| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 40C | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | LEI, D. | 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) |
| COM LIT 60C | CULTURAL STUDIES | ABBAS, M. | Is it true that the value of cultural studies lies in its enlarged, non-elitist and inclusive notion of culture, where all marginalities can find a place in the academic curriculum? Is cultural studies a more populist, media-wise and sexy replacement for literary studies? While it is important for cultural studies to develop an enlarged and inclusive notion of culture where alternative positions can find a place, it is even more important for it to problematize the notion of culture itself. Cultural studies did not emerge only out of a sense that previous notions of culture have been privative and limiting -- ethnocentric, imperialistic, chauvinistic, racist and so on; it emerged also out of a sense that the very space of culture is somehow not what it used to be, that something has shifted. Cultural studies can therefore be regarded as an attempt to rethink the problematic address of culture. We have cultural studies because we do not know what or where culture is. Through a discussion of different kinds of texts, images, and films (such as Barthes’ ‘Mythologies’, Levi-Strauss’s ‘Tristes Tropiques’, Tanizaki’s ‘In Praise of Shadows’, Lorca’s ‘In Search of Duende’, Mpe’s ‘Welcome to Our Hillbrow’, and Lars von Trier’s ‘Dogville’) the course will introduce the issues of ideology, ethnocentrism, media, race, post-coloniality, and gender that dis-placed our notions of culture. |
| COM LIT 102W | ANIME HORIZON | TERADA, R. | This course suggests that major anime works imagine the limits, or "horizon," of world crisis and the end of "Japan." We will discuss such works, especially feature films, along with criticism, theory, and social commentary on film and on economic, demographic, and environmental crises (unemployment, Fukushima, capitalist ruin). The goal of the class is for its members to develop, collaboratively, new ideas about the politics and aesthetics of anime and and what it means to think about the limits of the modern world from within Japan. Requirements: participation, informal writing on a group blog, midterm, paper, final, and feedback and contributions to others' projects. The emphasis of the course is on exploration and working together. Anime works may include: Kon, *Paprika*; Oshii, *Sky Crawlers*; Shinkai, *Voices of a Distant Star*; Murase, *Ergo Proxy*; Hamasaki, *Texhnolyze*. This course fulfills the Upper-division Writing Requirement. |
| COM LIT 105 | DU BOIS & WEBER | CHANDLER, N. | ON DEATH AND POWER: W. E. B. DU BOIS, MAX WEBER AND MODERN SOCIAL THOUGHT
This course brings into focus and examines the question of how to think about the general _moral and ethical dimension_ of a social field by a seminar level close study of two classic texts from the opening years of the 20th century, placing them in comparative purview: W. E. B. Du Bois's _The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches_ (1897-1903) and Max Weber's _The Protestant Ethic and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism_(1904-1905).
The moral and ethical dimension of sociality, even as it articulates in every aspect of the symbolic in human social life, indicates most fundamentally the horizon in terms of which judgments of right and wrong are formed and the context in which our ideals for living are constructed at the respective social levels of both individuals and collectives. This course, in its concern with this kind of question, thus goes beyond the _juridical dimension_ of law in the social order (rules and restrictions, penalties and incentives) to explore the moral and ethical foundations of society in general.
The operative question for a critical understanding of such a dimension is the relative status of the common or the diverse therein. That is to say -- the question is how to think differences of moral and ethical commitments within a common horizon. And, then most radically, this question takes shape as the relation of a defined social context (sometimes a society) to both its past and its future.
A century past these classic texts by Du Bois and Weber, grappling as they were with the massively difficult questions of how to address the privilege of an ideal of accumulation (in the ascendance of a full-blown world-wide capitalist organization of "market") and an affirmation of a new sense of hierarchy on a global horizon in the face of new concatenations of social difference (what Du Bois famously called the global level "_problem_ of the color line"), what lessons do these studies offer for us in the 21st century, one already marked by the rise
of new global powers and complex over-wrought contexts of antagonistically related horizons of moral and ethical value on a planetary scale (to wit: 9/11 and its aftermath; or, planetary level climate change, by way of examples).
