| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 8 | THE PRACTICE OF COLLECTING | TAMEDA, A. | Many of us enjoy the activity of collecting, and many more of us are fascinated by others' collections. How and why do we engage in this activity? Through a series of readings and art practice, this course pursues the activity of collecting as an art-making experience at the same time as it interrogates the nature of collections to reflect our response to objecthood and function. We look at the ways we collect and what this tells us about ourselves and our society, in particular, examining the collecting practices of such artists as Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Tracy Emin, and Charles LeDray. In a practical component of the course, students establish their own conceptual dialogue between objects and their organization. By referring to selected artists’ artwork and collecting practices, students are required to submit two preliminary collections with corresponding critical papers. In the eighth week, students begin to work on their final studio project and an essay addressing their own work. In this final project, students articulate a unique collection and explore its meaning. Creating both their own criteria and a corresponding array of collectables, students produce a final project that represents their experience of objects. To this end, students are encouraged to engage in a close analysis of the objecthood of their immediate environment through the activity of searching, selecting, and collecting. Through our examination of collecting, students can begin to establish, within their own critical writing and art practice, a new relationship to the material world.
Readings
To Have And To Hold: An Intimate History Of Collectors and Collecting, Philipp Blom
On Longing, Susan Stewart
Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp…in resonance, Polly Koch, ed.
On Collecting (Collecting Cultures), Susan Pearce
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson
Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, Eilean Hooper-Greenhil
The Familial Gaze, Marianne Hirsch, ed.
Sex Objects, Jennifer Doyle
etc
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| COM LIT 40B | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | MUNRO, I. | |
| COM LIT 50C | GENRE AND MEDIUM | JOHNSON, A. | This course is part of the Cl 50 introductory series to the Comparative Literature major and revolves around Genre and Medium. This year we will approach the concept of genre through its intersection with notions of selfhood. The course will be organized around three narrative modalities: the picaresque, captivity narratives and testimonials. The reading will range widely from the 13th to the 20th centuries and include European, African, North and South American texts. We will also do some work with film and comics. Examples of the type of questions we will be posing are: How different is the subjectivity constructed in a classic autobiography, like that of Rousseau’s, from cases of slave narratives. What does the 20th century South African novel Waiting for the Barbarians allow us to think about the way the writer of a sixteenth century U.S. captivity narrative deals with cultural difference? How is cultural difference important for the construction of a first person narrator? How can the relationship between the first person narrator and society differ in testimonials and autobiographies? |
| COM LIT 101 | PHENOMENOLOGY/DECON | GELLEY, A. | Phenomenology and Deconstruction. 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 by 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 ( Merleau-Ponty, Derrida). Requirements: oral reports, short written essays, term paper. |
| COM LIT 102 | AURAL UNCONSCIOUS | ABBAS, M. | The course will draw on a number of texts (from music, literature, cinema and theory) that revolve around the implications of ‘voice’ in culture, to ask: Is there an ‘aural unconscious’ that is as important as Benjamin’s notion of an ‘optical unconscious”? Topics studied will include: music in Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology; the voices of ‘innocence’ and ‘experience’ in Blake’s ‘Songs’; the ‘acousmetre’ in Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ and Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’; the colonial voice in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’; Kafka’s Josephine and Ulysses; Deleuze and Guattari on ‘the refrain’; Kierkagaard on the fascination of Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’; Voice, Body, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Liu Sola’s opera ‘Fantasy of a Red Queen’. |
| COM LIT 103 | HONG KONG CINEMA | ABBAS, M.A. | While the Hong Kong cinema obviously pre-dates the 1980's, it was nevertheless during that period that it began to emerge as a full-fledged international cinema. At one level, this emergence can be seen as a response to a series of social and political crises associated with local anxieties about the 1997 Handover; at another level, it can be related to transformations in social, economic, and political paradigms taking place elsewhere that go under the name of 'globalization'. This course will present the New Hong Kong cinema through discussions of a number of interrelated topoi(eg., space, affect, politics, information), and will try to define what makes the New Hong Kong cinema, before and after 1997, so riveting. |
| COM LIT 104 | JAPANESE CINEMA | HALL, J. | This course examines the narrative and cinematic horror genres in their Japanese contexts. In particular, we look to tales of the horrific and the terrible to discover how they negotiate such categories as modernity/tradition and technology/body within popular Japanese literature and cinema from the late nineteenth-century to the present. Attention is paid to late 19th-century debates around folk beliefs, horror and the emergence of modern literature, atomic horror, the political motivations behind mid-century horror, disaster, and ghost films, the relation of the body to cinematic representation of the horrific, the global proliferation of late-century Japanese horror cinema, and the current vitality of the Japanese psycho-horror genre. |
| COM LIT 104 | INTRO TO EUROPEAN STUDIES: THE CASE OF THE RENAISSANCE | NEWMAN, J.O. | 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, 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; all other students 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. Our special interest will be the question of Europe and Islam; we will study ‘Europe’ as it intersects—commercially, politically, culturally, and in terms of religion—with Africa, the Ottoman Empire and the ‘New World’. Using historical maps, literary texts (including Shakespeare’s Othello, Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Corneille’s The Cid, among others), and historical and art historical materials, we will begin to trace the influence of politics, religious ideology, military engagement, and mercantilism on the creation of the ‘European’ subject—whoever she or he may have been. 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 pretty scary political and cultural present. Reading logs and a research paper.
