| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | KUBIAK, A. | A one-year lecture-discussion course (each quarter may be taken independently) in the development of Western Drama, concentrating on the drama’s intellectual, social, and artistic foundations. About 10 plays and supplementary critical material are read each quarter.
40A: Greek Drama through Shakespeare. Readings from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the anonymous playwrights of the medieval theatre.
40B: Restoration Drama through Ibsen. Readings from Neoclassic, Romantic, and Naturalistic European playwrights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Molière, Racine, Congreve, Goethe, Ibsen, and Chekhov are included.
40C: Contemporary Drama. Post Naturalistic theatre: Expressionism, Epic Theatre, Theatre of the Absurd, and Contemporary American Theatre. Among the playwrights studied are Stein, Shaw, Pirandello, Ionesco, Beckett, Williams, Brecht, Weiss, Albee, Churchill, and Duras.
Same as Comparative Literature CL 40A, B, C. Drama and Music Theatre majors have first consideration for enrollment. (IV, VIII)
Spring 2013 Times:
Section A: TBA
Section B: M & W 8:30 - 9:50 AM in MAB 125
Section C: M & W 10:00 - 11:20 AM in MAB 125
Section D: Tu & Th 8:30 - 9:50 AM in MAB 125
Section E: M & W 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM in MAB 125
Section F: TBA |
| COM LIT 60C | CULTURAL STUDIES | SCHLICHTER, A. | The class introduces students to a variety of cultural practices (fictional and non-fictional writing, film, audio, new media) by looking at ideas of selfhood. We will study various kinds of autobiographical narratives in order to discuss how they use different strategies to represent a self, or how they problematize identity. The materials will range from the 18th to the late 20th century, and might include autobiographical writings (such as Rousseau's Confessions and Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative), novels, documentary films and self-representation on the web, e.g. in social networks. Important questions are how different genres and media technologies shape the narratives of self and how sexual and cultural differences are important for the construction of identity.
Requirements: Regular attendance, midterm, final, short writing assignments. |
| COM LIT 102W | POLITICAL INTERIOR | TERADA, R. | Marx and other thinkers help us to see social problems as structural. For example, workers go on strike when economic conditions come to the point that they just have to, not because they want to; or, the US Army just now allowed women into combat, not because they finally believe in women’s equality, but because otherwise they don’t have enough troops to go around. However, individuals and communities coming up against impersonal structures represent and respond to these necessities in their private and shared imaginary lives—in their dreams, associations, conversations, fantasies. How should we think about these “interior” worlds, especially if they can’t impact the structures of the external world? This class, a small seminar, will explore this question through film and theory. Works may include: Arendt, essays; Audiard, A Prophet; Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene; Berardi, After the Future; Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Jameson, The Political Unconscious; Suleiman, Divine Intervention; Tsai, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. The course will consist of discussion, posts on a messageboard, two papers, and a final. |
| COM LIT 107 | GLOBALIZ 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. |
| COM LIT 108 | COLONIZING ALGERIA | MORISI, E. | In February 2005, during the presidency of Jacques Chirac, the conservative majority passed a highly polemic law, a section of which prescribed that French pupils be taught about the “positive” effects of
“the French presence abroad.” The statement implied a partial praise of colonialism. A year later, this controversial amendment was repealed, following heated debates and polls that testified to the enduring relevance of this part of French history and to a nation’s ambivalent, and, some would argue, uninformed, positioning vis-à-vis colonialism.
This seminar will explore France’s relationship to one of its most important colonies, Algeria, through literary works that represent the period spanning 1830 to 1962. We will identify some of the key moments and political, ideological, and aesthetic trends that marked this colonial era: the conquest of Algeria (1830), the way in which it was appropriated as a plastic and ethnological object, the rise and implications of orientalism, the simultaneous ‘mythification’ of the land and resistance to its exploitation, the denunciation of the evils of colonization, and the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962).
Without aiming for exhaustiveness, we will investigate a variety of perspectives by reading Algerian (Assia Djebar, Kateb Yacine), French-Algerian (Albert Camus), and French (Eugène Fromentin, Maupassant) authors, reflecting on major pieces of post-colonial criticism (e.g. Frantz Fanon, Edward Said), and studying diverse media (speeches, diaries, reports, essays, narratives long and short, paintings, films). Our goal will be to understand better the range and stakes of the evolving representations of Algeria in this critical period.
[Taught in English] |
| COM LIT 143 | REN EUR GOES MOVIES | NEWMAN, J. | “History does not exist until it is created.” -- Robert A. Rosenstone
In his essay 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 and look at them in conversation with primary and secondary historical and literary texts from and about the period, asking what role cinematic representations of the European Renaissance and 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. Lecture attendance, completion of short reading assignments, and watching the films mandatory; participation in group discussion section two times during the quarter, quizzes, short final paper. |
| COM LIT 144 | PARIS & THE LOST GENERATION | SCHLOSSMAN,B | Twentieth-century Paris drew writers, painters, architects, composers, photographers, designers, performing artists, intellectuals, and exiles from around the world, making it a truly “global” city. Writers who became part of Gertrude Stein's "lost generation" of expatriate North Americans include Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. A major figure of twentieth-century African-American literature connected to Paris is Chester Himes. The cultural impact of Paris, “the city of light,” on these writers was focused through the prisms of modern art, surrealism, jazz, avant-garde film, architecture, fashion, and photography. Paris also exuded an air of freedom that in turn profoundly revised contemporary views and ideologies about race, gender, and sexuality, about religion and community, and about “pleasure.” From African-Americans in search of liberation to post-war Bohemianism to the hard drinking of the “quarter,” the lost generation lived a fascination with Europe that underscores the transnational and transcultural impact of modernity.
