| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 8 | TIME TRAVELS | CULBERT, J. | Time machines are an invention of modern science fiction, but the idea of time travel has a long history in literature and culture. This class will examine time travel in literature and film and explore its relationship to history, memory, fantasy and desire. Additional readings in psychoanalysis and cultural theory will help us consider time travel in the light of such concepts as "afterwardsness," traumatic experience and the return of the repressed.
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| COM LIT 40B | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | A one-year lecture-discussion course (each quarter may be taken independently) in the development of Western Drama, concentrating on the drama's intellectual, social, and artistic foundations. About 10 plays and supplementary critical material are read each quarter. Restoration Drama through Ibsen. Reading from Neoclassic, Romantic, and Naturalistic European playwrights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moliere, Racine, Congreve, Goethe, Ibsen, and Chekhov are included. |
| COM LIT 50B | PERIODS & MOVEMENTS | BARRETT, L. | Allows students to study literatures comparatively and in a historically specific and intensive way, for example, the period of the Milddle Ages across Europe and in dialogue with various contact cultures, such as Islam, or modernism and post-modernism, East and Wast. Focus of the lecture varies according to the instructor's field of experitise. |
| COM LIT 101 | THEORIES IN DIALOG | HALL, J. | In this course, students examine queer theory as a critical social practice emerging in the 1980s and after. We look at the emergence of different queer theories in relation to major theorists (“pink” Freud and Foucault, for example) and social movements (feminism, gay and lesbian liberation movements.) The course is especially interested in the effect of queer theories as political weapons and as aesthetic paradigms on other theoretical and creative projects as well as their influence on writers, critics, filmmakers, and an anxious media and government. We look at lesbian, gay, and transgender writing and filmmaking and explore such difficult, disturbing, and pleasurable authors as Isaac Julien, David Wojnarowicz, Amber Hollibaugh, Robert Glück, and Pat Califia. Expect to read at least one novel or watch one film at the library per week. In addition, there will be 2-3 critical texts weekly. Prior study of feminist theory is especially helpful, but not required. (crosslisted in Comparative Literature, Queer Studies, Women’s Studies) |
| COM LIT 102 | NARR OF SEXUALITY | SCHLICHTER, A. | "Sex" and "sexuality" are major themes of contemporary literature and culture. These terms capture a whole range of meanings: sexual identities, gendered bodies, sexual practices etc. This seminar will look at various meanings of "sex" and "sexuality" in literary texts and in a couple of films and TV shows. We will particularly focus on the analysis of textual and visual strategies in the portrayals of sex/sexualities and explore their critical potential. An important question will be how the categories "gender" and "race" function in the representations of sex/sexuality. |
| COM LIT 103 | SCREENING LITERATUR | TAYLOR, R. | How are film adaptations of famous novels limited or marked by an orientation on the text? How can the film medium open up new spheres, or alter (or distort) the novel by means of point of view, narration, or editing. Why do so many people say 'The book was better than the movie'?
This course opens with introductory readings in film theory (Richard Taylor on Eisenstein?s Potemkin), literary theory (Jonathan Culler), and adaptation, including a classic treatise on art and media forms by Walter Benjamin. These readings will help us explore three case studies: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Branagh's 1994 film Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Leo Tolstoy's AnnaKarenina and Rose's 1997 film; and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Kubrick's 1962 film. All films will be shown in class.
Students will write a 5-6 page paper halfway through the course, and throughout the quarter will write short, reflective assignments such as film analyses and mock diary entries. At the end of the course, students will submit a final project of their choice, either a paper or a project with a creative angle, such as a (mock) theoretical treatise, an original film, or a 'reverse adaptation' -- an original story or play that adapts from film to page. Students familiar with iMovie and other digital media are welcome to submit works in these formats. |
| COM LIT 104 | INTRO TO EURO STUD | NEWMAN, J. | What is Eurocentrism? Where is “the West”? Is the ‘New World’, including the US, automatically implicated in political and cultural conditions inherited from a strictly (Western) European past? What about Islam? What about Asia and “the East”? Why do we think geographically about identity anyway? Is identity a matter of a fixed geography, indeed, is identity fixed according to ethnic, religious, and political coordinates at all? -- These are some of the questions we will examine in this course, which is the first course of the two-course Core Sequence in the Major in European Studies in the School of Humanities. (European Studies majors need to take both quarters at some point, but both courses are also open to non-majors on a first come, first served basis; English and CL majors may sign up under the CL104 number.) This quarter, we will focus on the period of the Renaissance as one of the key periods during which the very concept of Europe began to be defined, and our special interest will be questions of identity associated with the issue of religious conversion. We will study trade routes and the circulation of goods, cultures, people, and religious identities in ‘Europe’ as well as to its south, east, west (e.g. in the direction of Africa, the Ottoman Empire and the ‘New World’). Using historical maps, literary texts (including Shakespeare’s Othello, Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, among others), reports by Marco Polo and Columbus about the Near and Far East and the New World, and art historical materials (paintings and etchings as well as other manufactured luxury items), we will begin to trace the influence of politics, religious ideology, and mercantilism on the ‘European’ subject—whoever she or he may have been—and pose the question of the stability of this subject and his/her identity in a world where conversion (both forced and self chosen) was common. Along the way, we will think about how the construction of Europe and religious identity in the past may bear on how we understand our always complex, often confusing, and at times a little bit scary political and cultural present. Reading logs and a research paper.
