| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 8 | HUMAN ODDITY | TAMEDA, A | This course explores the historical and narrative implications of human oddity within the fields of literature, science and art in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course engages images of physical deformities from contemporary art and cinema as well as medical documentation. For instance, we analyse and discuss the uncomfortable beauty that emerges from Ikkaku Ochi’s collection of late 19th century Japanese medical photographs of congenital deformations. With a focus on the American freak show where the exhibitions of anomalies entertained the curious eyes of “normal” people by inciting their fear or disdain, we also examine the social and cultural climate of sensitivity to human deformity and dignity. By applying both theoretical and analytical approaches to artificial constructs of beauty and grotesqueness, we also explore the psychological boundaries of artwork. Students will be asked to create artwork with body, uniqueness, and repulsion as the central theme. Through textual and visual materials, students will be challenged to enrich their tools of interpretation by translating their bodies into forms of artwork. Focusing both on critical readings and studio practice, students will explore their own perceptions of body and uniqueness as well as society’s perceptions.
The course is useful for students who wish to reconsider their preconceived notion of beauty and its relation to literature and visual arts. Assignments for the course include three studio assignments and three corresponding critical essays as well as one final studio project and paper. Part of the course will involve field trips to local museums and galleries.
This course is a rare cross-listing between Comparative Literature and Studio Arts; it welcomes students from across the campus. |
| COM LIT 10 | WORLD LITERATURE: TELLING TIME | AL-KASSIM, D. | In this course we will read short novels and literary essays that address the problem of narrating history from positions of marginality. Slavery and colonization, civil war and wars of conquest, these violent histories defy straightforward story telling and have inspired innovative and daring forms of writing. Techniques of fictional autobiography, dictation, letter writing, experimental history and mystery will be considered alongside questions of belonging and historical redress.
Assignments: 2 short papers (5 pages) and 1 oral report (3 students/week).
Countries: Algeria, Antigua, England, France, Lebanon, Morocco, South
Africa, Sri Lanka.
Languages: Arabic, English, French. All works in translation.
Jamaica Kincaid ³In History²
J.M. Coetzee, Foe
Assia Djebar, Fantasia
Zoe Wicomb, David¹s Story
Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man
Jean Genet, The Thief¹s Journal
Driss Chraibi, Heirs to the Past
Rachid Daif, Dear Mr. Kawabata
Michelle De Kretser, The Hamilton Case |
| COM LIT 40B | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | MUNRO, I. | Please contact instructor for information on this course: breynold@uci.edu |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | AMIRAN, E. | This course is an intensive introduction to theory and methods of literary theory. We study different approaches to literary texts and use them to interpret different kinds of literature and culture. Theory we read includes structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, and cultural history by such writers as Rolad Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Claud Levi-Strauss, and Gayatri Spivak; literary works include Fredrick Douglass’s Autobiography, Shakespeare sonnets, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, parables by Franz Kafka, digital media hypertexts, comics by George Herriman, films such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, selections from the New Testament, and others. The course combines lecture with seminar-style discussion. No previous knowledge of literary and cultural theory is expected for the course. Assignments include informal response papers, two essays, and a final. |
| COM LIT 100A | FILM & LITERATURE BY IRANIAN WOMEN | RAHIMIEH, N. | Same as Womn St 170. This course introduces students to the intersections of film and literature in modern Iranian women’s cultural production. We will begin with a focus on Forough Farrakohzad, the prominent modernist poet whose 1960s documentary, The House is Black, is credited as one of the most important sources for the New Iranian Cinema. Farrkhozad’s interweaving of poetry and cinema laid the groundwork for a post-revolutionary cinematic mode of representation that can be discerned in the work of prominent Iranian women filmmakers such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Tahmineh Milani, and Samira Makhmalbaf. We will also grapple with questions about the women’s use of the cinematic gaze against the backdrop of the Islamic Republic’s injunctions about representations of women on the screen. |
| COM LIT 102W | WOMEN AND MADNESS | SCHLICHTER, A. | Same as Womn St 139W. Are women crazy? Popular opinion certainly assumes that they tend to be "hysterical." And since antiquity, writings in Western philosophy and medicine have produced a myriad of theories about a specific feminine predisposition to madness. However, in literary and theoretical writings female authors have critically responded to such theories. This class will look at the figure of the madwoman in 20th century writing. After a brief introduction to the history of women's insanity, we will focus on critical essays, literary texts (shorts stories and novels) and films that undermine the myth of feminine madness. We will discuss how they present the madwoman as a critical figure in order to question - and eventually rewrite – dominant notions of gender. The role of the racialization of gender and the question of the relationship of gender, race and sexuality will be of particular interest. The reading list will include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Otto Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria and others. Requirements: regular attendance, take-home midterm, final essay, brief writing assignments. The required prerequisite for this course is satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| COM LIT 