| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40B | DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | |
| COM LIT 50B | PERIODS AND MOVEMENTS | STEINTRAGER, J. | During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at the same time that western European countries such as England and France were experiencing a shift from agrarian to commercial economies and migration from country to city, Japan was undergoing similar economic and societal upheaval. Literature from the Enlightenment period in Europe and the Genroku period in Japan both reflected these changes and actively participated in the shaping of new values and cultural worlds. In this class, we will explore the many intriguing parallels and striking differences between writers from Japan and Europe. We will compare Chikamatsu\'s Love Suicides at Amijima and Lessing\'s Emilia Galotti, tragedies rooted in deep social conflict. We will examine tales of amorous women in the novels of Saikaku and Prévost. And finally, we will investigate the poetics of nature and of time in the haiku of Basho and the verse of Collins and Gray. |
| COM LIT 101 | PHENOMENOLOGY AND DECONSTRUCTION | GELLEY, A. | Is literature to be defined primarily by the human experience (sensation, feeling) that constitutes its principal subject-matter or by the language that it is made of? One could answer \"both,\" but this does not resolve the antinomy of these alternatives. This tension in literary interpretation and criticism is reflected at a philosophical level by the relation of phenomenology and deconstruction. Paul de Man\'s essay \"Reading (Proust)\" explicitly takes a phenomenological model as a point of departure and tests it in a manner characteristic of deconstruction. In this course we shall follow de Man in taking (a part of) Proust\'s novel as a point of reference in trying to work out the complex relation of the two tendencies. Our theoretical readings will include interpretations of Proust (e.g., Poulet, de Man, Kristeva, Genette) as well as philosophical texts (Heidegger, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida). |
| COM LIT 102 | READING LYRIC POETRY | WARMINSKI, A. | Introduction to the main elements of lyric poetry and close reading of many short poems in the tradition--from Shakespeare to the present-- and some from the German, French, and other traditions. Some attention to the theoretical presuppositions of interpretation of lyric, the question of translation, and popular music. Two papers. |
| COM LIT 102 | MODERN YOUTH | AL-KASSIM, D. | Modern Youth approaches the volatile figure of the male youth in the Modernism of Wilde, W. Lewis, Freud, Genet, Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz. Beginning with late 19th century British anxieties surrounding the homosexuality and civic status of urban boys, we examine the Aestheticist and Decadent response to the emerging legal subject, the youth. In the final weeks of the class we will turn to the contemporary American context via Wojnarowicz\'s creative memoire touching on street life, AIDS and politics. Moving from the claim that the masculine youth becomes a category of social discipline in the mid and late 19th century to continental modernist preoccupations with early childhood, historical regression and states of primitivedevelopment (in psychoanalysis, social commentary and literature) the course develops the notion that temporal figures of regression and decline offer ambivalent support for normative narratives while simultaneously these figures become crucial modes of resistance to the dominant forms of sexual subjection. We will examine modernist understandings of the social panic aroused by the specter of youth by studying several works of literary criticism and cultural studies.One oral report, one written version of that report, short writing assignments and one longer paper to be revised. |
| COM LIT 103 | DOSTOEVSKY & NOVEL | WHEELER, L.D. | |
| COM LIT 103 | AFTERLIVES OF GREEKS | NEWMAN, J.O. | What happens when contemporary Nigerian and Irish playwrights rewrite ancient Greek tragedies for late twentieth century audiences? What happens when a Caribbean poet rewrites Homeric epic for a post-colonial world? Is this the \'globalization\' of literature, a sign of the increasing interconnectedness of diverse cultures, or a sign of \'western\' hegemony, the seeping into all corners of the earth of a single dominant canon? Does conceiving of the possibility of a \"global literature\" produce in us a sense of the increasing convergence and sameness of culture or a sense of cultural divergence, specificity, and change? This course is designed to allow us to study the concept of \"World\" or \"Global Literature\"and what it might mean to study literature from an international and transnational perspective on the basis of close readings of twinned texts from the ancient Western and the modern and postmodern canons. We will be reading some of the Homeric epics and the rewriting of their stories by the Attic tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, in the first half of the quarter; in the second half of the quarter, we will investigate the afterlives of these texts in the work of Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaneyand hopefully also challenge the notion (suggested by this very sequencing of texts) that the ancient Greeks stood at literature\'s Origin. The viewing of at least one movie will help us understand the ways that genre and media play an important role in such global exchanges as well. A series of writing exercises and a final research paper. This course will be of special interest to students who have taken CL50A recently, or who have studied the Homeric epics and ancient Greek tragedies in another class or at another institution before coming to UCI. |
| COM LIT 103 | BRAZILIAN WOMEN WRITERS | FERREIRA, A. | This course aims to introduce students to selected contemporary Brazilian women writers through a feminist Cultural Studies approach, organized around two differently constructed, translated, and exported Brazilian \"stars\": Carmen Miranda and Clarice Lispector. Between the pole of Hollywood and the good neighbor policy and that of US academic literary feminism of French leanings, we will be looking at a host of quests of female subjecthood, or stardom, in specific contexts and vis-à-vis pervasive Brazilian myths of racial democracy and pluralistic expressions of identities. In addition to the primary texts and films discussed in class, students are required to read secondary sources in criticism, history and theory. Two exams and a short final paper are required. Course conducted in English. Same as Port 121, Spanish 150 and WomnStd 170, Lec A. |