Along with selections from Nishida Kitaro's essay _An Inquiry Into the Good_ from 1911, a thinker who was a contemporary of Du Bois and Weber, Friederich Nietzsche's _On the Genealogy of Morality_ from 1888 and several essays by Michel Foucault from the 1970s and 1980s will, respectively, stand as dialogic references for the course. |
| COM LIT 123 | GLOBAL KAFKA | EVERS, K. | Kafka is among the very few global authors whose works shape the ways how we perceive the cultural and political transformations of the 20th and 21st century. Cultural theorists, political scientists, sociologists and historians have analyzed the effects of modernization and globalism through Kafka’s stories. After an introduction to central issues and theoretical concepts of globalization in the first two weeks, this course explores how writings by Kafka and his successors help us to understand global phenomena from the emergence of hybrid identities to the blurring of geopolitical boundaries. This course explores Kafka’s view of his own world as well as his visions of China, Russia, America, and the Arab world. It traces the strange story how the unknown Prague author become after his death a global phenomenon, how his writings continue to inspire artists and scholars to represent and rethink modernity and modernization, totalitarianism and globalization. Further, this course analyzes recent literary rewritings of Kafka in Latin America (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Africa (J.M. Coetzee), and Japan (Haruki Murakami). The course is taught in English. |
| COM LIT 132 | SURVEILLANCE | TERADA, R. | Through guest lecturers from various fields, film and literature from cultural contexts including Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, and discussion, this course asks how to think about controversies regarding surveillance. Edward Snowden and the NSA bring surveillance up now; we'll try to deepen our understanding by asking how surveillance raises
philosophical and critical questions. Who surveilles who, and how is that structured by race, class, gender and sexuality? What concepts of person, society, state, privacy, publicity, underwrite forms of surveillance, and what are their limits? What texts contribute to a theory of surveillance? What is surveillance's relation to incarceration, quarantine, immigration?
Requirements: midterm, paper, electronic postings, final group presentations, with an emphasis on exploration and discussion. |
| COM LIT 140 | THE CITY AS TEXT | ABBAS, M. | Walter Benjamin once described the city dweller as ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’, reflecting the many facets of the city like a broken mirror. More and more, the city exists not just as a physical, political, and economic entity that can be mapped, but also as a cluster of images, a series of discourses, an experience of space and place, and a set of practices that do not necessarily add up. Each of the cities that this course examines—Hong Kong, New York, Taipei, Los Angeles, or Shanghai—is a kind of jig-saw puzzle of the mind, made up of cognitive/experiential fragments, of historical residues and aspirations. In this sense, all these cities are what Calvino in his great novel calls ‘Invisible Cities’. Through a discussion of films, fictions, and theoretical texts, this course will consider the city as a text that challenges our ability to read it. The syllabus will include, besides some seminal writings on the city by Simmel, Benjamin, and Barthes, films like ‘Chungking Express’, ‘Chinatown’, ‘Lust Caution’, ‘Stray Dogs’; texts like ‘Delirious New York’; and fictions like ‘Invisible Cities’ and ‘The Speckled Band’. |
| COM LIT 190W | VOICE SOUND WRITING | 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 writing and voicing as two different media practices, i.e. pay attention to their different materialities, and think about their interrelation. How do acts of voicing, in particular speaking and singing, function in written texts? How does literature stage "voicing"? What’s the relationship between reading and listening? Can we listen to “oral literature?” And what impact do sound technologies have on the reception and production of literature (think poetry readings, slams and audiobooks)?
Requirements: Midterm, 12-15pp research paper, very short writing assignment in preparation of the paper, in-class group work, regular postings on class note board. |
| COM LIT 210 | IMPERSONALITY | FARBMAN, H. | A major slogan both of “high” modernism and of “high” theory, “impersonality” tends to come under suspicion in the current intellectual climate. This suspicion is well merited. The aim of this course is certainly not to re-raise the old banner. Rather, the course will explore whether modernist “impersonality” (and its postmodern variants) might have anything new to say to us now that the legal personhood of the business corporation has hypertrophied to the point that the corporation has the right to speak freely. The battle over personhood may be a losing one. In any case, it is largely a legal one. Meanwhile, beyond the law, life goes on. Can “impersonality” help in any way in the defense of that life against the encroachments of the corporation?