108 | HOME & AWAY: CULTURE, THEORY, LITERATURE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Same as AfAm 118 and AsianAm 110. Is home a literal place, a territory, a state of mind? What does it mean to be “at home,” and how does such a feeling of security relate to “being at home in the world?” How do Home and the World replicate each other; or, do they? Is home a sovereign and normative space, or is it a space of non-discriminating, ever inclusive belonging? Can some one’s home become some other’s exile? Can home be the function of a regime such as Nationalism? What is the relationship between having a home and enjoying the privileges of citizenship? How do race, gender, immigration, ethnicity, and sexuality determine what is home and what is exile? What happens when one leaves one’s home and lives elsewhere? Can there be divided homes characterized by “double consciousness?” During these times of intensive diasporas, movements of peoples-goods-and ideas across boundaries and borders, how does home become a mere location, and location acquire the significance of home? Is a home more natural than a mere location? Are homes natural or are they imagined constructs? With these questions in mind, we will be analyzing a number of texts, some fictional and some theoretical, as they traverse home and away in an infinite series of arrivals and departures. Format: A combination of lectures, discussions, and class presentations. 1 take home examination, 1 short paper, and 1 long paper. Texts: Theorizing Diaspora, Ed. Anita Mannur, Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, and Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter. |
| COM LIT 108 | SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE IN THE DIASPORA | SHROFF, B. | Same as AsianAm 110 and English 105. In this class we analyze the work of writers who are of South Asian ancestry living in North America and Britain. A central concern is how through literary and cinematic representations, spaces of “home” and “belonging” are negotiated through narratives of disjunctures and displacements. How do the literary and cinematic texts represent multiple and contradictorily organized spaces where new identities must be negotiated? How do writers and filmmakers construct and negotiate their identities in their own specific cultural context and also in the larger diasporic context? We analyze texts such as Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories The Interpreter of Maladies, Hanif Kureishi's screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette, and Agha Shahid Ali's poems The Half Inch Himalayas, among others. |
| COM LIT 121 | FANTASTIC FICTION | HU, Y | Same as E Asian 150. This course concentrates on fictions that do not readily conform to the conventions of realism. We read works that may be variously described as belonging to non-realist, surreal or counter-realist traditions. The aim of the class is to investigate imaginative portrayals of fantasy as alterity through the examination of different traditions of utopia/ dystopia. Sample texts include Italo Calvino¹s Cosmicomics, Julio Cortázar, Blow-up and other Stories and contemporary Chinese experimental writers such as Chen Cun, Lin Bai and Ge Fei. |
| COM LIT 121 | NARRATIVE THEORY: LITERATURE & FILM | GELLEY, A. | The principal subject matter of this course is narrative form. We will begin with traditional categories such as plot, setting, characterization, and temporal structure and then consider how a systematic theory of narrative ("narratology" as represented by Bal, Chatman, and Kermode) has sought to deal with these. Finally, we will consider the ways that the medium of film has adapted many of these techniques and, possibly, developed altogether new ones.
Requirements: regular attendance, participation in class discussions, two oral reports, two written assignment. Students will be expected to view three or four selected movies in the Library Media Resource Center. The required prerequisite for this course is satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| COM LIT 131 | PSYCHOANALYSIS & EVERYDAY LIFE | LIU, C | This course will show that psychoanalysis made everyday life an object of interpretation and analysis: the stuff and substance of ordinary experience acquired a new significance. Freud's theories of the unconscious bring into focus the significance of dreams, jokes, mistakes, slips of the tongue in the constitution of psychic life. Like the cinematic apparatus, psychoanalysis was able to capture the hidden importance of the most insignificant and ordinary gestures. We will be reading Freud on jokes, dreams, parapraxes and repetition. We will look at later twentieth-century critics and historians such as Michel de Certeau, who tried to use Freudian techniques to understand history. We will show how "everyday life" influenced the development of twentieth century art practices and cultural analysis. |
| COM LIT 141 | POPULAR CULTURE | JOHNSON, A. | Toys, the French critic Roland Barthes once wrote, prepares the child to accept the world of adult functions “by constituting for him, even before he can think about it, the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas. Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians etc.” This course has two aims. The first is to suggest the value of developing a critical eye for many of the objects (like toys) and practices that seem so natural to us today that we may not pay too much attention to them. The second is to do this through an introduction to how a variety of intellectuals and critics have thought of “popular culture,” a concept that is central to the development of the field of cultural studies. Questions we will be looking at include: What is the difference between popular culture, high culture and mass culture? What can we discover about a society from an analysis of movies, magazine photography, cars or toys? Can we understand popular culture as a tool for social control or as a place for resistance to a social order? In addition to reading theories of popular culture we’ll be watching 3 movies and reading a novel. Coursework includes several short writing assignments and a final paper. |
| COM LIT 142 | ASIAN CITIES VS. URBAN THEORY | ABBAS, M. | Please contact instructor for information on this course: mabbas@uci.edu.
