COM LIT Course Descriptions for 2023-2024

Fall 2023
Winter 2024
Spring 2024
Archive
Spring Course Descriptions
CourseTitleInstructorDescription
COM LIT 9MEMOIR AS RESISTNCECHAHINIAN, T.Memoir as Resistance: In Defense of the Fragmented Self
CL 9 / Spring 2024

In a 2011 interview, CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg argued that in the digital age, our negotiations of the self demand a singular identity, claiming that “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” (NYTimes 5/14/11). This class surveys contemporary memoirs and autobiographies to examine how the literary form of self-writing challenges emergent ideas of a unified identity that online personas perpetuate. The class explores how in a multicultural society like the United States, the memoir has gained popularity as a genre that celebrates notions of community, multiple belonging, and hybrid identities. In looking at the genre’s common themes of transgenerational memory, family narratives, and social responsibility, our readings will examine the intersection of power, privilege and bias inherent in the process of representing culture and expressing the self.
COM LIT 60CCULTURAL STUDIESAMIRAN, E.CL60C Spring 2024

What does it mean to read mass culture works like television shows, films, and architecture?  Many of these works are only nominally written (or created) by an author; instead, they sites of political contestation about culture and society.  We’ll read public culture, including TV shows (Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman from Japan, for example, or Star Trek), public demonstration art, newspaper comics, public art installations by Kara Walker, William Pope.L, and Barbara Kruger, graffiti from around the world, monuments in Mexico City, pop songs (K-Pop and Country music like Blackpink and The Chics, maybe, and also political songs from Trinidad) and elevator music, and folk art from Mexico and Thailand, among others.  We’ll also consider more traditional works like the film adaptation of Mosely’s novel Devil in a Blue Dress, Romare Bearden’s cut-up collage work, and nationally-identified literatures--possibly poetry by Mahmoud Darwish and short stories by JL Borges.  To help us read mass culture, we’ll study theories of the contestation of cultural hegemonies and deviant politics, such as Blanchot on criminality in everyday life, Foucault on public power, Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze, the Situationists on “the society of the spectacle,” Stuart Hall’s argument for cultural studies, Jameson’s reading of postmodern culture, and Baudrillard on Disneyland.  In-class essays and a final exam.
COM LIT 107INDGNOUS SOVREIGNTYCARROLL, A.COM LIT 107: Indigenous Sovereignty
Professor Alicia Carroll

This course examines the early East Asian and European theological origins, political evolution, and present significance of sovereignty, a historically contingent term that has become valued within Native American and Indigenous studies discourses to signify Indigenous Peoples’ “legal and social rights to political, economic, and cultural self-determination” (Joanne Barker, Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, p. 1). Students will explore Indigenous sovereignty through engagement with Native American and Indigenous cultural texts that represent and/or perform theories and practices of self-determination and self-government in various precolonial, settler/colonial, and “postcolonial” historical contexts. Course materials include works by Indigenous scholars who develop conceptual frameworks; research methodologies; and modes of critique, analyses, and debate that work toward the decolonization of Indigenous lands/waters/spaces, cultures/lifeways, community structures, governments, educational systems, intellectual traditions, philosophies, and worldviews. Assignments may include works by Anishinaabe, Cherokee, Cree, Creek, Esselen, Kanaka Maoli, Kiowa, Laguna Pueblo, Lakota, Lenape, Maori, Mohawk, Ohlone, Osage, and Pequot scholars, artists, and activists.
COM LIT 140HIP HOP RELIGIONCARTER, J.
COM LIT 150LIVING IN THE CITYDIMENDBERG, E.CL 150  Living in the City

Through analysis of texts in translation, this class will consider the modalities of urban experience in Berlin, Moscow, Amsterdam, Paris, Belgrade, Rome, and Tokyo. Writers to be studied include Emile Zola, Boris Pekic, Walter Benjamin, and Yukio Mishima.  Novels by Magda Szabo, Jenny Erpenbeck, Natalya Baranskaya, and Natalia Ginzburg will be investigated as clues about the agency of women in the metropolis during times of political and social transformation. Readings by urban theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin will provide an armature for thinking broadly about the modern metropolis.  Assignment structure: Weekly reading questions, take-home midterm, and final essay. Regular attendance and participation in class discussions will be expected.
Instructor: Edward Dimendberg
COM LIT 190WGLBL INDGENOUS FILMGAMBER, J.CL 190W

