| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 60C | CULTURAL STUDIES | ABBAS, M. | |
| COM LIT 100A | MAPPING POSTCOLONIALISM | AHMAD, A. | The idea of postcolonialism first emerged in the field of cultural studies around 1990 and then made rapid strides into a whole host of fields in Humanities and the Social Sciences, from literary studies to historiography and from feminism to race theory. Soon enough, postcolonial theory became something of a contested terrain, leading to a rich array of theoretical debates and to much work that was done from diverse epistemological and political positions even though under the broad rubric of postcolonialism. We shall read diverse texts that have been seminal in defining the field as such, in all its internal diversity. This is a senior undergraduate course and will be taught at an advanced level. Students should be prepared for considerable amount of weekly readings in sophisticated theoretical texts. |
| COM LIT 108 | AFAM-CARIB AUTOBIO | KEIZER, A. | Creating, naming, and claiming the self has been a central preoccupation of African American and Caribbean literatures from their inception to the 21st century. This course will explore several subgenres of autobiographical writing: slave narratives, autobiographical fiction, memoirs, and critical essays that utilize personal histories. We’ll examine the structure and figurative language of these texts, attempting to understand how the story of a life can be rendered as an argument for a cause, a tool for professional advancement, or a model for emulation. Course requirements include a take-home midterm and a take-home final exam (a 7-10-page essay). |
| COM LIT 130 | MAD MEN CRAZY WOMEN | SCHLICHTER, A. | This is not a class about a TV (as relevant as Don Draper’s story might be to contemporary culture). Rather, we will deal with representations of the experience what today is called “mental illness.” Some theorists have posed the question how “madness” can be communicated if we understand it as the condition of a mind at the limits of language. Such a problematics is of particular interest in narratives, which use the perspective of an individual deemed “mad” in order to provide a critique of society, i.e. try to rearticulate “madness” as social pathology. We will explore these issues in a range of contemporary theoretical and literary texts, films and examples from popular culture. One of the major interests concerns the roles of gender and race in the construction of madness and in the experience of subjects regarded as “mad.” Readings might include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony. Movies of interest include Miloš Forman, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down. Requirements: Regular attendance and participation, midterm, final, paper. |
| COM LIT 132 | PUSHBACK | AMIRAN, E. | Pushback has characterized Occupy Wall Street, student demonstrations against structural racism at Mizzou, citizen resistance to police violence in Fergusson, and student protests against the corporatization of education at UC Davis. But the empire also strikes back. Recent years have seen the rise, or return, of reactionary and racist politics around the world that push back against or re-press freedoms of information, immigration, and social movements that demand fairness and accountability. Right wing movements like the Golden Dawn in Greece, the National Front in France, and Pegida in Germany are growing in popularity and legitimacy. In Argentina and Poland, governments have recently put media under their control. In the US, presidential candidates have demonized Muslim and Mexican immigrants as pushback against the imagined loss of greatness. In Texas, legislators have pushed back against science and history by changing school textbooks. Government deregulation of banking can be seen as pushing back against the rise of middle-class investors and stake holders, leading to the redistribution of capital to a small minority. In this course, we will study different ways of thinking about pushback, and in particular forms and theories of reactionary culture, dialectics of social power, and state violence. How does pushback manifest in culture and in society? How is academic study involved in pushback? What kinds of relation does pushback establish between different parties if it is not unidirectional? We will consider literature, film, critical theory, video games, and music, and feature guest lectures and student presentations. |
| COM LIT 144 | POSTWARS | TERADA, R. | “Postwars” will explore cultural and cinematic responses to the end of global war after WWII, both in Europe and in Japan. The end of war is not followed by "peace," but by political rewriting of history and competing attempts to find advantage in what was broken or formed during the war. We’ll discuss literature, philosophy, film, and other materials, focusing on the impact of the "postwar" concept on everyday life. How does the sense of living in the aftermath of a globalized conflict change experience, and how is it exploited politically and economically? |
| COM LIT 190W | WRITING ON WRITING | SCHLICHTER, A. | “Civilization is unthinkable without writing,” writes Lydia Liu in her description of writing as medium. And so, it seems, are we. The seminar asks how the constitution of selves and of writing might be inter-dependent. We will take a closer look at the question how writing relates to different aspects of subjectivity through discussions of writing as thinking, writing as embodiment, writing as creative expression and craft, writing as healing. Our materials will include theoretical and literary texts that conceptualize writing, manuals for writers as well as interviews and personal essays. Authors of interest include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Dorothy Allison, Toni Morrison. One goal of the class is to increase students’ awareness of their own writing process, which will then, hopefully, be reflected in the writing assignment. Requirements: Regular attendance and participation, midterm/final, independent research and final paper (traditional academic paper or a creative writing project, which responds to the questions raised by the texts and class discussions and incorporates theoretical aspects), group presentations. The majority of texts will be provided in PDF. A website will be available at the beginning of the quarter. |
| COM LIT 210 | DELUZE: PHIL&CINEMA | ABBAS, M. | 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. |