The required prerequisite for this course is satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| COM LIT 143 | ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE & FILM ADAPTATIONS | SHROFF, B. | Same as ArtsHum 101 and English 105. 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 1920s to self-representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. We analyze different literary genres such as novels and dramas and short stories, for example Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Namesake Le Ly Hayslip's memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, David Henry Hwang's drama, M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's drama, The Wash. 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, Seventeen Syllables and Yoneko's Earthquake. 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.
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| COM LIT 144 | LOVE IN THE MAY-4TH | HU, Y | Same as E Asian 170 and Womn St 170. The course focuses on the theme of love in early 20th century Chinese literature. The May-fourth was an age of enlightenment, nationalism and women's liberation, a time when intellectuals proposed "love" as a symbol of individual freedom, personal autonomy and gender equality. How did the romantic discourse of ³free love² begin as a revolt against Confucian patriarchy? How did the genre of romance aid the construction of the romantic individual? How did changing gender relations affect literary productions? These are some of the questions we explore together, as we read fiction, drama and poetry by men and women. The class requires papers, oral presentation and examinations. |
| COM LIT 144 | GLOBALZTN FRM BELOW | JOHNSON, A. | This course’s main objective is to explore what globalization looks like through the eyes of the third world. We will also try to develop our critical perspective by comparing current forms of globalization to earlier world-systems not only to ask what is really new about what we’re seeing today but also to try to imagine alternative kinds of globalization. We will be watching films, reading novels and reading theoretical and historical essays on globalization. Coursework includes three short papers and a final exam. The required prerequisite for this course is satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| COM LIT 200B | THEORY OF TRANSLATION | BAHTI, T. | Course Code 22800, Wednesday, 2:00-4:50PM, KH 500
(***Note: Seminar Request Forms for this course should be submitted to Arielle Read, HIB 416, or as an attachment to aaread@uci.edu***)
Theory of translation is framed by two limit-“concepts.” The first is that of translatability, both as a quotidian, worldwide experience and as an axiomatic condition of possibility for most traditional philosophy (translatability as a condition of universal truth-claims). Indeed, could the term and concept of “language” even exist without its being translatable into all languages? The second limit is not “untranslatability,” but rather the notion of “autotranslation”—the notion that some words, some language-uses, and perhaps some languages are themselves their own translations. Consider the word Ursprung (German for “origin”), for example, or, for that matter, the word translation, itself a translation of the Greek metapherein. To take the notion of autotranslation and to fold it back upon that of translatability, is to discover that the necessary ubiquity of translation is the counterpart to its self-displacing quality, to its always being other than it is. This can be best understood with help from the trope of catachresis: translation literally is that which is never in itself literal.
The seminar will explore this problem of translation’s own translations and translatability by way of triangulation with two other domains in which translation figures largely if often obscurely: psychoanalysis and blindness. Readings will be drawn from Plato, Freud, Heidegger, Jakobson, Benveniste and Derrida, but also from Sophocles, Hölderlin, Merrill and Carver. For course credit, students may write a research paper, or may produce a translation of a philosophic, critical, or literary text.
