| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 10 | PIRATES | JOHNSON, A. | In The City of God, Saint Augustine recounts the following exchange between Alexander the Great and a pirate he captured. “What gives you the right to disrupt the sea-lanes by force?” asks Alexander. To which the pirate boldly replied, “What gives you the right to disrupt the whole world by force? I use a small ship, so I’m called a thief; you use a great fleet, so you’re called an emperor.” In this class we’ll explore popular depictions of pirates (in movies such as the Pirates of the Caribbean series and literature) and compare these with historical narratives of piracy. We will also, as St. Augustine’s anecdote suggests, inquire into how piracy gets defined and what it might tell us about the dividing line between legality and illegality, relations of force, and the fantasies and practices of opposition to dominant social structures. While our main focus will be on piracy in the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th and 18th centuries, we will also discuss contemporary forms of piracy such as the Somali pirates and internet piracy. |
| 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 place of culture today, by a study of its dis-locations. We have cultural studies because we do not know what or where culture is; because our ideas of culture change. Through a discussion of different kinds of texts, images, and films, the course will introduce the issues of ideology, ethnocentrism, media, race, post-coloniality, and gender that dis-placed our notions of culture.
SYLLABUS*
1/Culture and Cannibalism: Levi-Strauss on ethnocentrism and ‘structural analysis’.
Texts: short excerpts from Levi-Strauss ‘Tristes Tropiques’; Marx ‘The German
Ideology’.
2/Cultural Identity?
Text: Tanizaki ‘In Praise of Shadows’.
3/ Art and Advertising: Images from Magritte, Barbara Kruger, Cigarette
Advertising, Warhol. (From Internet).
4/ Revisiting ‘the Male Gaze’.
Text: Victor Burgin ‘Perverse Space’ (On the photographs of Helmut Newton)
5/ Shopping and Consumption
Text: short excerpt from Baudrillard ‘Towards a definition of consumption’.
6/ Critique of ‘Orientalism’
Text: short excerpts from Edward Said ‘Orientalism’.
7/ Race in the era of Neo-liberalism
Text: Goldberg’s essay ‘When Race Disappears’.
8/ Culture as ‘Duende’ (‘Soul’, jouissance).
Texts: excerpt from Nietzsche ‘The Birth of Tragedy’;
Lorca’s essay’ Play and the Theory of Duende’
EVALUATION
A Journal (made up of your notes and comments) instead of a mid-term test, to be submitted around Week 6.
A Term Paper of around 2,000 words due on examination week.
Class participation and attendance.
*All texts are available online or as handouts. |
| COM LIT 100A | TRNSNATL KR LIT&FLM | KIM, K. | This course is a survey of literary and filmic works—produced both within and outside the Korean peninsula—that address the experience of emigration/immigration from/to Korea since the early 20th Century. Focusing on the ways in which Korean filmmakers and writers negotiate the shifting relations between people and place, we will attempt to place their representations of Korea, Koreans, and non-Koreans in a global context, one that moves beyond the history of the nation state. Our readings will include diverse materials such as colonial-period literary texts and films dealing with new forms of cosmopolitanism and internationalism, South Korean works on migrants and immigrants to Korea, as well as literature and film by ethnic Koreans from Japan. This course aims to offer a literary and filmic history that will contextualize both South Korea’s recent move toward a multi-ethnic immigrant society and the increasingly complex global Korean diaspora. |
| COM LIT 120 | PHIL GENOME RACE | CHANDLER, N. | 1. The course elaborates an investigation of the critical thought that in the history of modern thought and science the very idea of race is not an aberration or anachronism. It proposes, instead, that such an idea is encoded in the problem of the supposed commonness of the human, as it has been produced and engaged in modern discourses, in particular since the 18th century. These discourses include both philosophy and social-political-legal thought on the one hand and the sciences, social and natural, including among the latter not only biology and genetics, but even certain aspects of contemporary physics, on the other.
2. Beginning with Immanuel Kant’s attempt to formulate a philosophical concept of race, the course then engages the intellectual history of the concept of race since the late eighteenth century. This includes 19th century Darwinism and its interlocutors, early 20th century engagements with Mendelian inheritance, including both eugenics and then the evolving first synthesis in the biological sciences, as well as certain aspects of the critique of the concept of race by way of the production of a concept of culture in anthropology and ethnology on the one hand. It also considers more contemporary problematics, especially the massive implications of the mapping of the human genome and the rise of a new genetics, all of which now implicate projects for the reconstruction or enhancement of the human (both bodily and cognitive forms of intelligence, the cyborg, for example), and the ongoing reappearance of a 'new' eugenics' which have taken shape across the past quarter century, on the other.