| COM LIT 103 | CITIES ON SPEED | HALL, J.M. | The course examines relations between high-growth economics, the city, and literary and cinematic conventions in a series of East Asian, American, and European texts from periods of rapid economic growth. Hyperbole, displacement, poverty, anonymity, loss, fetish, and speed are among the tropes of urban life under modern regimes of accelerated economic expansion. Colonial Shanghai, post-war Tokyo, 1950s Paris, 1960s Rome, mid-century Los Angeles, 1980s Hong Kong, late-century Beijing: we map the familiar and foreign city as a site of cinematic and literary production and consumption in local, national, and global contexts. Theoretical readings from Benjamin, Debord, Deleuze, Chow, Freud, Jameson, Koselleck, Laplanche and Stewart are juxtaposed with both representative and deviant fictional and documentary texts. |
| COM LIT 103 | ROMANTIC FAIRYTALES | LILLYMAN, W.J. | The fairy tales of the German Romantic period are among the world\'s great literary achievements. In this course we will read and discuss not only the most famous of the tales by the Grimm brothers, but also some of the original fairy tales of the German Romantic writers such as Tieck, Novalis, Wackenroder and Hoffmann. Comparable texts by other European and American writers, e.g. Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault and Garrison Keillor, will provide a broader context and perspective. We will explore the literary, psychological, historical, sociological, and political aspects of the Romantic fairy tales. One paper and one exam required. |
| COM LIT 104 | MUSIC & LITERATURE IN THE AFRICAN DIASPOSA | MOTEN, F. | This course will be part examination of and part immersion in the work and the spirit of the great Nigerian revolutionary Fela Anikalapu-Kuti. Fela\'s work moves at the intersection of tradition and modernity, origin and diaspora, aesthetics and politics, blowing up the terms of these and every other opposition used to characterize his impact. We\'ll examine some of the specific social and aesthetic forces that influenced Fela\'s work-placing that work within the Nigerian musical and literary traditions, consider his impact on Afro-diasporic expressive cultures, and speculate on what his life and work have to offer to the ongoing project of human social development. Same as Af-Am 130, Lec C. |
| COM LIT 104 | NGUGI NOVELS & WORKS | MASILELA, N. | Ngugi wa Thiong\'o, presently Professor of English and Comparative Literature here at UC Irvine, is one the intellectual giants to come out of Africa in the twentieth-century. Though he is first and foremost regarded as a major
novelist, he has also transformed African theatre by writing a play that was an extraordinary discourse on African history. He belongs to the generation of African writers, including among others Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe,
that in the late 1950s and in the early 1960s simultaneously reflected and articulated Africa\'s \"New Awakening\" to a new historical experience: his novels are a critique of both colonial modernity and the postcolonial African crisis. His critical writings have posited the contentious issue that African Literature can ONLY be constituted through the African Languages. This contention has transformed the nature of discourse on African literary history. Though his earliest novels were written in the English language, for the last twenty-five years he has forsaken this imperial language (to many postcolonials) by writing all his recent novels in Gikuyu (his mother tongue in Kenya). The course will engage itself with the profound implications of Ngugi\'s combination of literary practice and historical theory: in other words, how well has Ngugi integrated Joseph Conrad and Frantz Fanon! Same as Af-Am 130, Lec A. |
| COM LIT 104 | ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE/FILM ADAPTATION | SHROFF, B. | This course analyzes the historical context within which Asian American texts have been adapted into films. There is a vast body of Asian American Literature but very few texts have been adapted to cinema since issues of audience and market are primary considerations. A historical context demonstrates how representations of Asian Americans have changed from the stereotypical images in the 1920\'s to self-representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. This course examines the interplay between literary texts and their film adaptations. We will analyze different literary genres such as novels and dramas, for example Amy Tan\'s novel \"The Joy Luck Club\", and David Henry Hwang\'s drama, \"M. Butterfly\". Cinematic adaptations/versions of literary texts sometimes retitle and reconstruct texts as suitable for a mass audience, such as \"Heaven and Earth\" directed by Oliver Stone and others such as \"Hot Summer Winds\" directed by Emiko Omori based on two Hisaye Yamamoto short stories from \"Seventeen Syllables\". We employ literary and film theory in reading the novels and plays to analyze language, structure, characterization and historical representation. We also discuss how the literary form translates into a visual medium, and the modifications of story/plot and characterization for the screen--for instance, how dramas lend themselves to screen adaptation more easily than do novels. We interrogate the strengths of each medium such as the scope of the fictional framework, and the spatio-temporal capabilities of the cinematic medium. Students will write a weekly journal on films and readings. There will be a midterm and a final essay. Same as AsAm 114, Lec B and HumArts 101, Lec D. |
| COM LIT 104 | CONCEPT OF EUROPE | AVILES, L. | Same as Human 101A. |
| COM LIT 200C | POST COLONL TOPIC | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 200D | ANCNT GREEK RHET | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 210 | TBA | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 210 | TBA | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 220 | TRANSLATN WRKSHP | WA THIONG'O | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | STAFF | |