| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 8 | GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION | DIMENDBERG, E. | Comparative Literature 8 The Geographical Imagination This class will introduce a variety of ways to think about space--particularly urban space--through a close analysis of geographical writings and literary texts. Texts by geographers (Humboldt, Harvey, Lynch) will be considered, as well as writings by a variety of cultural theorists (Kracauer, Lefebvre). We will read several urban novels whose narratives transpire in Beijing, Berlin, and New York. Our goal will be to understand how culture and literature can be related to practices of mapping and wayfinding in the contemporary world. Assignment structure: Weekly reading questions, take-home midterm, final research paper. Instructor: Edward Dimendberg. |
| COM LIT 10 | HUMANOIDS: THE ADVENTURES OF A DIGITAL READER | CHAHINIAN, T. | Over the last several decades, the Digital Revolution has changed the way we produce and practice culture, which is increasingly run through software. Com Lit 10 traces the development of literature, visual arts, and popular culture in the digital world to ask a) how do we make sense of our experience in the world and b) how do we represent our experience of the world in the digital era? We will consider our changing reading practices, the politics of digital participation across social media platforms, the performance of online identities, both the generative and potentially destructive effects of the AI boom, and new challenges to our understanding of reality to critically examine how we engage with multi-media culture. |
| COM LIT 60C | CULTURAL STUDIES | JOHNSON, A. | CL60C is the last class of the introductory series to the Comparative Literature major and focuses on introducing students to the third pillar of our educational mission: to develop the ability of students to critically read cultural texts in a range of genres and media (novels, poetry, drama, film, monuments, political discourse, popular culture, audio, etc.) from across the globe. This course specifically introduces students to modes of analysis that came to be known as “cultural studies”, that focused on popular or mass media and articulated theories of the relationship of culture to social and political processes. We will read theory but also consider fairytales, popular music, advertising, film, and social media genres. |
| COM LIT 102W | ANTHROPOCENE | GAMBER, J. | Comparative Literature 102W: Literature of the Anthropocene This course studies literature by Indigenous authors and authors of color that represent the Anthropocene, the contemporary era in which humanity has shaped every ecosystem--and even the climate--of the entire planet. We will address concepts similar to the Anthropocene, including the Plantationocene and the Capitalocene which emphasize that it is not humanity in its entirety that has altered the global ecosystems, but specifically the wealthy global north. Our authors address environmental issues from marginalized positionalities which are too often overlooked in environmental discourse. Central questions include: How do these texts represent a world altered by our own species? How do we exist, continue to exist, or forge new relationships with other species in this era? How do authors from different communities represent global climate change, mega-extinction, human agency, and human responsibility to one another and to the world in which we live? How do these texts imagine possible hopeful alternatives or paths forward? |
| COM LIT 105 | INDIGENOUS FEMINIST | CARROLL, A. | Comparative Literature 105: Indigenous Feminist Theories Course Description This upper-division course in multicultural studies centers the interventions that Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists have made in the field of feminist theory. Through engagement with creative and critical works produced by Indigenous feminist-identified artists and scholars, students will examine multiple intersections of gender, race, patriarchy, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism to consider the difference that sex and gender make in Indigenous Peoples’ experiences of settler-colonial violence. Course materials include novels, memoir, dramatic and documentary films, poetry, and essays by Anishinaabe, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Kanaka Maoli, Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen, Unangax, Klamath, Mohawk, Menominee, Seneca, Muskogee Creek, Diné, and Athabaskan authors. |
| COM LIT 132 | DEATH DRVE/CIVL WAR | AMIRAN, E. | In 1848 Marx and Engels said a “more or less veiled civil war” raged within society. Alongside class conflict, aspects of such civil war today include ideologies immune to counter-evidence, paranoid projections and lies, conspiracy theories, murder suicides, and post-apocalyptic movies. Punishment, retribution, and pointed indifference appear in spheres of life, like politics and the academy, that might have been thought to oppose them. What is the place of such internal conflict in culture (a conflict within cultural or social contexts rather than between them), and what forms does it take? We will read texts that examine facets of this social reality, and works that imagine violence as a constitutive, rather than exceptional, condition of the social sphere. Texts and topics may include Georges Bataille on sacrifice, Henry Darger’s murder fantasies, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Nadine Gordimer stories, fictions of the “state of nature,” Hofstadter on "paranoid style," Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Lacan on capitalism, Jean Laplanche against Freud, Alex Rivera on the border, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM or other manifestos, survivalist video games, and Frank Wilderson on Afro-Pessimism. The course will host guest lectures by members of the Comp Lit community. |