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| COM LIT 105 | LITERATURE OF IRANIAN DIASPORA | RAHIMIEH, N. | This course introduces students to different genres of writing produced by the Iranian diaspora in North America and Europe. Along with poems, short stories, novels, and memoirs we will read hybrid genres that juxtapose the visual and the verbal. Readings from theories of diaspora will help us situate the Iranian experience in a global context. We will begin with a discussion of the key concepts of modern Iranian national identity and explore how they have left their mark on the diaspora communities. We will also focus on negotiating identity across boundaries of language, gender, and race.
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| COM LIT 106 | ADV SEM COMP LIT | GELLEY, A. | The City: Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project may be regarded as a foundational text for "the aesthetics of the city." His conception of the city in the 19th century encompassed urban culture, commodity practices, and the reception of technology, but it also extended to the mutation of forms of art and the dissemination of information. The point of departure were the arcades of the title (Passagen in German), which referred to glass-roofed enclosures that began to appear in the mid-19th century and served to house retail establishments, much like present-day malls. As a localized form of exposition space for commodities (the world exhibits that began in the mid- 19th century are a parallel phenomenon), the arcades constitute a synecdoche for the cultural-historical goal of Benjamin’s object of study. “Paris” assumes a world structuring or cosmological function, as is indicated by the alternative title that he gave the projected work: “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” We will read parts of The Arcades Project, a massive collection of notes for Benjamin’s unfinished book, as well as some essays by him and others on the theme. Requirements: oral reports, reading journal, and term paper. |
| COM LIT 200C | GLOBALISM, POSTCOLONIALISM AND AFRICAN NARRATIVES | NGUGI, W. T. | The course examines issues and themes in African fictional narratives to help define the concept and phenomenon of postcolonialism. But the postcolonial question cannot be divorced from that of globalism and globalization. Central to the course is the exploration of the intersection of class, gender, ethnicity, the cold war, and military coups in the shaping of nations and nation-states in the era of globalization. While based on Africa, the course tries to narrow down the concept of the postcolonial by examining closely the ‘neo’ hidden in the ‘post’ of many theories of the post-colony and the globe.
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| COM LIT 210 | SLOW READING: BATAILLE | AL-KASSIM, D. | A course devoted to the work of George Bataille beginning with La Part maudite (1949) and continuing with the first volume of his La Somme athéologique: L’Expérience intérieure (1943). We will read slowly and carefully as much of these materials as possible in 10 weeks. Students will be responsible for weekly position papers, class presentations of the material and for developing an annotated bibliography of critical works on Bataille is as many languages as the group collectively possesses. Bataille’s theory of expenditure, sovereignty and the sacred will anchor our discussions while critical articles on Bataille will provide context and a genealogy of critical reception and influence. This course will lay the groundwork for the Spring 2007 HUM 270 “Gift Exchange” although students are not obliged to enroll in both quarters.
Assignments: weekly position papers, annotated bibliography and short paper in the form of a project proposal related to your own research. |
| COM LIT 210 | IMAGINARY ETHNOGRAPHIES | SCHWAB, G. | Course Requirements:
Seminar: Long Paper
Pro-seminar: Commented Bibliography
Class Presentation and Participation
Exploring the relationship between literature, ethnography and the cultural imaginary, this course views literature as a form of writing culture. We will explore the specific role and devices of the literary in relation to other discourses on culture such as ethnography and cultural theory. In this context, we will develop a method of reading that emphasizes the complex transcodings (as defined by Jameson in The Political Unconscious) between the literary, the cultural/ethnographic, and the psychological. The literary readings will foreground a set of liminal cultural figures that have aggregated iconic value in the cultural imaginary: the indigenous, the child, the disenfranchised, and the posthuman.
We will explore topics such as the colonial imaginary and the colonization of psychic space, violent histories and trauma, the social construction of childhood, zones of abandonment and emergent forms of subjectivity in global cultures. (I am including a bibliography for the course. For class discussions we will focus on topical clusters that combine literary, ethnographic and theoretical readings.)