Students should read Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents, “Introduction” and “Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism” (c. 40 pp.)—Both ON RESERVE and in the Bookstore—for the first day of class. Reading Questions to help orient you in your reading will be available on my office door (374 HIB) by the beginning of Exam Week of the Fall Quarter. |
| COM LIT 104 | EAST ASIAN CINEMAS | HALL, J. | In this course, we look at East Asian cinemas in broad geographic, historical, and theoretical perspectives that underscore the movement of directors, actors, audiences, genres, and even techniques in a region we might call East Asia: Vietnam, the Philippines, the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Los Angeles Thailand, and beyond. Our focus is sometimes thematic: how and why does intra-Asian travel figure so prominently for directors Wong Kar Wai and Ann Hui? What is “Asia” for directors in Japan like Iwai Shunji or Sai Yoichi? Sometimes the question is historical: How did the experience of the postwar in Asia produce varying concepts of “national cinema”? What was Japanese colonial cinema? And frequently the question simultaneously involves form, audience, and a global market: What motivates Japanese enthusiasm for Korean melodrama? Who is watching Filipino divas? And why must Kidlat Tahimik go abroad? Or to borrow a phrase from Tsai Ming-liang, “What time is it there?” The class meets on Monday and Wednesday for lecture and then on Friday in an extended lecture/screening format. Expect online quizzes about the films you watch, film notetaking, a short visual analysis, and two substantial papers. (crosslisted in Comparative Literature, Film & Media Studies, East Asian Languages & Literatures) |
| COM LIT 104 | THE OTHER EUROPE | STAFF | Lecture and discussion course open to all students, three hours. Treats interdisciplinary topics of various kinds (e.g., literature of politics, literature and religion, literature and science, literature and other arts). |
| COM LIT 105 | MLTICLTRL WOMN WRTR | SCHLICHTER, A. | This class will discuss the structures of and the conflicts within U.S. multicultural society through literary and theoretical writings by women of color. We will take their critiques of white feminist theories and practices as a starting point, and then explore how the writers appropriate and contest constructions of gendered and sexual identities in different cultural traditions, and how their representations of gender, ethnicity and sexuality have changed the debates around identity, difference and power relations. The reading list will include texts by Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lord, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen an others. A class reader will be available at the beginning of the quarter from the reserve desk.