| COM LIT 144 | LATAM SCI-FI | JOHNSON, A. | 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 190W | REP REALITY IN LIT | NEWMAN, J. | Professor Jane O. Newman CL190W (Spring, 2023): Where in the World is Reality? The question that is the title of this course may seem appropriate not only for our highly mediatized world, but also for the disorientations that the epidemiological, political, and social upheavals of the past few years have presented us with. This course is designed to give you the opportunity to take what you have learned at UCI about how humans have been and continue to be in their worlds and to relate it to how you will be ‘in the world’ in the future. As the capstone seminar for Comparative Literature majors, the course will allow students 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 from Homer to Virginia Woolf shaped the way they captured human reality in their texts. 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, a TV show, 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, learning research methods, writing exercises linked to your individual texts and projects, and 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. All students will be provided with a copy of Auerbach’s Mimesis after they have contacted the instructor about their intention to enroll in the course. |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | ABBAS, A. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | LONG, M. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | SCHLICHTER, A. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | VAN DEN ABBEEL, G. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | THIONG'O, N. | |
| COM LIT 199 | INDPT STDY COMP LIT | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 210 | PST-THRY & AUTO WRT | MOR, L. | Post-Theory and Auto-writing Graduate seminar Spring 2023 Liron Mor Course description What does writing—theoretical, personal, or fictional—mean today? The crisis of theory has been announced, surmounted, spun, and critiqued repeatedly for several decades now. The political rejection of universal Theory has led to its diversification in the form of vernacular theories and theories “from below.” It has also yielded an unprecedented centering of the self in the production of theory and criticism. The current auto-theoretical moment was accompanied by a similar shift in the literary world and in culture more broadly: although authors have always drawn on their biographies and personal experiences, contemporary autofiction writers do so explicitly, intentionally exposing, styling, and foregrounding the “real” self behind their writing, just as social media influencers do. Finally, the contemporary recentering of the self is related to another rapidly intensifying process: automation. As automation invades ever growing terrains of life and as nature is exhausted by the intensifying demands of capitalism, the gaze seems to turn inward while corporations move on to excavating our inner world—with self-help books, machine learning, data mining, and targeted advertising, informed by algorithms. By reading literary, visual, and theoretical texts—some of which belong to the newer genres of theory and have therefore appeared in more “public facing” venues and formats—this course asks: what is the contemporary meaning of writing? And of theory? Why have the twin notions of the self and realism become so central to literature and theory these days? Do they work differently in different geographical contexts and across positions with divergent colonial and racialized histories? When both sociality and depth are eroded, what modes of critique or theorizing are left? And what happens to writing under conditions of automation—how might digitization, search engines, automatic writing and editing tools, and the increasingly perfected writing skills of artificial intelligence affect the future of writing and academic production? By contextualizing and historicizing some urgent debates regarding literature and theory, the course aims to introduce the field and to offer opportunities for reflection on contemporary disciplinary methods and practices. How and why do we do what we do? And how might we do it differently? Possible readings include works by Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Rita Felski, Hortense Spillers, Eva Illouz, Audra Simpson, Sarah Brouillette, Tau Lin, Andrea Long Chu, Salley Rooney, Lauren Fournier, Mitsuye Yamada, Ahdaf Souf, Adania Shibli, Marguerite Duras, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Christopher Harris, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Lisa Marie Rhody, Younès Rharbaoui, and others. The course will also involve viewing episodes of recent TV shows and experimenting with apps, such as Wattpad, and the GPT-3 playground (an AI tool). |
