| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 10 | REFUGE AND DETENTION | MOR, L. | CL10: Refuge and Detention Spring 2022 Liron Mor Course Description: The present moment is characterized, once again, by the displacement of large populations from their land and their internment on the frontier. War, violence, poverty, and extreme weather events are driving millions to migrate across borders, sometimes at great risk, in search of futures elsewhere. Bereft of state protections in a world neatly organized into nation states, such displaced individuals are often known as “refugees.†Engaging a wide array of texts—memoirs, films, novels, visual art, legal and academic writing—this course explores the 20th century formation of the figure of the refugee, its construction as a problem, and the solution that Europe offered to this problem: the camp. What does the legal term “refugee†imply and what might it conceal? What spatial, temporal, social and economic conditions are produced by the camp? How is encampment related to race and colonialism, and why might “refugee camps†prove such a source of anxiety for settler colonial states? Finally, what are the effects of the 21st century shift to an explicitly carceral attitude toward refugees, now held in “detention centers,†often outside and before the border? This interdisciplinary course explores these questions and problems in various contexts, from the US-Mexico border to the Middle East. It emphasizes close readings of written and visual texts, as well as collaborative thinking on urgent contemporary matters. |
| COM LIT 60C | CULTURAL STUDIES | TERADA, R. | COM LIT 60C Cultural Studies Spring 2022 Professor Rei Terada Literary US and British university education before WWII largely avoided studying contemporary literature and media, focusing on history and canonical national literatures. Popular culture tended to be relegated to folklore and sociology. This course reads the influential movement to develop Cultural Studies in 1960s through 80s Britain, when scholars such as Stuart Hall and artists such as John Akomfrah began to theorize what it would take to study contemporary mass society critically, politically, and systematically, including popular culture, youth movements, gender, race, and class. To a large extent Cultural Studies followed the lead of and lingered in the retrospection of Black British thinkers and artists from the Caribbean and African diaspora. We will explore foundational essays, for example Hall's "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation" and Dick Hebdige's "Digging for Britain," and films including Akomfrah's _Handsworth Songs_ and/or _Stuart Hall Project_ and Steve McQueen's brilliant _Lovers Rock_. Class will consist of discussion, informal writing, midterm and final. |
| COM LIT 100A | ARABS, JEWS, AND ARAB JEWS | MOR, L. | CL100A: Arabs, Jews, and Arab Jews Spring 2022 Liron Mor Course description: Arabs and Jews are often presented as having always been enemies. This interdisciplinary seminar questions this common assumption and challenges the stability of the two identity categories, Arabs and Jews. Given the long history of neighborly relations between Arabs and Jews—some of whom were themselves Arabs—what is it that separates Arabs and Jews? How and why were the two identities constructed as mutually exclusive? And what are the effects of such constructions today? the course explores these questions through a wide range of historical documents, academic writing, personal essays, memoirs, novels, short stories, television shows, visual art works, and cinema. The course begins by examining the longer history of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East and the European construction of the two identities as both similar and distinct. It then turns to investigate “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and the ways in which Zionist thought attempted to redefine, separate, and secularize these identities. Finally, the course zeros in on the cultures and histories of Arab Jews—Jews who lived in, or originated from, the Arab world and saw themselves as integral to it. What does it mean to be both an Arab and a Jew? How are Arab Jews perceived and treated in a state that considers their very identity impossible? How might their intellectual and cultural traditions destabilize and refigure the definitions of “Arabs” and “Jews”? |
| COM LIT 140 | COMICS | AMIRAN, E. | Early US newspaper comics perform social and political questions psychologically. One of our main arguments will be that comics address social topics like immigration, sexual identity, racism, and the cold war under cover of personal issues, such as eating disorders, paranoia and narcissism, separation anxiety, and OCD, so that in comics you can’t separate psychological from social and political arguments. We’ll pay particular attention to questions of state identity and the symbolic social order as represented in these comics. Readings and viewings include Foster’s Prince Valiant, Ormes’s Torchy Brown, McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Foster’s Tarzan, Hanks’s Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle and Stardust the Super Wizard (and other of his weird work, like Big Red McLain and Space Smith), Herge’s Tintin, Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol. 1, and contemporary comics suggested by the class. Superheroes like Spiderman and Wonder Woman will be considered as well. We will view films that animate comics, including classic Bugs Bunny and Popeye shorts and current web-based comics. |
| COM LIT 150 | LATIN AMERICAN SCI-FI | JOHNSON, A. | Professor Adriana Johnson Comparative Literature 150: Latin American Sci-Fi This course offers an overview of Latin American science fiction, including short stories, novels and film, with a special emphasis on the way Latin American writers engage critically with the dominant modes of the genre, challenging science fiction’s associations with colonial discourse or the North American technological imaginary. |