| COM LIT 210 | THEORY&AFAM LIT | KEIZER, A. | African American literary and expressive cultures have contributed significantly to the development of literary/critical theory and critical race theory in particular. This course revisits major African American texts to investigate the most important strands of critical race theory and contemporary African Americanist literary criticism. We will examine black literary works as sources and intertexts for theoretical works, as well as using critical/theoretical works to read the literature. We’ll read fiction, poetry, and drama by James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, Toni Morrison and others. This course can be taken as a seminar or pro-seminar. |
| COM LIT 210 | GRAMMATOLOGY HISTORIOGRAPHY II | CHANDLER, N. | Whereas the spring 2014 course, Grammatology and Historiography I (the description of which is below), focused on the way in which Jacques Derrida’s 1962 translation and introduction of Husserl’s late essay fragment “Origin of Geometry” allowed the opening up of the theoretical path to the thought of trace and archi-écriture given in Of Grammatology in 1967, this spring 2016 course, Grammatology and Historiography II will study directly Of Grammatology, in particular its first half and its closing formulation of problem for the whole discourse under that title, notably marked by and in light of reference to Derrida’s reading in the years 1961 to 1967 of the early thought of Martin Heidegger (1925-1934), part of which we can see in his recently released lecture notes for a course that he taught on Heidegger in 1964-1965. Following upon the publication of a French edition in 2013, an English translation should be released this year, 2015, just in time for our seminar – drawn from the original handwritten notes in UC Irvine’s special collections. Our spring 2016 seminar approaches this early form of problem in Derrida’s thought as opening toward a more radical re-engagement of the problem of historicity – not only in Derrida’s itinerary, but in general, with something at stake beyond and otherwise than the thought of trace — something more radical and of interest than has yet been brought into full elaboration in contemporary thought. It engages a path of thinking in which there is no such thing, all puns intended, as a thought of the “pure trace.” This seminar thus explores and proposes some ways beyond a fundamental impasse in contemporary critical thought. The description of the 2014 course reads as follows. “This course revisits the transition between Jacques Derrida's study of the historicity of “ideal objects” in his “Introduction” (1962) to Edmund Husserl's “Origin of Geometry” (c. 1937) to his formulation of a thought that he placed under the heading of a "grammatology" (1967). While, it is the case that in so doing, it allows for another approach to Derrida’s own path – one not often taken as the principal way to engage the opening and incipient staging of his itinerary, let alone its allowing for a more fundamental consideration of the work of the last decade and a half or so of his itinerary – the approach taken in this seminar also allows for a consideration of this work as opening toward a more radical reengagement of the problem of historicity than has yet been brought into full elaboration in contemporary thought. Of the two referenced above, the main text will be Jacques Derrida’s “Introduction” to Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” whereas Of Grammatology marks out our textual horizon. The complex historicity that attends the supposed African American situation will be the guiding example throughout the seminar. In the background will be certain leading questions of the historicity of contemporary science, in particular quantum mechanics. Thus, certain lateral references to the practice of Cecil Taylor, especially, and several specific texts of Gilles Deleuze and Roger Penrose, respectively and to some extent, will also mark our engagement.” |
| COM LIT 210 | WHAT IS A SYMBOL? | MALABOU, C. | This course aims at : 1) tracing the history and transformations of the concept of “symbol” from the XIXth century up to the end of the XXth century, more specifically from Hegel’s definition of “symbolic art” in his Lectures on Aesthetics up to Lacan’s definitions of the symbolic. Starting with the Greek definition of the symbol as something together unified and broken (sym-bolon), or as something which stands for something else, we will show that the symbol obeys its own law, and is meant to always designate something other than itself. Therefore, in the course of the XXth century, particularly with Freud and Levi Strauss, the notions of “symbolisation”, “symbolic representation” and “symbolic order” substitute for that, purely linguistic and aesthetic, of “symbol”. The main function of a symbol is not its signification (“justice” for the scale for example), but the hole in language and meaning it both opens and comes from (the excess of signifiers over signified according to Levi-Strauss, or the “white square”). Levi-Strauss will be a central author all though the course. 2) studying the different attempts at deconstructing the « symbol » as well of all notions of « symbolic order » at the end of the XXth century, particularly in Derrida (Ethics of the Gift) Agamben (Homo Sacer), and Judith Butler (Gender Trouble). 3) proposing a new approach to the symbolic that differently situates the issue of « excess » or « suprlus » , and roots it in the biological, that is in immanence. We will interrogate this new meaning of the symbolic in the current neurobiological discourse in particular. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE UNFINISHED PSYCHOANALYTIC REVOLUTION | TERADA, REI | The title refers to Jean Laplanche's essay "The Unfinished Copernican Revolution," in which Laplanche argues that psychoanalysis begins but does not finish a description of a world that is not the world of the "I." To Laplanche's criticism it can be added that "subject-object relations" in psychoanalysis as in philosophy and political theory are racialized where subjectivity is associated with "free" knowing and movement. Taking up from questions that came up in last year's seminar, this seminar turns back to texts in the areas above to ask about the role of perception in them. What had to be done to it to make it seem like an instrument of knowing and movement, transition and access? Further, *what is it when it is not that*? What happens to the category of perception, and to images, when the idea that perception is a route of access to others fails? The material here is partly theory-canonical (Kant, Freud, Laplanche, Deleuze) and partly eclectic-experimental (films, poetry, episodes in the history of stranded perception). How can the latter rewrite the former? |