| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 10 | COMICS & SUPERHEROS | AMIRAN, E. | Comics talk to adults in the language of childhood; they fight crime with magical thinking; they showcase unmentionable desires and energies under flimsy disguises; they defend propriety (and property) with violence. Comics challenge our preceptions of reality, and help transform that reality. In this course, we will consider how comics use fantasy to work through social, psychological, and ideological issues. One of our main arguments will be that comics address social and topics like immigration, sexual identity, racism, and the cold war under cover of personal issues, such as eating disorders, paranoia and narcissism, separation anxiety, and OCD, so that in comics you can’t separate psychological from social and political arguments. Readings and viewings include McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Foster’s Prince Valiant (and probably other adventure comics like Tarzan, Secret Agent X-9, and Terry & The Pirates), Hanks’s Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle and Stardust the Super Wizard, Herge’s Tintin, Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol. 1, Moore’s Watchmen, and contemporary comics. Superheroes like Spiderman and Wonder Woman will be considered alongside anti-heroes like Katchor’s Julius Knipl. We will view films that animate comics, including classic Bugs Bunny and Popeye shorts and current web-based comics. Students will help select recent comics for the course. Assignments include short noteboard entries, a midterm essay, and a final exam. |
| COM LIT 40B | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | KUBIAK, A. | |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | TERADA, R. | An introduction to critical theory, from philosophical critique to Marx, Foucault, Derrida, antiracist theory and queer theory. The course will sketch the relation of these movements to one another and in interaction with literature and culture. In short papers, you’ll experiment with reading and writing with theory to enhance your analysis of culture and contemporary events. No previous experience is expected; discussion and debate will be encouraged. |
| COM LIT 105 | MULTICULTURALISM | SCHLICHTER, A. | The class offers a look at multiculturalism through the cultural production of various minority groups in the United States and Germany. We will discuss literature, autobiographical, and theoretical writings, films and popular music in order to explore both the historical and contemporary conditions of two different multicultural societies (including histories of nation building, citizenship, immigration). Materials will include essays by Angela Davis and R. Radhakrishnan, literary writings by Gish Jen, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, the German Jewish writer Barbara Honigman, the Turkish German writer Emine Sevig Özdamar, movies on the cultural differences between East and West Germany (such as Good-Bye Lenin, dir. Wolfgang Becker) and on German Turkish life (Head-on, dir. Fatih Akin) and German and US hip hop,
Requirements: regular attendance, midterm and final, short writing assignments (short essay or blog). A website will be available at the beginning of the quarter. |
| COM LIT 144 | SCI FI COLD WAR | LIU, C. | Science Fiction/Cold Wars looks at the cinematic and literary genre in light of Cold War culture and politics. This course will look at SF film and fiction in terms of Cold War visions of technological and political developments: we will focus on the rise of "mass society," "organization man," technocratic optimism, nuclear apocalypse and the space program will also be considered in the context of Southern California and its built environment. We will ask the question, "How as the SF imagination shaped by mass consumption/production and the threat of nuclear apocalypse?" Readings will include novels by Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Octavia Butler, William Gibson. Screenings will include The Thing, Dr. Strangelove, Road Warrior, Total Recall, The Matrix. Contact Prof. Liu at catherine.liu@uci.edu for an authorization code for this course. |
| COM LIT 160 | THE FAUX DOCUMENTARY | ABBAS, M. | When factoids are taken for facts, when ‘reality’ as in reality TV has become a game show, and when an unadorned fact is becoming as rare as ‘an orchid in the land of technology’, what becomes of documentary? Are we witnessing its demise? Not quite; but at the same time, the documentary cannot retain its old form or employ its old strategy of confronting the factitious with the factual. If documentary, like translation, is inadvertently a betrayal, then documentary will have to start with the fact of betrayal, with the betrayal of fact. It has to become—faux documentary. Through discussion of films and writing, the course will trace how mutations in the documentary form point to a world increasingly impervious to factual explanation. |
| COM LIT 190W | COMP INDIG LIT | SCHWAB, G. | In this course we will discuss indigenous literatures and films from the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A comparative perspective will allow us to discern commonalities and differences across cultures and nations as well as textual and visual forms of representation. Prominent topics will include colonialism, genocide, religion, gender politics, indigenism and sovereignty. We will discuss novels, poetry, short stories, and films in relation to specific theories of indigenous literatures, cultures, and histories.
Fiction: Louise Erdrich, Tracks (Native American); Leslie Silko, Yellow Woman (Native American); Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Native American); Jeanette Armstrong, Slash (Aboriginal Canadian); Witi Ihimaera, Whale Rider (Maori); Doris Pilkington and Nugi Garimara, Rabbit Proof Fence (Aboriginal Australian)
Poetry: Simon J. Ortiz, from Sand Creek (Native American)
Film: Thunder Heart; Incident at Oglala (Documentary); Atanarjaat (The Fast Runner) (Inuit/Canadian); Whale Rider; Rabbit-Proof Fence
Theory (Selections from the following texts): Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive; Ward Churchill, “Radioactive Colonization”; Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism; Kevin Bruynell, The Third Space of Sovereignty; Scott Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent |
| COM LIT 210 | GLOBALISM, POSTCOLONIALISM AND AFRICAN NARRATIVES | THIONG'O, N. | Globalism, Postcolonialism and African Narratives
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 theories of the post-colony and the globe. |
| COM LIT 210 | POSTCOLONIAL LIFE: LATIN AMERICA | JOHNSON, A. | In a sense this is a course which reflects on the politics animating the production and circulation of knowledge and theory. Our case study is the discourse of postcolonial theory and, to a lesser extent, the discourse of globalization as they intersect with knowledge about and from Latin America. What then does it mean to think Latin America through the lens of postcolonialism, particularly when the main corpus of what is known as postcolonial theory today evolved largely out of reflections on British and French colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Africa and Asia? Two decades ago the use of terms like postcoloniality and then later subalternity were vigorously contested by some intellectuals as yet another form of imperialism from the North American academy, even as others welcomed such theoretical traffic. To approach this question we will read some of the key works by postcolonial critics alongside texts that emerged out of a consideration of the Latin American colonial experience and its after-effects. We will also finally consider the relation between the paradigms of postcoloniality and globalization in order to consider the place of postcolonialism today. Has globalization superseded postcoloniality? To what extent do key tropes of globalization borrow from the work of earlier postcolonial critics? Why does the deployment of the paradigm of globalization seem less problematic than that of the post-colony to speak of contemporary Latin America? Readings include Homi Bhabba, Gayatri Spivak, Gyan Prakash, Michael Taussig, Sara Castro-Klarén, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Alberto Moreiras and others. Students will be asked to write six 2 page reaction papers and either a final paper or an annotated bibliography.Same as Spanish 233. |