| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40B | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | AMIRAN, E. | This course is an intensive introduction to literary theory and to methods reading. We study different theoretical approaches to literature and use them to interpret different kinds of texts. Theory we read includes structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism, deconstruction, and cultural history, among others; literary works include Fredrick Douglass’s Autobiography, Shakespeare sonnets, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, parables by Franz Kafka, digital media, comics by Fletcher Hanks, films by Demme and Hitchcock, selections from the New Testament, and others. The course combines lecture with seminar discussion. No previous knowledge of literary and cultural theory is expected for the course, but you should be ready to learn some! |
| COM LIT 102 | MELODRAMA | TERADA, R. | In this course we look into the genre of film melodrama, inquiring how to think about emotions that seem extravagant, excessive and sometimes even false. We will ask how the idea of hyperbolic emotions helps to form normative models of self, concepts, feeling, and what is socially possible. Often, melodrama’s depiction of a world of people who can’t seem to produce the “right” emotions seems to suggest criticism of the society that demands certain emotions and yet has produced these people. We’ll watch several films from the period of classic melodrama or reflecting back on it, probably including George Cukor, Gaslight (1944), Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows (1955), Alberto Gout, Aventurera (1950), Ki-Young Kim, The Housemaid (1960), Todd Haynes, Far from Heaven (2004), and for contrast, Kent MacKenzie, The Exiles (1961). The class format will be student-driven discussion; requirements include regular postings on a website, two 5-pp. papers, a midterm, and a final. |
| COM LIT 107 | GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW | JOHNSON, A. | This course is the capstone seminar for the Global Cultures major and explores the topic of what globalization looks like from 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. The seminar will be interdisciplinary: we'll be reading history as well as novels, watching films and looking at theoretical essays on globalization. Finally, as befits a capstone seminar particular emphasis will be put on your own creative and critical contributions to the topic in the form of a class presentation and final research paper in addition to weekly contributions to a class blog.
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| COM LIT 140 | INTRO KEY TEXTS | ABBAS, M. | |
| COM LIT 143 | MEMORIALS, MONUMENTS AND MONSTROSITIES | AL-KASSIM, D. | Monuments and memorials mark heroic turning points in the life of a nation, state or people and claim to be the final word in social struggle. But how do we memorialize a war or a fact like slavery or colonization when the argument and the wounds are still open? Architecture and museums are called upon more than other forms to draw such periods of trouble to a close, yet memorialisation can take many forms: statues, installations, museums, exhibitions, film or literary works. We will read literary accounts that register the trouble with memory alongside interesting cases of politically charged memorials. To approach this question we will look at 4 cases: South Africa after apartheid, USA after Vietnam, Algeria after revolution and Lebanon after civil war.
Works by Annie Coombes, Yvette Christiansen, Lauren Berlant, Assia Djebar and Rachid Daif along with short essays in architecture, urban studies, museum studies and cultural studies. |
| COM LIT 160 | GODARD | GELLEY, A. | CL 160/FMS 115, "Godard, New Wave and After", Winter, 2011, Prof. Alexander Gelley
M, 3-5:50, W, 3-4:20, HH 262
Jean Luc Godard's career as a film-maker is extraordinary at once for its length (1954 to the present), its variety, and its provocations. It began with his work as a film critic and then continued with the critical dimension subsumed in his films. In the process the films have passed through a number of phases, from early works closely allied to the New Wave style to others where the narrative mode is adapted to discursive and quasi-documentary practices. What is more, his films have responded, both explicitly and implicitly, to some of the major theoretical currents of the past half century. We will view and discuss a selection of films from Breathless (1960) to Notre Musique (2004), including parts of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998), the long film essay on the history of films. |
| COM LIT 200B | THEORIES OF TRANSLATION | SCHWAB, G. | We 9-12; Office Hrs: 12 –1 and by appointment
Requirements: Seminar Paper and Class presentation
The emphasis of this course will be on the concept of cultural translation. We will discuss this concept from a variety of angles, including intralingual translation, interlingual translation and intersemiotic translation (Jakobson’s distinction). In particular we will explore issues such as translation and transference, the positioning of translation in the location of culture, translation and global literacies, and postcolonial perspectives on translation. In the final section of the seminar we will turn to so-called “transcreations” in literary texts and a film. In this context, we will also look at the creative aspects of Samuel Beckett’s autotranslations.
