| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 10 | LATIN AMERICA, U.S. LATINO, AND IBERIAN CULTURES | LEGRAS, H. | Intro to Latin(o) American culture
This course is an introduction to Latin American culture for non Spanish majors. The course satisfies categories IV and VIIB of the Breadth requirement or categories IV and VIII of the General Education requirement. All materials and teaching in English.
This year's course is divided into four components. Each component deals with a particular problem or situation from a variety of points of view: film, literature, history, essayistic production etcetera. First module will explore the legacy of Pre-Columbian civilizations. We will read on the discovery of the city of Teotihuacan and the effects that this discovery had on literature and theories of national identity in Mexico, but also explore how the indigenous past is a main player in today's Latin American politics and society. The second module will be centered on the experience of populism in Argentina. Third module will cover the Mexican revolution with special emphasis on painting and film. Fourth and last module will be dedicated to the Chicano/Latino experience in the US.
Readings include short stories by Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garr, Julio Cortazar, León Rozitchner; novels by Tomás Eloy Martinez (Santa Evita), Oscar Zeta Acosta (The Revolt of the Cockroach People); films include: Stand and Deliver, El analfabeto (Cantinflas), Qué Viva México! (S. Eisenstein), The revolution will not be televised (Bartley/O Brian); essays by Ernesto Laclau, Claudio Lomnitz and Jean Franco.
Students have to complete one mid-term and one practical assignment related to the film series "Cosecha latina/Latin Harvest" organized by the Film and Video center at UCI.
Cross listed with Sp 50 course code 32145 |
| COM LIT 40B | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | Drama B is the second of a three-quarter series of courses examining the development of Western Drama and performance from the ancient Greeks to the present. Concentrating on the drama's intellectual, social, and artistic foundations, the 40 series engages with dramatic literature in it's theatrical, cultural, and historical contexts. The format of the 40 series includes a variety of methods-lectures, discussions. activities, presentations, quizzes, and written assignments-intended to foster an active engagement among the students with theatrical literature of the past. Simultaneously, the class seeks to place such historical work in conversation with the present moment. As such, students are encouraged to consider the plays under investigation from their sociohistorical and theatrical )performance-oriented) perspectives. The 40B quarter will focus on plays that are representative of the major styles,authors, and genres of the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | LIU, C. | How does a story function? How does a film mean? And why do magazine and television advertisements work so well on us? This course introduces you to basic tools of cultural and textual analysis including the following: semiotics, formal analysis, Marxist and Freudian criticism, feminist, queer, postcolonial, and ecological studies. We apply these critical theories to a wide variety of media objects from around the globe: short stories, magazine advertising, films, internet sites—even your own dreams. The course assumes no prior knowledge of theory or criticism and provides an excellent opportunity for you to sample the wide variety of "critical theory" used in the Humanities and Social Sciences--and to determine the methods that seem most promising for your own studies. The course is open to students from all schools and majors. Course requirements include five one-paragraph submissions to an online course website, two online quizzes, and two short papers (3-5 pp). |
| COM LIT 100A | CASE OF RENAISSANCE | NEWMAN, J. | What is Eurocentrism? Where is “the West”? Is the ‘New World’, including our own present-day 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 religious, ethnic, 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). 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 in a global context. 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 ‘East’. 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, and often confusing, political and cultural present. Reading logs and a research paper. |
| COM LIT 102W | BLACK PROTEST TRADITION | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | Some feminist critics have raised serious concerns with the writings of Frantz Fanon primarily on charges of ill-consideration of the impacts of nationalism on the lives and survival of women. Indeed, the question of nationalism and its links to misogyny and control over female reproduction has been also raised. Other feminist critics namely Third World and Black feminist critics have insisted on holding on to Fanon in part because his attention to culture, neo-colonialism, spirituality, detention and incarceration, and violence create greater visibility for the role of women as political actors, political agents, and revolutionaries. The Fanon that has been touted, rejected, reproduced, and engaged by feminists of all stripes is a complicated voice among many in the black protest tradition. This course will examine several key works by Frantz Fanon and his reception and deployment by radical black feminism, Arab-American feminism, Algerian feminism, African feminisms, and Third World feminism.
