| 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 60A | WORLD LITERATURE | NEWMAN, J. | People call movies like Avatar (dir. Cameron) (2009) and the Star Wars movies “epics.” How do these movies mimic the ancient Greek poet Homer’s pre-modern epic, the Odyssey, if they do? And what can we learn about any nation’s interests and concerns today from its engagement with the masterpieces of either its own tradition or with other traditions from a different time and place? How do the world’s literatures converse with one another, in other words? In Comparative Literature 60A, we will read some of the greatest texts of World Literature – from the ancient Greek, Argentine, English, Irish, Nigerian, U.S., and Persian traditions – in dialogue with one another as a way of answering these questions. Texts will include the Persian poet Firdowsi’s 10th century epic, the Shahnameh, and its afterlife in oral recitations in Iranian coffee houses today alongside other re-significations of this “classic” as Iran’s national epic; the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles’ Antigone (442 b.c.e.) as it is retold in Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa play (1986); Sophocles’ Philoctetes (409 b.c.e.) as it dialogues with Irish playwright Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990) and the U.S. poet Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems” (1974-1976); Euripides’ Bacchae (405 b.c.e.) in conversation with Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973); parts of medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1476) with and against selections from the work of contemporary Nigerian-British performance artist, Patience Agbabi; and Shakespeare's Tempest (1611) in conversation with the Martiniquan writer Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969), on the one hand, and with the documentary film, "Shakespeare Behind Bars” about the production of Shakespeare’s play in a U.S. prison in 2005, on the other. These dialogues will help us understand the many ways that the traditions we study can have multiple afterlives across traditions and around the world. THIS COURSE IS ENTIRELY ON LINE (although I will be happy to meet with you in person on campus in my office hours throughout the quarter!). Quizzes on readings and lecture material, Discussion Board posts on the readings, and short comparative writing assignments. Comparative Literature 60A is the first quarter of the “World Literature” track in the Comp. Lit. major, but the course is open to all students. It fulfills the GE IV and VIII campuswide requirement. |
| COM LIT 60C | CULTURAL STUDIES | CHAHINIAN, T. | Comparative Literature 60C surveys literature and various forms of cultural production to examine how computing and the digital domain intersect with notions of narrative and representation. In tracing the developments of literary and visual arts in the digital world, our readings will be guided by the following questions: How have our reading practices and our understanding of narrative evolved in the era of Internet culture? What influence do augmented reality, virtual reality, and hyper reality have on our construction of self, and thereby on our processes of representation? How do new modes of spectatorship affect the performance of identity, both on and offline, and how do they facilitate our sense of collective belonging? How does the digitization of culture affect our imagination of categories like ‘world’ and ‘globe’ and our sense of place within them? We will combine historical and sociological approaches with analytical skills to critically examine, contextualize, interpret, and write about literature and culture produced in the realm of digital media. |
| COM LIT 150 | MODERNITY AS DISSENSUS IN MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURE | MOURAD, G. | Michel Foucault has famously said in “What Is Enlightenment?” that modernity is more an attitude than a period of history. Rather than dating the inception of modern Middle Eastern literatures to the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, as it is commonly accepted, this course considers modernity from a perspective similar to Foucault’s, i.e., as an attitude that is both historically contextualized and ahistorical—it is situated in its historical and local contexts yet it is ahistorical in the sense that it can be considered as a timeless materialization of the modern. We will read texts across various genres: prose fiction, poetry, and drama. The common denominator of these texts is a dissenting attitude on the political, social, literary, and sexual levels. |
| COM LIT 160 | WORLD CINEMA: NEW CHINESE CINEMAS | ABBAS, M. | The working assumption of this course is that contemporary cinema provides a kind of evidence for an understanding of history. However, such evidence is not easily discernible, but emerges only through a visual-spatial analysis. It is not history that explains cinema, but cinema that makes history legible. This course is not a survey of ‘New Chinese Cinemas’. Rather, it will study some of the more significant films made recently in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in order to trace their connection to important issues in contemporary history like globalization, affect, politics, memory, and media. Syllabus 1/ Globalizing China—Zhang Yuan’s ‘Crazy English’ 2/ Cyberkungfu and Cyberpolitics—Lee Ang’s ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ 3/ Documenting Disappearance—Jia Zhangke’s ‘Still Life’ 4/ Where the truth lies—Lou Ye’s ‘Suzhou River’ 5/ History as Hysteria—Ning Ying’s ‘Perpetual Motion’ 6/ Disappointment and Repetition—Wong Kar-wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love’ 7/ The violence of media—Johnnie To’s ‘Breaking News’ 8/ Spectral time, ghostly presences—Tsai Ming Liang’s ‘What Time is it There?’ Evaluation 1/ A Journal (notes and research) to be submitted at mid-term and end of the quarter 2/ A term paper of around 2,000 words due Dec 9 2014 3/ Class participation |