Requirements: regular attendance and reading, midterm, take-home final, short writing assignments
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| COM LIT 106 | ADV SEM COMP LIT | GELLEY, A. | This course will investigate the problem of memory and its representation of the past, as well as the difficulties that arise when memory is recast, or reframed within a personal and historical narrative. Where are the boundaries between history and memory? How useful is it to investigate the transmission of historical data in the light of trauma theory? In what ways is the concept of traumatic experience – a retroactive processing of experience – related to mythic and metaphoric elements in literature? How can we move from the intimate quality of individual recollection to the public and deeply social dimension of cultural tradition? The core readings for the course will draw on writings by Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, Duras, Benjamin, with additional selections in literature and the philosophy of history. We will also view and discuss some movies. |
| COM LIT 200B | THEORY OF TRANSLATION | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | “Translating America to Itself” was the name of a successful national conference organized last year at UCI by the Department of Asian American Studies. The polemical thesis behind the title was that a dominant formation such as America, before it presumes to translate itself to other cultures and languages, has to acknowledge the reality that it does not make much sense to itself. When does translation become an absolute prerequisite for intelligibility and the transmission of intelligibility? Are some realities transcendent of the labor of translation, whereas others depend on translation and translatability? What are the ontological and epistemological assumptions about Self and Other that inform any project of translation? As the title of the conference suggests: Why not translate English into English before one translates it into Tagalug, or Hindi, or Arabic? In other words, how are the inter- and the intra-linguistic dimensions of translation and translatability related to each other? Does any work make perfect sense to itself before its meaning becomes possible in another language? What are some of the differences between dominant and subaltern/postcolonial theories of translation? What is a literary, and what is a non-literary translation? How are resistances and complicities measured with respect to each other in an act of translation? How is the meaning of translation secured and valorized in a world that is structured in dominance? How does the translator indulge in her love for two languages, and synchronize her two commitments? What is the performative rationale of a translation? Should translations be freed of their obligation to the “source language” and be valorized as an autonomous genre? How are the rights of the translator to be adjudicated with reference to the rights of the original author? What role does translation play in an increasingly global, diasporic and disseminated world that is simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous? How does the theme of translation connect with a number of contemporary socio-political and cultural issues such literacy, orality, multiculturalism, mono-, bi-, and multilingualism?
These are some of the questions we will be pursuing in this seminar. As must be obvious by now, we will be looking at the term “translation” both in a literal sense, and, as Gayatri Spivak would have it, a “concept-metaphor.” There will be room to analyze the complexities of specific projects as well to theorize “translation” more speculatively and allegorically. The course texts would be the Venuti and the Trivedi-Bassnet readers. Students are invited to bring their particular translation interests and projects that could well become part of the syllabus. The presiding ethic of the course would be, to quote from Jacques Derrida: “We only ever speak one language. We never speak just one language.” |
| COM LIT 200C | THEORY AND POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE SPACE | NGUGI, W.T. | The course examines the performance space as a site of struggle of the various physical, social and psychic forces in society. The course singles out the colonial and postcolonial performance space - be it the street, the home, the shrine, the museum, the archeological site, the burial ground, the prison, the national theater or even the national state - as a site of intense political theater. In particular, the course looks at the rise of popular theater movements in Africa in the light of the politics of performance space. The course is built around texts where performance and space are of particular significance in the development of the conflict. |
| COM LIT 200D | ENDS OF MIMESIS | LIU, C. | A sustained engagement with the stakes and strategies of an anti-Platonism that may be called historical materialism (that begins with a renewed engagement with the work of Plato), this seminar will take explore the concept of mimesis through aesthetics, philosophy,critical theory and psychoanalysis in order to better grasp its relationship to modernity, commodity and reification. Mimesis is a critical concept in understanding orders of representation and discourses of verisimilitude in visual as well as literary culture. We will examine what is at stake in the Platonic sequestration and condemnation of the "bad copy" or simulacrum, as well as the metaphysically based suspicion about appearances. Beginning with Eric Auerbach, we try to understand what drives readings for verisimilitude. Gilles Deleuze's affirmation of the simulacrum represents one way of overturning Platonism, while Jacques Derrida's "La double séance" provides another. Jean Baudrillard's simulacrum appears to be commodity revisionism, that unlike Guy Debord's "society of spectacle" seems to bear the traces of nostalgia for authenticity. Finally, we will examine Walter Benjamin's notions of perception as "reading" and his affirmation of the "mimetic" faculty. In addition, we will try to understand the relationship between the concept of "regression" in the later writings of Sigmund Freud to Theodor W. Adorno's account of mimesis and aesthetic experience. For post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory's contribution to the question of mimesis we will return to Lacan's "The Mirror Stage."
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Students taking the Seminar option will be required to write two 8-10 page papers.
Pro-seminar students will be required to write two 5-8 page papers. All students will be required to deliver a class presentation.
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| COM LIT 210 | TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND THE DIALECTICS OF OPPRESSION | SCHWAB, G. | This course focuses on literary figurations of violent histories, oppression and the transmission of transgenerational trauma. It addresses the following issues:
1. The role of literature/writing/witnessing in processes of mourning, reconciliation and
reparation
2. The conflicted concept of “isomorphic oppression” (Ashis Nandy)
3. Silence, haunting and the transgenerational transmission of trauma
4. Carriers of violent legacies: replacement children
5. Discursive ruptures, cryptography and the rhetorical paradox of traumatic narratives
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