Same as 139 Women's Studies 33626 and AfAm 29100 , 162W |
| COM LIT 122 | RHETORIC&PUB SPCH | JARRATT, S. | Rhetoric and Public Speech
This course introduces students from any discipline to the art of speaking publicly as the practical extension of the field of rhetoric. Readings will introduce concepts of speech as the enactment of human relationships, the construction of knowledge through language, and the cultural contexts of style. Students will be introduced to Toulmin’s theory of argument, to Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification, and classical approaches to ethos (a speaker’s persona), invention, and organization. Students will also view performances of famous speeches, as well as materials from contemporary mass media and popular culture, and analyze them through rhetorical frameworks. |
| COM LIT 132 | (DISCOURSE, POLITICS, AND IDEOLOGY PROTEST AND CIVIL DISOBE | ABBAS, . A. | In honor of student protests at the University of California, this course, taught by a variety of faculty in different departments, explores the social and cultural history and the philosophy of civil disobedience in various contexts. Faculty from Chicano and Latino Studies, Comp Lit, Film and Media Studies, History, Political Science, Spanish & Portuguese, and Women’s Studies will discuss:
protests in Southern California; revolt in France in the 1960’s; protest art and activism in the U.S. in the 1960’s; postcolonial and anticolonial writings; a documentary film about worker occupation of a factory in Latin America; faith-based protests on the right and left in the U.S. in the 1980’s; and more. Participation in discussion and informal responses will account for most of your grade; a midterm and final will make up the remainder.
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| COM LIT 143 | ASNAM LIT/FLM ADAPT | 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. |
| COM LIT 150 | SOUTH ASIAN LIT. IN TRANSLATION: THE POWER OF THE WORD | EVERAERT, C. | Title:
South Asian Lit. in Translation: The Power of the Word: Modern Indian history seen through the eyes of creative writers
In this course, students get a taste of the powerful literature by South Asian writers, offered in English translation. This course will focus on modern South Asian literature. Short stories and poetry will a.o. illustrate how the last Mughal ruler experienced the end of the powerful Mughal Empire, how people on the Indian subcontinent witnessed the atrocities during the struggle for independence from the British, how outcasts (Dalits) found a voice in literature and started writing creative prose about the life of an outcast in India. The selection of stories will open the door to a very rich world of South Asian literature as well as offer an overview of the modern history of this vast subcontinent that is playing an increasingly important role in the modern, globalizing world.
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| COM LIT 210 | MODERN MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURE | RAHIMIEH, N. | This course will serve as an introduction to modern Middle Eastern literatures in translation. The very designation, the Middle East, raises complex historical and political questions which we will address through selected critical essays and the following literary works written originally in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish: Sadeq Chubak, The Patient Stone, Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl, Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk, Alia Mamdouh, Napthalene: A Novel of Baghdad, Orhan Pamuk, Snow, Anton Shammas, Arabesques, S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh.
Course code 22805 |
| COM LIT 210 | RACE AND MIXED RACR | SEXTON, J. | This course will explore figures of racial difference and racial mixture in postwar U.S. visual culture, with an emphasis on the crisis of visibility produced by images of blackness. We will address, on the one hand, the relations and politics of representation (especially in cinema) and, on the other, critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly as
they regard formations of state and capital. (Same as Human 270, Sem C; and Vis Std 295, Sem A)
Course code 22810
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| COM LIT 220 | TRANSLATION WRKSHOP | LEZRA, J | How can one dare say that nothing is translatable and, by the same token, that nothing is untranslatable?” So asks Jacques Derrida. In this course we will seek to make sense of his question. We’ll approach its constituent assertions—that “nothing is translatable,” that “nothing is untranslatable,” and that one “dares to say” both “by the same token”—separately and together, through critical, philosophical and literary works and by means of practical examples drawn from the work and projects of the seminar’s participants. As a group, we will make use of the ongoing translation into English of the collaborative volume *Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles* (Seuil 2004; ed. Barbara Cassin).
Students may fulfill one of the Comparative Literature language requirements by enrolling in this class and completing a translation project that is accompanied by a substantive preface that engages the theoretical materials covered in the course.
Professor Lezra's Com Lit 220 Translation Workshop will meet for five weeks in January and early February; students will meet to discuss additional readings and work on their written assignments for the 5 weeks after his departure.
Course code 22840
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