This class engages in central issues of Indigeneity and explores contemporary film and video games, created by Indigenous people from nations including Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Sweden, and the United States (in English or with English subtitles. We will investigate ways that these artists construct narratives of Indigenous community and selfhood, particularly within contemporary colonial national contexts. Among the issues we will focus on are constructions of gender and sexuality and the role of place within these narratives.
COM LIT 199INDPT STDY COMP LITSTAFF
COM LIT 199INDPT STDY COMP LITTERADA, R.
COM LIT 199INDPT STDY COMP LITSCHWAB, G.
COM LIT 199INDPT STDY COMP LITRAHIMIEH, N.
COM LIT 199INDPT STDY COMP LITMOR, L.
COM LIT 199INDPT STDY COMP LITJOHNSON, A.
COM LIT 199INDPT STDY COMP LITCOLMENARES GON, D.
COM LIT 199INDPT STDY COMP LITCARROLL, A.
COM LIT 199INDPT STDY COMP LITAMIRAN, E.
COM LIT 210IMAGNRYETHNOGRAPHYSCHWAB, G.
COM LIT 210INTERPRET. DREAMSFARBMAN, H.Interpretation of Dreams

This course will be devoted to an immersive reading of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams along with his “metapsychological” reframings of its theses and selected commentary from the subsequent psychoanalytic tradition. Depending on how discussion proceeds, we may pay visits to adjacent sites—e.g. surrealism, Walter Benjamin, early film and film theory, Marxist theories of ideology—and students are welcome to write their papers on anything related to the questions Freud raises, or fails to raise, about dreams. Students will keep a dream journal as part of the work for the course (1) as a way of thinking along with Freud, who is working on his own dreams in the first place, and (2) because the medium of dreams is such that one can only see one’s own. The question of the status of the medium will be at the center of our concerns. The course will work on locating the place of the dream as an image-medium among image-media. The dream, which is made of pre-recorded material, is not necessarily any more a medium for novelty than it is a new medium, and it has the metapsychological function of guarding sleep, forestalling awakening. Still, we wake up daily, none the wiser. What might a new awakening to dreams require?
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCETHIONG'O, N.
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCETERADA, R.
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCESCHWAB, G.
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCERAHIMIEH, N.
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCENEWMAN, J.
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCEMOR, L.
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCEJOHNSON, A.
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCEGOLDBERG, D.
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCECARROLL, A.
COM LIT 290READING&CONFERENCEAMIRAN, E.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGMOR, L.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGJOHNSON, A.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGJARRATT, S.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGGOLDBERG, D.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGGAMBER, J.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGFARBMAN, H.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGCARROLL, A.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGAMIRAN, E.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGNEWMAN, J.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGRAHIMIEH, N.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGSCHWAB, G.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGTERADA, R.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGTHIONG'O, N.
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGSTAFF
COM LIT 291GUIDED READINGABBAS, A.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHNEWMAN, J.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHRAHIMIEH, N.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHSCHWAB, G.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHTERADA, R.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHTHIONG'O, N.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHSTAFF
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHMOR, L.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHJOHNSON, A.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHABBAS, A.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHAMIRAN, E.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHCARROLL, A.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHFARBMAN, H.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHGOLDBERG, D.
COM LIT 298PRE-DISS RESEARCHJARRATT, S.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHRAHIMIEH, N.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHSCHWAB, G.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHTERADA, R.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHTHIONG'O, N.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHLONG, M.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHRADHAKRISHNAN, R.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHSTAFF
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHNEWMAN, J.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHMOR, L.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHJOHNSON, A.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHJARRATT, S.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHGOLDBERG, D.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHGAMBER, J.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHFARBMAN, H.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHCARROLL, A.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHAMIRAN, E.
COM LIT 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHABBAS, A.
COM LIT 399UNIVERSITY TEACHINGMOR, L.