Literature:
Juan Jose Saer, The Witness
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller
Clarisse Lispector, “The Smallest Woman in the World” in Family Ties
Simon Wiesenthal, "The Sunflower"
Richard Powers, Operation Wandering Soul
Patricia Grace, Baby No-Eyes
Zoe Wicomb, David’s Story
Beckett, Le Depeupleur / The Lost Ones
Ethnography:
Zora Neale Hurston, Of Mules and Men
Cara Ella Deloria, Waterlily
Joao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Abandonment (Introduction and “Catarina and the Alphabet”)
Memoir:
N. Scott Momaday, The Names
Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (pp. 1-32)
Theory:
Clifford/Marcus, eds., Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (selections)
Behar/Gordon, Women Writing Culture (Selections)
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (section on Ethnography and Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (“The Writing Lesson”)
D. W. Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience”
Gabriele Schwab, The Mirror and the Killer-Queen, (Theoretical sections on "Reading as Cultural Contact")
Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (selections)
Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space (selections)
Michael Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (selections)
Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, Remaking the World: Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery (selections)
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (selections)
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers
Sharon Stevens, Children and the Politics of Culture
Veena Das, Words and Life
Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive |
| COM LIT 210 | LITERATURE OF REVERIE | TERADA, R. | Reverie indicates nonteleological thought and a suspensive quality of perception. Reading especially the philosophies and phenomenologies of perception implied by Romantic and post-Romantic theory and literature and by psychoanalytic texts, I’d like to explore the appeal of reverie in relation to exigency, natural and social discontent and coercion, and the problem of reconciling oneself to reality. The course will offer a philosophical genealogy that suggests how reverie became a figure of freedom in the post-Kantian era and a shaping force in what we now call Romantic culture. Briefly, the fact/value problem as understood by Hume and Kant, and Kant’s rational insistance that we must “accept” the fact that the world exists for us as appearance, make errant, nonteleological kinds of perception and consciousness newly appealing ways to “resist” exigency. (Both acceptance and resistance here are imaginary, mental acts.)
Relevant texts and figures include:
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment (excerpts)
S.T. Coleridge, Notebooks (excerpts) and lyrics
De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and late fragments
Psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature on dissociation and derealization
One or two Anglo-American philosophical articles on object perception and fact perception
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie (excerpts)
T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (excerpts)
W. Benjamin, On Hashish
The course can be taken as a seminar or pro-seminar. Seminar requirements include one or more oral presentations and a 20-p. research paper. The proseminar requirement consists of one or more oral presentations and weekly 2-pp. responses.
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| COM LIT 220 | TRANSLATION WORKSHOP | BARNSTONE, A. | This is a class in the art and craft of literary translation. Students will read a variety of critical, theoretical, and practical approaches to the translation of literature, which will help them to develop and define their own ethics and esthetics of the interesting and troubled act of translation, and finally to express their esthetic theories in the form first of a manifesto and later of a translator's preface or afterward to their final project. Though this is not primarily a course in theory, it is a course that is open to an application of theory to experimental forms of translation practice.
The class is a workshop, in the first part of which we will discuss the day’s readings in theory and criticism, and in the second part of which we will be doing a wide variety of in-class writing exercises and will critique student translations. In addition to translating original poetry and/or short prose pieces from other languages, the translators will experiment and expand their craft by doing a variety of experimental translations and transformations, imitations and parodies, literary replies and retorts, intra-lingual translations, and sound translations. A final project, which the student will work upon throughout the quarter, should be considered a serious first draft of something that could develop in later years into a book of translations. All students should come to the first class with a reading knowledge of a foreign language, and with a tentative final project in mind, but it will not be expected that all will share the same languages. Students will also translate from a variety of other languages, based upon trots prepared by their fellow students or provided by the professor. In addition, students will be required to attend talks and readings by a series of distinguished visiting scholar-translators and to keep a creative journal exclusively for this class.
Students are expected to carefully and critically read each other’s poems/creative prose at home, to make comments in the margin and to writing critical responses that will be the basis for class discussion. The final project will be a substantial bilingual chapbook with the original poems/prose and the translations on facing pages. I recommend that you translate works by the same author, but, subject to my approval, you may propose projects by multiple authors if they have a strong commonality (thus: four female tanka poets of classical Japan, or three 20th-century French prose poets). The chapbook should include a translator's preface or afterword in which you should sketch pertinent biographical details about the writer(s), and discuss the theoretical and practical translation issues that arose when translating from this language and from your chosen writer(s). If the text translated is previously untranslated, and if the student works under the supervision of a faculty member approved by the Director of Graduate Studies, this project will satisfy the Comparative Literature language requirement.
Students are encouraged to join the American Literary Translators Association and to submit panel proposals to the yearly ALTA conference. In addition, students will be introduced to venues for translation and translation studies and encouraged to submit their critical and creative work for publication.
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