| COM LIT 210 | NEGATVTY & UNCONSCI | MALABOU, C. | NEGATIVITY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS: TRAUMA, ANXIETY, DEATHDRIVE IN FREUD, LACAN AND FANON CL 210 Negativity and the unconscious. This title seems paradoxical since Freud affirms several times that the unconscious doesn’t have any sense of time or death. “The processes of the system unconscious are timeless”, he claims. “At bottom, he goes on, no one believes in their own death…” We might then conclude that the unconscious is alien to the any notion of negativity. However, as Deleuze rightly points out, “Freud supposes the unconscious to be ignorant of death time and no, yet it is a question only of these three in the unconscious.” In fact, the unconscious is all about these three. We will even see, through our readings of Freud, that the unconscious is perhaps nothing other than the different relationships of the psyche with its own destruction. Studying the different forms of unconscious negativity : repression, trauma, forclusion, disavowal, anxiety, deathdrive, we will is nothing else than the various relations of the psyche maintains with its own destruction. Through the study of the different forms of negativity, we will see that Freud is increasingly pessimistic as to the tendency of humanity to destroy itself. We will then see how Lacan dialectizes self-destruction through the three terms of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. We will end with Fanon's critique of psychoanalysis. Traditional psychoanalysis, he says, has studied all forms of negativity but one: the assimilation of the Black to a non-being. |
| COM LIT 210 | INDIG GRAPHSM AMERI | COLMENARES GON, D. | COM Lit 210: Alternative Literacies in the Americas Spring 2023 David Colmenares Before the European invasion, the American continent was a vast inscribed surface. Peoples throughout the continent inscribed, incised, scarred and painted animal and human skin, stones, deserts, mountains, and even the sky. Many of these practices survived and new ones arose during the Colonial period, and have continued to evolve until the present day. Long dismissed as deficient or underdeveloped writing systems vis-a-vis the purported superiority of alphabetic writing, these alternative literacies stand today as challenges to Western onto-theology and logocentrism. By following the social life of inscribed lines as they interlace surfaces, bodies, landscapes and topographies, the course dialogues with the anthropology of images (Aby Warburg, Carlo Severi), poststructuralist critical theory (Gilles Deleuze, Andrea Bachner), Indigenous studies and poetics (Edgar García) and the anthropology of lines and symmetry (Tim Ingold, Dorothy K. Washburn). We examine these and other theoretical and philosophical responses elicited by the encounter with non-glottographic graphism throughout the Americas, including Mesoamerican pictorial codices, Andean quipu or knotted strings, Nazca geoglyphs in southern Peru, modern Kuna pictography in Panama, abstract body marks among Amazonian “graphic peoples,” Anishinaabe pictography, and Plains ledger art. At the end of the course, we turn our attention to the work of contemporary artists and poets, including Raúl Zurita (b. 1950) , who inscribed his poetry across the Chilean sky and deserts, and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948), who continues to explore the creative potentials of the quipu. |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | THIONG'O, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | MALABOU, C. | READING GROUP : HEGEL’S SCIENCE OF LOGIC, with Catherine Malabou Volume1, The Objective Logic Book 1 : The Doctrine of Being (+Preface and Introduction). Cambridge Edition, trad. George di Giovanni. The group will meet once a week, on Thursdays . We’ll read together the first book of the Logic, focusing on the issues of negation, negativity, and nothingness. What does Hegel mean when he affirms : « Being and Nothing are and are not the same » ? |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | GAMBER, 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 | FARBMAN, H. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | CARROLL, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | ABBAS, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | MOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | CARROLL, A. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | THIONG'O, N. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | MOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | BOLDING, S. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | GAMBER, J. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | FARBMAN, H. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | ABBAS, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | MOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | LONG, M. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | THIONG'O, N. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ABBAS, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | MALABOU, C. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | GAMBER, J. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | FARBMAN, H. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | CARROLL, A. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | MOR, L. |