Sections and Texts:
I. Dislocating Translation
1. Sigmund Freud, “On Transference” (Collected Works, Vol. 11) “The Ego and the Id,” (in Vol. XIII), The Interpretation of Dreams (Chapters VI “The Dream Work” and VII “The Psychology of the Dream Processes”); Walter Benjamin,” The Task of the Translator” in Illuminations; Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other (Chapter on Translation); Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (includes the Benjamin essay)
II. Cultural Translation and the Location of Culture
2. Homi Bhabha, “How Newness Enters the World,” in The Location of Culture (last chapter); D. W. Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience” in Peter Rudnytsky, ed., Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott; Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Anthropology” in Clifford/Marcus eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
III. Translation, Global Literacies and the Borders of Disciplines
3. Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Columbia UP; “The Politics of Translation,” (in Venuti Reader)
IV. Postcolonial Perspectives
5. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New
4. Niranjana, T. Siting Translation: History, Postcolonialism and the Colonial Context, U of California Pr., 1992
V. Translation and Transcreation
5. Cuckoo (2002 Film by Estonian director Aleksandr Rogozhkin)
6. Samuel Beckett, Le Depeupleur and The Lost Ones (Autotranslation and Transcreation) Theory: Friedman/Rossman/Sherzer, eds., Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett
7. Ermine Özdamar, Mother Tongue
8. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language |
| COM LIT 210 | EXPOSURES | AL KASSIM, D. | CL 210, Winter 2011
Exposures: Biopolitics and Psychoanalysis in the Practice of Truth
“I found that, after witnessing Peter Hujar’s death on November 26, 1987, and after my recent diagnosis, I tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical words or concepts designed to make sense of the external world or designed to give momentary comfort. It’s like stripping the body of flesh in order to see the skeleton, the structure. I want to know what the structure of all this is in the way only I can know it…there is something I want to see clearly, something I want to witness in its raw state. And this need comes from my sense of mortality. There is a relief in having this sense of mortality.” – David Wojnarowicz
“I do not think that reflection on this notion of govermentality can avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of a subject defined by the relationship of self to self. Although the theory of political power as an institution usually refers to a juridical conception of the subject of right, it seems to me that the analysis of governmentality – that is to say, of power as a set of reversible relationships – must refer to an ethics of the subject defined by the relation of self to self.” – Michel Foucault
No analysis of power without the relation of self to self, yet no analysis possible without a radical exposure of the self; between them, Foucault and Wojnarowicz identify a conundrum of contemporary thought in its approach to biopolitical realities and in doing so, they both, in different ways, attest to a fundamental relation of exposure in all its valences (self-exposure, disclosure, contamination, vulnerability, precarity) at the core of social relations. What histories of the exposure, harrowing, and harnessing of the self do they narrate? How do witnessing, suffering and expression alter or figure this exposure? What place does this subjection have in political theory today? What place does it have in contemporary literature and art practice attuned to political predicaments and the afterlife of crisis, revolution and colonial predation?
In Foucault’s wake, much biopolitical theory seems to have forgotten that power and governmentality go by way of the subject. Such theory produces “bare life” as a mute and fallow ground inhospitable to aesthetico-political renewal and lacking access to concepts of truth, disclosure and community because of the violent mediations of global capital, modern anomie and the assumed effects of precarity (illiteracy, deficiency, incapacity for self-governance). Through this lens, the political struggles of gendered, racial and religiously-marked subjects are often characterized as no more than the return of the archaic in a social landscape devoid of community. In this course we will chart this claim as it has emerged in political philosophy (Agamben, Esposito) and examine the ways that such political theory obscures the real labor of survival that constitutes and characterizes social vulnerability. As a counter to this trend in biopolitical theory, postcolonial and post-revolutionary writing reflecting on alternatives to bare life will guide our critical engagement.
To address these issues we look to a set of writing and art practices that argue for revelation through containment or exposure of truth through figures of impasse. The authors and artists we will study aim to disarticulate witnessing from the juridical notion of truth-telling to accede to what we might call, following Foucault and Butler, a radical parrhesia, which many of the writers and thinkers we will read believe is accessible only through the ordeal of exposure. Psychoanalysis, as a set of speculative reflections on the modes and means of such parrhesia without mastery, offers us ways of approaching practices of truth in the modern dispensation of subject and community. We will also consult the work of anthropologists responding to biopolitical theory and crafting new terms of description, e.g. “spiritual insecurity” in the wake of state sovereignty.*
Critical writings by Agamben, Ashforth, Bataille, Bersani, Butler, Comaroff, Deleuze, Esposito, Fletcher, Foucault, Laplanche, Pandolfo, Taussig, Zizek
Literature:
Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
Rachid Daif, Dear Mr. Kawabata
Nureddin Farah, Close Sesame
Zoe Wicomb, David’s Story
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives
*N.B. Please acquire the literary texts above. All other readings will be made available through pdfs accessible from the website via password to enrolled students. Likewise the syllabus of weekly readings will be available to the password protected website. |
| COM LIT 210 | BODIES, SELVES, TECHNOLOGIES | SCHLICHTER, A. | 12:00pm - 2:50pm Th HIB 220
The class will reflect on the use of Foucault's work for a cultural studies mode of analysis. I am particularly interested in the relevance to discussions of the materiality of the body and of media that have emerged in gender, queer and media studies. By investigating the central terms of Foucault's texts (such as "subject," "knowledge," "discourse", "power," "subjection," "technologies of self") with and against their interpretations and modifications in writings by his readers (among them Judith Butler, Friedrich Kittler, Mark Poster and Jonathan Sterne), we will attempt to articulate fragments of a material studies of subjectivity.
Pro-seminar option: 2 short position papers, in-class presentation, regular postings
Seminar option: 20pp seminar paper, in-class presentation, regular postings
(Same as Hum 270) |
| COM LIT 210 | MODERN PERSIAN LITERATURE | RAHIMIEH, N. | W 1:30-4:20p, HG 1342
This course focuses on the patterns of development in modern Persian literature and the intellectual and literary debates that surrounded the turn to the modern. We will examine the crucial role translation played in the articulation of a new Persian prose and poetry and analyze the heated debates about the role of literature in the creation of a national consciousness and its potential for resistance to imperialism and foreign domination.
In addition to reading to novels, short stories and poems, we will analyze the works of the major critics of modern Persian literature. Among the writers included will be: Bozorg Alavi, Sadeq Hedayat, Sadeq Chubak, Nima Yushij, Forugh Farrokhzad, Simin Gholamhossein Sa’edi, Sohrab Sepehri, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Simin Daneshvar, Iraj Pezeshkzad, Houshang Golshiri, Shafii-Kadkani, Simin Behbahani, and Fariba Vafi. |