The course addresses some of the most far reaching issues of the present and the future, considering especially the moral and ethical questions that arise therein. Thus, students of comparative literature, philosophy, history of science, and anthropology should find the course of great value in helping them prepare to address such difficult issues in all facets of professional and public life.
3. This course compliments the African American Studies course Philosophy and the Matrix Trilogy, which is also taught Winter 2014 and x-listed with Comp-Lit, Film and Media, and Anthropology. Those students who took the Matrix course in 2012 or 2013, can profitably take this course, or new students can usefully take both courses together this coming winter. Along classic and contemporary philosophy, science, and history texts, several programs from the four seasons of the Science Channel series “Through the Wormhole” narrated by Morgan Freeman will be among the required texts for the course.
4. This course is part of the STAR initiative -- Science, Technology, and Race -- established within the Program in African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. |
| COM LIT 132 | ANARCHISM | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 144 | WRITING HUM RIGHTS | MORISI, E. | The adoption of France's “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (1789), a key product of the Enlightenment period, is one of the landmarks for the concept of “human rights.” The national motto adopted during the French Revolution, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” seems to uphold human rights as well. In the 20th century, a French politician, diplomat, jurist, and Nobel Peace Prize Winner named René Cassin was one of famous fathers of the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and served as the president of the European Court of Human Rights in the 1960s. These potent symbols are but a few among the many that illustrate how closely the history, politics, philosophy, and the arts of France are connected to human rights.
This course explores these connections as well as their limitations and contradictions in French and Francophone literature and culture. Indeed, for France to be one of the birthplaces of human rights, these very rights had to be defined against the prejudice, torture, slavery, lethal violence, social inequalities and various forms of oppression and lack of freedom that the country itself harbored. Some of the questions we will address include: what major French and Francophone writers and works contributed to the emergence of the notion of "human rights" from the 18th to the 20th century? How did they proceed? What were the various facets of these rights? What national and international contexts led to their consideration (e.g. the transatlantic slave trade, the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, colonialism, WWI and II, the totalitarianisms of the 20th c., etc.)? How may (and did) art and popular culture impact human rights? Have these rights sometimes been an inoperative notion or a fig leaf masking exploitationand forms of disregard for the other in France and the Francophone world? [IN ENGLISH; texts in translation] |
| COM LIT 210 | FAUX DOCUMENTARY | ABBAS, M. | When factoids are taken for facts, when ‘reality’ as in reality TV has become a game show, and when an unadorned fact is becoming as rare as ‘an orchid in the land of technology’, what becomes of documentary? Are we witnessing its demise? The paradox is that today at a moment when the documentary with its claims to ‘truth’ seems theoretically impossible, what we are seeing is its renewed vitality and proliferation across diverse cultural fields: not only in cinema, but also in writing, the visual arts, and philosophical movements like ‘speculative realism’. Understandably, the documentary today cannot retain its old form or employ its old strategy of confronting the factitious with the factual. If documentary, like translation, is inadvertently a betrayal, then documentary will have to start with the fact of betrayal, with the betrayal of fact. It has to become, in an important sense, faux documentary. The course will trace how mutations in the documentary form point to a world increasingly impervious to factual explanation, where documentary has become the crucial but problematic site for aesthetic, political, and ethical debates.
SYLLABUS
1.Introduction: The problem with documentary is…
Flaherty ‘Nanook of the North’, Vertov ‘Man with a Movie Camara’, Antonioni ‘Blow Up’, Borges ‘Emma Zunz’.
2.Michel Foucault on Parrhesia (truth-telling) and the paintings of Magritte
Lectures at College de France, ‘This is not a Pipe’, ‘I, Pierre Riviere…’
3. Chris Marker,Orson Welles and ‘the powers of the false’
‘La Jetee’, ‘Sans Soleil’,‘Touch of Evil’, ‘Macbeth’.
4.Michael Moore and ‘hysterico-documentary’
Lacan’s ‘Four Discourses’, ‘Bowling for Columbine’, ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’
5.Marcos Prado and ‘Schizo-documentary’
‘Estimira’, Deleuze and Guattari on ‘schizoanalysis’.
6.Werner Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration
‘Fitzcarraldo’, Grizzly Man’, ‘Fata Morgana’.
7. Documenting the ‘Socialist Market Economy’
Jia Zhangke ‘Still Life’, Lou Ye ‘Suzhou River’.