| COM LIT 190W | LIMITS REPRESENTATN | JOHNSON, A. | This is the capstone seminar for Comparative Literature majors and, as such, is a class in which students are expected to engage in a research project of their own and produce a final paper of 15 pages. The overarching theme I’ve proposed is the question of the environment and the limits of representation and will take off from a set of problematics and questions identified by Amitav Ghosh’s recently published The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). For the first 6-7 weeks we will read a set of key texts that will expand and illuminate these questions as well as analyze together a few case studies, but by the last month of the class we will shift to working on your own independent research projects. Of central interest in the class will be the question of what a discipline like Comparative Literature may contribute to larger discussions on the environment and climate change. |
| COM LIT 210 | DOCMNTRY&DECEPTION | ABBAS, M. | CL 210: Documentary and Deception (22860), Spring 2019 Wed 1pm-350pm. HIB 246 Documentary in the Era of Its Impossibility 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 surprising 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. In literature and the arts, in critical theory, and in cinema (the focus of this seminar), we find parallel developments in documentary practices. Documentary today cannot retain its old form or employ its old strategy of confronting the factitious with the factual, arming itself only with ‘a camera and a cause’. For example, 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, allegory, or the indirect and necessarily faulty and incomplete presentation of history-as-crisis. Mutations in the documentary form point to a world increasingly impervious to factual explanation, requiring us to draw on what Deleuze calls ‘the powers of the false’. These documentaries do not merely comment ironically and helplessly on how the Real has been replaced by fakes, clones, and technical simulacra, the clichés of our time; but focus on re-placing the Real in relation to historical grids and contexts that have shifted radically, as a result, among other things, of information and technology. Hence it is understandable that it is especially those who are ‘against documentary’ as previously understood (and Werner Herzog is just the most obvious example) that can continue the documentary project. Documentary in the era of its impossibility is also potentially its golden age. SYLLABUS 1.Introduction: What was Documentary? Flaherty ‘Nanook of the North’ and Vertov ‘Man with a Movie Camara’ versus Antonioni ‘Blow Up’ and Lou Ye ‘Suzhou River’. 2. Holocaust and Apocalypse, Time and Memory Resnais ‘Night and Fog’, Chris Marker ‘La Jetee’, ‘Sans Soleil’ 3.Beyond the Limit Werner Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration ‘Fitzcarraldo’, Grizzly Man’ 4.Powers of the False Welles ‘F for Fake’, ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ 5.Documentary in the Dock Abbas Kiarostami ‘Close Up’, ‘Certified Copy’ 6. Soap Opera Genocide Oppenheimer ‘Act of Killing’, ‘Look of Silence’ 7. Documentary and Hysteria; or, Documentaria Michael Moore ‘Bowling for Columbine’, ‘Fahrenheit 11/9’ 8. Chinese Cities Jia Zhengke ‘Still Life’, Tsai Mingliang ‘Stray Dogs’ 9. From the mimetic to the memetic; or, music video as documentary Childish Gambino ‘This is America’ Evaluation: Class participation, presentations + Term Paper or Project |
| COM LIT 210 | COMPARATIVE STUDIES | THIONG'O, N. | The course examines the afterlife of the colony in African fiction in the context of post-colonial theories. It examines the impact of the cold war, military coups, and dictatorships on the new nations in the decades that follow colonial rule. An important theme in all this is the politics of language in African literature. The course examines the intersections of class, gender, race, and ethnicity in the literature and post colonial theories. |
| COM LIT 210 | PHILOSOPHY AND ANARCHY | MALABOU, C | In contemporary Western philosophy, destruction or deconstruction of metaphysics has been presented by prominent thinkers like Levinas, Derrida or Schürmann as the liberation of an an-archic way of thinking. The possibility of questioning and acting beyond the « archè », beyond the principle (commandment and beginning at the same time), has opened new perspectives in ontology and ethics. Levinas, for example, characterizes the relation to the Other in terms of « an-archic responsibility ». Interestingly, such an ontological and ethical anarchy has always been strictly distinguished from political anarchism. |
| COM LIT 210 | TRANSATLANTIC AVANT | MAHIEUX, V. | This seminar will offer an overview of the various collective literary and artistic movements that surged in 1920s and 1930s Europe, Spanish-America, and Brazil. Course material will draw from literature, painting, photography and film. We will delve into the cultural and political implications of the avant-gardes in a transatlantic context, with emphasis on notions of center and periphery, imitation and parody, art and politics. Particular attention will be given to the movement of people, texts, art and ideas between France and Mexico. Reading knowledge of Spanish and French encouraged (translations will be made available when possible). Requirements: Regular oral and online participation, one class presentation on selected readings, brief project presentation, final paper. |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | COX, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | AHMAD, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | THIONG'O, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | CHANDLER, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | KATRAK, K. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | ABBAS, M. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 22739 | MODERNITY AS DISSENSUS IN MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURE | MOURAD, G. |