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| COM LIT 200D | CULTURAL RHET & CRIT THEORY: EVENTS, SUBJECTS, THEOLOGIES | MAILLOUX, S. | Course Code 22810, Wednesday, 9:00-11:50AM, HIB 341
(cross-listed as Criticism 240 and Humanities 270)
(**Please note: Students can enroll in this course online via WebReg starting on November 19. Submission of seminar request forms is requested but will be used for information purposes only.**)
The course will examine the rhetoric of what some call the “theological turn” in recent critical theory. More a swerve than a turn, this rhetorical movement in theory circulates around a number of topics that have been addressed for several decades, including three that will preoccupy us in the course: ontotheology, evental philosophy, and theories of subject formation. We will use the contemporary reception of Paul’s epistles and Augustine’s autobiography to address these topics. Readings will include Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Augustine’s Confessions, Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, Heidegger’s Identity and Difference, Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine, Lyotard’s The Confession of Augustine, Kenneth Burke’s The Rhetoric of Religion, Jacob Taubes’s The Political Theology of Paul, Alain Badiou’s St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, and Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that Remains. Pro-seminar option requires a class presentation and take-home final exam. Seminar requires a class presentation and final seminar paper. Both options also require attendance at a UCI February 23 symposium on “The Universality of Religions, the Particularities of Cultures?”
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| COM LIT 210 | PERFORMANCE AND/OR PERFORMATIVITY AS CRITICAL CONCEPTS | SCHLICHTER, A. | Course Code 22840, Thursday, 1:00-3:50PM, HIB 411
"The performative" has become a key concept in various intellectual terrains. While notions of performance and performativity have been used to discuss complex relations of power, knowledge and identity, the production of identity, the different terms have also been collapsed into a simplified figure of performance as – more or less – voluntary presentation of a self. This class will analyze different approaches to performance and performativity in order to trace productive intersections of and tensions between the terms. Despite a number of publications that discuss the theatrical as well as the linguistic valences of the terms, the specific dynamics between the two in cultural analyses still has to be theorized. Insofar, the class will work towards a reevaluation of existing notions of "the performative." Of particular interest is a discussion of its critical potential for feminist, queer and critical race theories.
The reading list will include texts by Austin, Felman, Derrida, Butler, Sedgwick, Phelan and others. Various essays will be available in a course reader at the beginning of the quarter.
Course requirements: Oral presentation and seminar paper (10-12 page critical analysis of one theoretical text for pro-seminar students, 20-25 page research paper for seminar students).
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| COM LIT 210 | DICTATORSHIP IN POSTCOLONIAL FICTIVE IMAGINATION | NGUGI, W. | Course Code 22830, Monday, 2:00-4:50PM, HIB 411
A very prominent feature of the postcolonial fiction is the rise of the Dictator Novel. The course examines the postcolonial dictator novel, drawing mainly on African literature but looking comparatively at Latin America and Asia. The examination will be based on the works of such writers as Nurrudin Farrah, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Marquez, Asegwa and films like “The Last King of Scotland”. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE GIFT AND THE SOVEREIGNTY OF EXPENDITURE | AL-KASSIM, D. | Course Code 22820, Tuesday, 5:30-8:20PM, HIB 311
The analysis of gift exchange as a symbolic economy has proven remarkably fruitful for the critique of hegemonic forms of social organization and subjectivity in fields as diverse as feminist theory, postcolonial studies, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism and philosophy. In this course we will approach the “notion of expenditure” by reading the fundamental texts on the gift, with special attention to potlatch, before embarking on a focused reading of sovereignty, excess and luxury in the work of Georges Bataille, whose theory of waste, sacrifice and aesthetic, as well as social, sovereignty presents several challenges for contemporary accounts of economic rationalism and subjectivity in the postcolony. Building on the analysis of excess, we will consider Derrida’s claim of the impossibility of the gift in light of a feminist understanding of gift exchange as a gendered system of kinship relations. If the gift is impossible, does woman, the first gift, bear the social symbolic burden of impossibility? What politics of value are evident in the gender relations of the postcolonial state? How might a feminist understanding of expenditure alter the map of power in specific case studies? What other forms of identity take on the properties of the gift?
Requirements: 1 Oral Report, Weekly response papers to be disseminated to the class and a Final Paper on approved topic.
Texts May Include:
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. 1-3, Zone Books (selections)
--------------------, “The Notion of Expenditure,” Visions of Excess
--------------------, Theory of Religion, Zone Books
Marcel Mauss. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W. D. Halls. Foreword by Mary Douglas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990
Jacques Derrida. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits
Selections from:
Bourdieu, “The Economy of Symbolic Goods” and “Modes of Domination”, The Logic of Practice
Butler, Excitable Speech
Foucault, “Preface to Transgression”
Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss
--------------- The Elementary Structures of Kinship
Mbembe, On the Postcolony
The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, Ed. Fred Myers
The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines, Ed. Mark Osteen
Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex”
The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, Ed. Alan D. Schrift.
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia.
Sahlins, Stone Age Economics
Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific
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| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |