European” history, culture (philosophy, literature, film, music), society, and politics (in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Gaelic, etc., etc., also in its expression in Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone Africa and the Caribbean) via a series of research assignments on individualized topics developed by the students in consultation with the instructor. On the basis of these assignments, students will have the opportunity to produce a polished research paper that could either be used to apply to graduate school (in History, Art History, Literary and Cultural Studies, Political Science, and International Studies) or serve as the basis of a senior thesis or a proposal for a prestigious scholarship (Fulbright, Marshall, Rhodes, Soros). Open to all students, but recommended for those with junior and senior standing.
Please contact the instructor if you have any questions about your research interests (jonewman@uci.edu ). |
| COM LIT 107 | GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW | JOHNSON, A. | This course will be organized around the question of what globalization looks and feels like from below: this can mean both what is called the global south (what used to be called the third world) but also includes the face of globalization looks for those who may be on the loosing end of things in the global north as well. Are differences in space and time shrinking in the same way all over the planet? Is the present defined by speed, mobility, interconnectedness and hybridity for everyone? How is globalization being resisted or reformulated by those who call themselves anti-globalization? What if we are moving towards becoming, as Mike Davis suggests, a planet of slums? The first 6-7 weeks of class will lay the ground through readings which consider the impact of globalization on the organization of social movements, notions of identity, transformations of culture, experiences of space etc. in addition to the consideration of a few particular contexts through films and other readings. As this is the capstone seminar for the Global Cultures major, however, particular emphasis will be placed on students’ creative and critical contributions and to that end, the last 3-4 weeks of the class will be organized and run by student groups. Groups will be responsible for selecting an appropriate topic, identifying reading material as well as crafting study questions and assignments for the rest of the class in close consultation with me. Students will also be asked to write a final 8-10 page research paper that comes out of the work with and topic of their group. The class is open to all students, regardless of whether you are a Global Cultures major or not, but the emphasis on independent student research and organization of the class should be particularly beneficial to juniors and seniors. Same as GC 191 |
| COM LIT 132 | OCCUPY | TERADA, R. | Through guest lectures, readings, and cultural materials, this course examines the Occupy movement of the last year. We will think about how this movement suggests new ways of looking at such things as debt (student debt in particular), labor, class, action, revolution, university, and community. We'll also consider comparatively the meanings of recent protest in different locations such as the E.U., the U.K., the Middle East, Latin America, and the U.S. The course will be taught by a variety of instructors and will emphasize participation and experimentation. |
| COM LIT 143 | RENAISSANCE EUROPE GOES TO THE MOVIES | NEWMAN, J. | Same as FMS161 and HIST 112D
In a now well known book, Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1996), scientist Stephen Jay Gould writes that the film Jurassic Park contains several errors, but that these errors “belong to the juicy and informative class of faults” characterized by the economist Vilfredo Pareto in the following way: “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truths for yourself.”
In this course, we will examine the “juicy faults” about the European Renaissance that we find in a series of movies from the 1940s up through the early twenty-first century. We will look at them in conversation with primary and secondary historical and literary texts from and about the period, and ask what role European early modernity (c. 1500-1650) played in the fashioning of modern and post-modern political, religious, cultural, and scientific identities from the Cold War up through the aftermath of 9/11, with the relentless militarization of foreign policy and the rise in religiosity on the homefront in the U.S.
Hundreds of movies have been made about the European Renaissance. The principle of selection this year derives from one of the (itself juicily fruitful) claims that it was during the Renaissance that ‘Man’ “awoke” out of the slumber of the Middle Ages and became aware of himself as an individual. The outsized individuals whose cinematic selves we will examine include artists (Michelangelo and Vermeer), politicians (Machiavelli and Richelieu), monarchs (Elizabeth I), religious men and movements (Martin Luther, Pope Julius II, the Jesuits, and the Anabaptists), intellectuals and scientists (Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, Galileo), and explorers (Columbus), as well as several less prominent individuals whose fraught early modern lives modern and post-modern Hollywood has tried to capture in interesting ways.
Lecture attendance, completion of short reading assignments, and watching the films mandatory; films will be screened during the section, but will also be on reserve for those who cannot attend. Quizzes, two movie reviews, short final paper. |
| COM LIT 150 | MOD MIDDLE EAST LIT | RAHIMIEH, N. | The very designation, the Middle East, raises complex historical and political questions we will attempt to address through selected literary works written originally in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish. The works will be read in English translation. Our readings and discussions will take into account colonial and national histories as well as questions of literary genre and their travels across languages, regions, and cultures. Among the writers to be included are: Adalet Agaoglu, Mahmoud Darwish, Forugh Farrokhzad, Sun Allah Ibrahim, Sayed Kashua, Naguib Mahfouz, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk,. |
| COM LIT 210 | FOUCAULT: BODIES, SELVES, MEDIA | SCHLICHTER, A. | Annette Schlichter
CL 210 – Hum 270
Spring 2012
Bodies, Selves, Technologies
The class will reflect on the use of Foucault's work for a cultural studies mode of analysis. I am particularly interested in its relevance to discussions of the materiality of different kinds of bodies and their roles in gender, queer and media studies. We will investigate central terms of Foucault's texts (such as "subject," "knowledge," "discourse-practice", "power," "subjection/subjectivation," "technologies of self") with and against their interpretations and modifications in writings by his readers (among them Judith Butler, Friedrich Kittler, Mark Poster and Jonathan Sterne) in order to articulate fragments of a material study of subjectivity.