8. Forensic Architecture, Drone Strikes, and New Materialisms
Texts by Weizman, Paul Virilio, Gregoire Chamayou, and William E. Connolly
Evaluation: Class participation+ Term Paper or Project |
| COM LIT 210 | TRANSPARENCY/SECRECY | GOLDBERG, D. | Much attention has been paid of late to issues of secrecy and transparency. In the so-called Information Age, data has come to represent value, economically as much as politically. As increasing knowledge seemed to produce increasing power, data itself became the object of power struggles, over who exercised what control over data, over their quantity, over what data could be used to effect. We now interact with, indeed, carry around technologies of data gathering pretty much every minute of our lives: they are on our desktops, in the cell phones we never leave behind, a product of multiple daily interactions with the bank, our medical practitioners, credit cards, sites of consumption, in our cars and televisions, for some inserted into our bodies to monitor this or that physical function.
As data has become ubiquitous and ubiquitously collected—about everything everywhere--all seems open to increasing surveillance but also increasingly with discountable or at least ignorable impacts and effects. As we resist the spread of data points we call for increasing transparency, predicated on the possibility of more data generation and access. And transparency itself is so often predicated on the anonymity—the effacement or self-effacement—of its promoters or producers, on a scaffolding making subjects increasingly oblique, obtuse, less transparent if not secretive.
Secrets—whether epistemologically or sexually—are made to secrete, to reveal, to leak information. And transparencies inevitably shadow, hide, set aside or cover over information. Secrets are revelatory; transparency suppressive. If privacy was the social architecture on which modernist capital formation was structured, transparency has become the socially expressive commitment of the neoliberal ‘man of enterprise. Under the theory of high liberalism, transparency is an instrument of accountability, legitimated as a means to accountability. Here accountability is considered the grounding principle, transparency the technology invoked to produce accountability. Accountability is predicated on the autonomy of the subject, liberalism's ultimate transcendental principle. Transparency hides secrets in plain sight, secrets heightening value and desire until the cost of their maintenance discounts the commitment to transparency.
This course is designed to take up these themes with the view to elaborating a critical theory of secrecy and transparency. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE ORDER OF THINGS | CHANDLER, N. | |
| COM LIT 210 | SUBSISTENCE, USE, AND MAINTENANCE | TERADA, R. | Insofar as subsistence suggests the minimal level of sustenance, it tends to function as one of the names of the real. Subsistence agriculture or gathering then identify a foundation of society and a
moral economy: what's enough, but no more. "Maintenance," meanwhile, connotes a more contingent kind of making do rather than a level of existence. Both can be analyzed as part of the form of "use value": normative social relations condition the appearance of subsistence's "intrinsic value," just as they condition the appeal and horror of "exchange value." In part, the course will work on critiques of (not just critical thinking about) these forms and figures in theory and culture. But also--and still--subsistence and maintenance can help with reconsidering social phenomena that seem to be not enough. They then appear "after" or transverse to a historical moment instead of at the origin. For example, these categories can look like what's left when "sustainability" collapses but capitalism hasn't yet, or what's indifferent across the transition; or as a vocabulary for movement without the resources of endurance or the horizon of optimism. Ideally, the course would read material forms through their figurative shadows and vice versa. It would be nice to incorporate fields that seminar members work on, not just in writing but in the reading list. It's not hard to imagine relevant investigations in subaltern studies, black studies, psychoanalysis, as well as conversations about labor and unemployment in both rural and urban environments.
Texts may include Kalyan Sanyal's *Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism*; Lauren Berlant's "Slow Death" and Gopal Balakrishnan's "Stationary State"; passages of Marx on use value and value form; Maria Mies, *Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale*; Silvia Federici, *Revolution at Point Zero*; Marshall Sahlins, *Stone Age Economics*; and films by Nicolas Pereda, Tsai Ming-Liang, and/or Ogawa Shinsuke. There will also be visits from collaborating scholars. |
| COM LIT 210 | FRIENDSHIP AND WOMEN | YING, H. | Many people say women are friendlier, and yet Aristotle thought of perfect friendship as exclusively masculine (and Confucius would agree). What does the female gender do to friendship? We start with Carol Gillian’s pioneering research into the moral orientations of women in terms of the “ethic of care” that diverges from traditional moral theory and appears to be closely associated with women’s traditional role as nurturer. We then proceed to discussions of key issues in the conceptionalization of
friendship such as voluntary choice, intimacy, recognition, reciprocity and difference. We end with Michelle Friedman’s formulation of the concept of paritiality in friendship in her What Are Friends For? Along the way, we sample a variety of friendship writings (fiction and poetry) across time and culture. The main questions we will address are the following: How does friendship contribute to a woman’s sense of self, her ethical growth, her literary/cultural production? With what language do women speak of their friendships? How is women’s friendship different from other formulations of social relationships such as kinship, comradeship and solidarity? |