Readings will include texts of Flaubert, Mallarmé, Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Plato, Freud, Benveniste, Simone Weil, Barthes, Deleuze, Barbara Johnson, and Roberto Esposito, among others. |
| COM LIT 210 | THEORY AND THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE SPACE | KATRAK, K. | This graduate seminar examines the performance space as a site of struggle of the various physical, social and psychic forces in society. The course singles out the colonial and postcolonial performance space - be it the street, the home, the shrine, the museum, the archeological site, the burial ground, the prison, the national theater or even the national state - as a site of intense political theater. We explore the State's contestation particularly of outdoor performance spaces in Kenya and in India. We connect the power in such sites with contemporary struggles for democracy in city squares such as Egypt's Tahrir Square among others. |
| COM LIT 210 | WRITING - VOICING | SCHLICHTER, A | The notion of “voice in writing” is predominantly understood as the manifestation of an author’s identity in a literary text but such an understanding seems to be an oversimplification of what can constitute an interrelation of voice and writing, It relies exclusively on the metaphorical meaning of voice as identity and agency (reproducing the problem, which Derrida has famously named phonocentrism), while disregarding the sonic materiality of the voice and its impact on literary texts. The class aims at shifting the perspective by approaching the question of voice in writing as a question of media practices, considering the materiality of the sonic and the written, while remaining aware of the interactions of the metaphorical and the material. While the notion of writing can (and will) not be reduced to literary discourse or a universalist idea of “textuality,” one of my objectives is to come to a more complex understanding of voice in literature in the context of literary and critical theory, Voice and Media studies. We will work with a range of theoretical and literary texts as well as sonic and audiovisual objects. Readings will include writings by Mikhail Bakhtin, Friedrich Kittler, Julia Kristeva , Walter Ong, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and others. I encourage students to suggest textual and sonic materials of interest and will try to integrate them in the appropriate session.
Requirements:
- Regular participation, postings on note-board
- 15-20pp paper for seminar option
- annotated bibliography (ideally related to your research project) or shorter position papers for pro-seminar option. |
| COM LIT 220 | LIT OF PARTITION | O'CONNOR, L | Drawing on postcolonial and trauma theory, the seminar will explore how the partition of Ireland into North and South (1922) and of the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan (1947) is represented in ethnography, poetry, novels and other genres. Partition along sectarian lines was a feature of British withdrawal from several colonies, and offers plenty of scope for examining literature in historicized contexts. The Manichean logic and binaries of colonialism, which polarize settler and native, resurface in the partitioned post-colony when the impasse between ethno-religious groups reifies into a sectarian faultline dividing a new “us” from “them.” Brought into focus through comparative analysis, this peculiar state-formation raises many intriguing theoretical issues. The partition of countries ramifies into further “partitions”--of ethnic groups; local communities; cities; families; and cultural, literary, and historical genealogies.
Partition bifurcates along territorial, epochal and psychocultural axes, and we’ll track the figurative and narrative “lines” in our texts demarcating the divide between us and them, then and now, and event and rumor, among others. We’ll explore how the experience and narration of partition is gendered, and the effects of partition on the regulation of sexuality. How do post-partition maps and related political symbols alter the political, geographical, and spatial imaginary of the newly reconstituted peoples? How do writers at a generational (and perhaps geographical) remove from the event of partition come to terms with a history that has shaped them but that they did not themselves experience firsthand?
Though routinely acknowledged as a historical watershed, the event of partition is paradoxically occluded as an object of inquiry and surrounded by silence and discursive invisibility. The new states in the partitioned post-colony repress how their cherished independence is predicated upon cataclysmic violence, though their disavowals are evident in how their dominant cultural narratives demonize and shun the “others” on the far side of the divide. Our writers call attention to the difficulties of writing partition, difficulties that arise from the complex relationship between memory (collective and personal), trauma, and narrative.
The course is of obvious relevance for students of postcolonial, Indian sub-continent or Irish literature, as well as for those interested in other partition histories like those of Israel / Palestine or the Cold-War partitions of Berlin or Korea. The emphasis on figurations of partition has pertinence for other borderland / frontier contexts. Political issues of historiography and secular vs ethno-religious state-formation, and representations of collective trauma, are also applicable elsewhere. Course readings include the short fiction of Saadat Hasan Manto; poetry by Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and other Northern poets; ethnographers Allen Feldman and and Veena Das’s Formations of Violence and Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary; and Bapsi Sidhwa and Seamus Deane’s novels, Cracking India and Reading in the Dark. Seminar students are required to write a 15-20 page research paper, pro-seminar students to complete a take-home exam, and all participants are expected to circulate weekly response papers.
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