Pro-seminar option: 2 short position papers, in-class presentation, regular postings
Seminar option: 20pp seminar paper, in-class presentation, regular postings
(Same as Human 270) |
| COM LIT 210 | PHILOSOPHY AND CINEMA; DELEUZE 1 | ABBAS, M. | Graduate Seminar on Deleuze’s Cinema 1, Spring 2012
This is the first of a 2-part seminar on Deleuze’s groundbreaking cinema books. Each seminar can be taken independently. Spring 2012 will focus on Cinema 1.
For Deleuze, philosophers construct concepts, while filmmakers construct images, so much so that filmmakers can be classified in terms of the type of image they create. The cinema books do not give us a ‘philosophy of cinema’, or treat filmmaking as ‘thinking in images’. Rather, ‘thinking’ and ‘image-making’ are seen as independent but related activities; which is why the books on cinema can complement and extend Deleuze’s philosophy in important ways. Taking a hint from Bergson, Deleuze organizes cinematic images into two main types, the Movement-Image (Cinema 1), and the Time-Image (Cinema 2). The Movement-Image is not the same as the ‘image of movement’. For one thing, it is related to perception and affection, which may or may not entail any discernible movement. What it produces, even at a very early stage in the history of cinema, are destabilizations of various kinds. The perception-image and the affection-image prepare the ground for a provocative and surprising discussion of the third type of Movement-Image, the action-image. Everywhere, the stress falls not so much on classification but on transformation. Hence, Cinema 1 ends with a discussion of ‘the crisis of the action-image’, which is the hinge between the two cinema books. The seminar will have occasion to review the work of filmmakers like Griffith , Eisenstein and Vertov; Pasolini, Bergman, and Bresson; Bunuel, Herzog, and Chaplin; Kurosawa and Mizoguchi; the Marx Brothers and Hitchcock.
The seminar will not encumber students with excessive readings. Instead, students will themselves write a ‘textbook’ on the subject of the seminar, based on lectures, discussions, and further research.
(same as Visual Studies 295) |
| COM LIT 210 | OBJECT RELATIONS | TERADA, R. | An introduction to and collaborative reading of the "object relations" school of psychoanalysis constellated mostly in postwar England, whose most accomplished theorists are Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott. In this body of work, the object of love or hate is paradigmatically another person who more or less adquately perceives and is perceived by the developing child and adult; hence in object relations lie the organization of reality and the origins of ethics and sociality. Object relations, then, is a psychoanalytic complement to sociopolitical analyses that allow us to see conditions and institutions as inherently dynamic and co-constructed. Our course will begin by reconstructing Freud's and Ferenczi’s accounts of the human object and especially the “omnipotence” effects that, Freud hypothesizes, haunt our fear of our own aggression toward objects. We’ll then consider Klein’s theories of aggression and reparation and Winnicott’s sketching of an alternative ethical space that takes into account the self’s needs for distance and privacy. We’ll also read essays by Fairbairn and Balint; possibly, by Abraham and Torok; and recent scholarship deploying object relations. In general, we’ll try to see what the priorities and values of object relations have to offer contemporary thought over and against the starker, a priori other-centeredness of Levinas and other ethical thinkers. |
| COM LIT 210 | CRITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY:POSTCOLONIALISM,LANGUAGE,GENDER | KATRAK, K. | This course explores diverse cultural and critical theories--from ancient India, and from 20th century Africa, Europe, India, multiethnic US--and their local and global resonances. We explore the conjunctures and disjunctures among critical and cultural theories of postcolonialism paying attention to language and gender, and continuing decolonization in the face of cultural imperialism. We engage critically with cultural theory that is attentive to postcolonial realities on the ground even as we challenge a problematic theoretical notion that regards such discussions as under-theorized or un-theorized while privileging critical theory that is “free” of concerns with such realities.
We discuss the overlaps of cultural and critical theory within the history of colonialism and postcolonialsm in the work of thinkers such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Raymond Williams, Ama Ata Aidoo; feminist theorists such as Chandra Mohanty, Ketu Katrak; dance and performance theorists such as Susan Leigh Foster, and Randy Martin among others. Our readings include essays on ongoing decolonizing struggles and unimaginably spectacular violence, often State-supported discriminations, such as the caste and class based violence on the poor and tribal communities in India as discussed in Arundhati Roy‘s essays. We study State censorship and the cultural artistic expression of artists who survive imprisonment and exile. Both Ngugi and Soyinka have expressed their personal experiences of such enforced silencing and outsiderness via prison diaries and essays. Such “internal brain drain”, as Soyinka puts it, is supported tragically by African regimes on their own artists.
We undertake a study of selected creative work from which we elicit theory—for instance Japanese-American Denise Uyehara’s Performance art that undertakes profound critique of US hegemony, militaristic adventures in Asia, internment of Japanese-Americans in the US, and post 9-11 hate crimes against those who “looked like” the enemy and this included South Asians. We also study expressive arts with politically progressive goals such as Shyamala Moorty’s dance and theatre work with victims of domestic violence among the South Asian American community.
We contextualize major theorists within their own historical and socio-cultural contexts, locating them like other cultural workers within the ideological and historical currents of their own societies’ past and present. Theories emerge from dominant and indigenous cultures colliding with colonial, patriarchal, and racist legislation, and at times, the collusion of patriarchy, colonial and neo-colonial forces that worsen gender inequities. Throughout our study, we approach cultural and critical theory as tools that participate in issues of social justice for ordinary people rather than theory as an end in itself.
(Same as Drama 292) |