Readings will include a diverse selection of short stories, essays, novels, and poems. The course emphasizes formal analysis, engaged discussion, and critical response, as well as a personal approach to a chosen research topic and a journal of reflective responses to the works read. Students will be asked to view several films outside class. Research paper topics will be chosen from a list on the first day of class.
The course emphasizes learning through the study of literature and the experience of a range of works of art, including film, style and spectatorship, music, and the arts in society. Readings and seminar discussions focus on American and African-American literatures, and a range of films (including French films with subtitles) will be viewed. Students will participate in class discussion, write a research paper of 6 to 8 pages, and keep a journal that briefly indicates response to texts and films. The course will conclude with a final exam. |
| COM LIT 190W | CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS | AMIRAN, E. | What forms does social class take today—far from the mid-19C world in which Marx first conceptualized it—and what forms of consciousness does it take in culture? How does an economic condition relate to thought structures? How do we think because of class? After doing some groundwork on materialist historiography, this seminar will consider social and economic mechanisms that regulate class structures and class-based thinking. We’ll ask not only what defines people as having a particular “class,” but also what kinds of thought class produces in us. Readings will include selections from Pierre Bourdieu, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and Henri Lefebvre on class culture; Karl Marx and Luce Irigaray on exchange; Huey Newton and Rosa Luxemburg on action; and Timothy Mitchell, Melinda Cooper and Kalindi Vora on surplus bioeconomies. Literary works such as Ming-liang Tsai’s I don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Brecht’s Three Penny Opera (and/or Pabst’s film), Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl, Garrone’s Gomorrah, and Bugs Bunny shorts will help us develop our ideas. This is an advanced seminar and requires prior coursework in Comparative Literature or related fields. Students will make short presentations and will write a final essay. |
| COM LIT 200D | RHET OF HISTORY | JARRATT, S. | This seminar will explore post-Enlightenment ruptures in historiographical thinking and innovations in styles of history-writing—rhetorics of history. Beginning with Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, we’ll move to some canonical work in rhetoric and historiography (Marx, “18th Brumaire”; Nietzsche, “Uses and Abuses of History for Life”; Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”; Burke, from Rhetoric of Motives; Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”; Hayden White, from Metahistory). The second half of the course will feature contemporary scenes of archival engagement with a concentration on African American and indigenous cases (Chandler on DuBois; Royster on 19thC African American women activists; Romano on women’s rhetoric in colonial Mexico; Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signature of Assent). We will end with a history of the present employing the scene of protest as archive: Ahdaf Souief, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution. Topics for discussion will include the problematics of identification and representation, the historiographic possibilities of literary and figural frames, and the dynamics of critical engagement in academic publication.
Each student will serve as primary respondent to the readings in one class period and will write an annotation of a work from UCI’s Theory Archive. The final assignment may be a 5-7 page rhetorical analysis (proseminar) or a longer paper/project (seminar). Collaboration and rhetorically innovative proposals are welcome. |
| COM LIT 210 | FREUD/BATAILLE | AMIRAN, E. | This course surveys the sacred groves of Sigmund Freud, our genius of the incestuous cannibal mind, or is it a dream and there’s an old man coming and a snake is saying something. Then you’re naked and you need to go away but you can’t, you’re in the force field of modernity. We will work through fundamental Freud, like Interpretation, Three Case Studies, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the essays on mourning and on repetition, without which the world we know (from Sophocles to trauma theory) would not exist. We will study fantasies of social origin—the bad Freud of Totem and Taboo—that connect with political theory today, aided by Bataille’s readings of Freudian paradigms of object relations and exchange. To develop this vision of the political, the course reads literary and visual works, including video, fiction, cartoons, and public architecture. While trying to concentrate on the high minded Freud overlooked by his animated detractors, we will also spend time in the lowlands, bogs, fens, and marshes in order to develop college teaching topics and strategies that exercise Freud. Readings include essays and some fiction by Georges Bataille (especially Visions of Excess, The Accursed Share), Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (selections), Henry Darger art, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and other dream art, digital performance art by Stelarc, work by Dali and Bunuel, and secondary readings by Derrida, Weber, Massumi, and others. Presentations, written exercises, seminar essay. |
| COM LIT 210 | PRINT AND THE INVENTION OF THE NATURAL WORLD | VAN DEN ABBEELE, G | Instructors: Georges Van Den Abbeele/ Beryl Schlossman
Through select theoretical readings and practical analyses of both textual and visual objects, this seminar explores the invention of the natural world as an object of scientific and technological study. We will study the specific technological breakthroughs that enabled early modern printing in the form of books (through moveable type), art prints (through copperplate engraving), and maps (through navigational positioning and through graphic projection). How did these technologies interface with the travel experiences narrated by the likes of Zheng He, Marco Polo, Vasco de Gama, Christopher Columbus, Luis de Camoes, Michel de Montaigne, René de Laudonnière, Jacques LeMoyne de Mourgues, Sir Walter Raleigh, Theodore De Bry, Carl Linnaeus, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Darwin, and others? What we expect to find along the way is the invention of the modern scientific method, the calibration of what constitutes “evidence” rather than opinion, the development of both pictoral and literary forms of representation, and more generally, the origin of the modern academic disciplines of geography, art history, botany, environmental science, anthropology, and geology. At the conclusion of the course, we will briefly examine the way modern media technologies, such as cinema, television, and digital media, once again are changing the way we see, understand, and construct the world. |