| COM LIT 150 | NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE | GAMBER, J. | While Native American people and communities are often imagined and spoken of in the past tense, they remain politically, culturally, and artistically vibrant. This course examines contemporary literature across genres, including film, by Native American authors and auteurs. We will pay particular attention to the ways that Indigenous artists depict frameworks of gender and sexuality as well as human relationships to the other-than-human (or, what is often called “nature”) now and in the future (including in Native-authored speculative fiction). |
| COM LIT 150 | CINEMA OF SENEGAL | MOURAD, G. | |
| COM LIT 190W | WHERE IN THE WORLD IS REALITY? | NEWMAN, J. | Professor Jane O. Newman CL190W (Spring, 2022): Where in the World is Reality? The question posed by the title of this course might seem to be an appropriate one for the past two years or so. Where did our pre-Covid world go and what kind of new reality will we be confronting in the future? And how will anything you learned in college help you understand how to exist in and shape that new world? How, in other words, is what you have learned at UCI about how humans were and continue to be in their worlds in both the more distant and the immediate past related to how you will be ‘in the world’ in the future? - One of the aims of this seminar, which is the capstone seminar for Comparative Literature majors, is to allow seniors to look back on their course of study at UCI and investigate how reading and writing about texts and events that show humans negotiating the realities of an always complex and often troubling world might help us navigate the way forward. Our guide in this journey will be one of the major figures of the discipline of Comparative Literature in the U.S., Erich Auerbach, whose book, Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), was described by the great post-colonial critic, Edward Said, as “by far the largest in scope and ambition out of all the other important critical works” of the twentieth century. After introducing ourselves to the history of the discipline of Comparative Literature and to Auerbach’s place in it in a series of short readings, we will read what Auerbach has to say in Mimesis about how the techniques of representation and intense emotional, spiritual, and political commitments of authors such as Homer, the Old Testament Elohist, St. Augustine, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Zola, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, among others, shaped the way they captured human reality in their texts, and about what these textual realities may or may not have had to do with the larger social and political realities of the times when the texts were written. As a designated upper-division writing seminar, the course is also designed to allow you to devote time to your writing; students will thus be asked to return to a text (with text broadly understood, i.e., a novel, a series of poems, a film, etc.) of their choice, something by which they have been particularly moved during their undergraduate years — or pick a new one that they haven’t yet read, but have always wanted to – and undertake an in-depth Auerbachian reading of it, based on the model of the chapters of Mimesis assigned. The goal is a 10-12 page research paper on your text or object of study that wrestles with the realities of the world out of which it emerged and that it attempts to capture. Class time will be used for analyzing and discussing how Auerbach’s close readings unfold, for writing exercises linked to your individual texts and projects, and for sharing your work with the other seminar participants in a collaborative fashion. The last two weeks of the quarter will be devoted exclusively to revising and finalizing your research papers, with meetings for peer editing as well as individual sessions with the instructor. |
| COM LIT 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY - COMPARATIVE LITERATURE | COMPARATIVE LITERTURE FACULTY. | |
| COM LIT 210 | READING FOR INFRASTRUCTURE | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 210 | ONESELF AS ANOTHER: ON THE APORIAS OF IDENTITY | MALABOU, C. | Catherine Malabou Spring 2022 Oneself as Another. On the aporias of identity. Through the reading of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s book Oneself As Another (1990), the class addresses the issue of personal identity. Very interestingly, Ricœur confronts continental and analytic philosophy on that problem, showing that for both tradition, even if for opposed reasons, « who (…)? » is an impossible question.”Who is this I”, Ricoeur asks about Descartes’ “ego cogito”, “it is in reality no one”, “a thing that thinks”. He then turns to Strawson, Austin, Davidson, and Parfitt who all, after Locke and Hume, regard personal identity as a succession of events or actions without an agent, and conclude: ““identity is not what matters”. For Ricœur, it is of decisive importance to distinguish between personal identity understood as sameness (I=I), and personal identity understood as selfhood or ipseity (I=another). Because of constantly reducing the second to the first — even in different and often incompatible ways —, continental and analytic philosophers have systematically confused otherness to oneself with pure and simple non-identity. How are we to interpret these philosophical issues today in the light of “identity politics”? |
| COM LIT 220 | TRANSLATION WRKSHOP | HU, Y. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | THIONG'O, N. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | FARBMAN, H. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | MOR, L. |