| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 8 | PICTRING THE WORLD | SCHLOSSMAN, B. | Instructors: Beryl Schlossman & Georges Van Den Abbeele
This course proposes a multidisciplinary introduction to how we represent the world and the natural environment through hands-on study of early modern maps, art prints, and books. We will examine how the invention of the scientific method (and fields from geography to botany) interfaces with the personal observations and experiences of travelers from Marco Polo to Charles Darwin. Time permitting, we will further consider the way modern technologies, such as cinema, television, and digital media, are once again changing the way we see and understand the world. No prerequisites. |
| COM LIT 40B | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | LEI, D. | A one-year lecture-discussion course (each quarter may be taken independently) in the development of Western Drama, concentrating on the drama’s intellectual, social, and artistic foundations. About 10 plays and supplementary critical material are read each quarter.
40A: Greek Drama through Shakespeare. Readings from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the anonymous playwrights of the medieval theatre.
40B: Restoration Drama through Ibsen. Readings from Neoclassic, Romantic, and Naturalistic European playwrights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Molière, Racine, Congreve, Goethe, Ibsen, and Chekhov are included.
40C: Contemporary Drama. Post Naturalistic theatre: Expressionism, Epic Theatre, Theatre of the Absurd, and Contemporary American Theatre. Among the playwrights studied are Stein, Shaw, Pirandello, Ionesco, Beckett, Williams, Brecht, Weiss, Albee, Churchill, and Duras.
Same as Comparative Literature CL 40A, B, C. Drama and Music Theatre majors have first consideration for enrollment. (IV, VIII) |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | AMIRAN, E. | An introduction to literary and cultural theory Comp Lit style. What is deconstruction? Use it to read Franz Kafka. Want to read Hopi legends with structuralism? You can, but it might be a trap (learn why). Apply Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism to Bugs Bunny (mandatory), and debate the relation of queer theory to the war on terror with Jasbir Puar. Can you do a psychoanalytic reading of The Smurfs? that’s easy--but how about a Marxist reading of Batman? (We’ll do both.) If you start to think about it, theory changes everything. Would you change your mind about Adorno’s critique of the culture industry after viewing City of Jazz, a film on racism and pacing? Read Shakespeare sonnets with Eve Sedgwick and Michel Foucault, then critique domestic labor with Kalindi Vora. This course emphasizes mad skillz that help you make these connections, and also gives you basic grounding in critical theory. No previous theory experience required. |
| COM LIT 100A | INTRO EUR ST RENAIS | 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. International Studies majors with an emphasis on Europe, and Religious Studies majors may find it of interest.) 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 5-7 page research paper. |
| COM LIT 108 | MID EAST DISPRA LIT | RAHIMIEH, N. | This course focuses on the culture produced by communities of migrants from different nations states in the Middle East. We will begin by examining the concept of diaspora, its history, and its significance in the age of globalization. The emergence of communities of migrants from the Middle East is closely tied to the politics of the region and affects the way they relate to both to their home and host cultures. Through the study of theories of diaspora, literature and other forms of cultural production by Arab, Iranian, Turkish migrants, among others, we will explore the relationship between ethnicity, national identity, and diaspora. We will also reflect on how diasporic communities such as North Africans in France, Turks in Germany, and Iranians in the US create new flows between the local and the global. |
| COM LIT 130 | PHIL&MATRIX TRILOGY | CHANDLER, N. | 1. This course examines the problem of how to understand the time of our own lives historically - conceived as a critical archaeology of the future.
2. Its core focus is the blockbuster film project, The Matrix Trilogy (The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions), directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski from 1999 to 2004, including the special project that was also part of it, a collection of short films presented under the title Animatrix, involving several Japanese and Korean, and Chinese American, artists and directors working in manga and anime.
3. While the signature of the course is an engagement of the rich diversity of the religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions that have bearing for thinking a collective human future, as well as key global level historical turning points -- all of which are densely interwoven in The Matrix Trilogy -- its critical guide is the way in which the historicity of the African Diaspora, African Americans in the United States in particular, expose the most profound questions about the sense of a common futural historicity for humankind in general over the coming centuries.
4.The student who completes this course will understand both the need and some of the ways to go beyond traditional forms of history which remain so tied to traditional forms of identification in order to engage fully the diverse ways of life -- real and imagined -- that make up today’s globalized senses of world.
5. In addition to the Ultimate Matrix Collection from 2004, core documents for the course will include selections: from the contemporary writers and intellectuals Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Ernst Mayer, Raymond Kurzweil, Roger Penrose, Stuart A. Kauffman, Stephen Jay Gould, Shirley Tilghman, Ralph Ellison, Octavia Butler, Fredric Jameson, William Gibson, Hortense Spillers, Cornel West, Kevin Kelly, Edwin Black, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten, and Frank Wilderson III; from several films of the 1990s, Microsomos (Claude Nuridsany, Marie Pérennou, Jacques Perrin, 1996), A Bug’s Life (Pixar Studios, 1998), Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch, Forest Whitaker, 1999), Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii and Masmune Shirow, 1996), and, perhaps its sequel, Innocence [Ghost in the Shell 2](Mamoru Oshii and Masmune Shirow, 2004); from several classic texts in philosophy, natural science, literature, and cinema including work by Plato, Rene* Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Arnold Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Lewis Carroll, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Spencer, Gregor Mendel, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Albert Einstein, Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Akira Kurosawa; and from several major texts in religion and philosophy, not only the Abrahamic religious traditions (Judaic, Christian, and Islamic), but the Upanishads of the Indian sub-continent, and Buddhist thought in the texts of Nagarjuna, Santaraksita, Dōgen, as well as twentieth century Japanese and Buddhist philosophy in the work of Nishida, Kitarō.
6. This course is part of the STAR initiative -- Science, Technology, and Race -- established within the Program in African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
It is listed as Phil&MatrixTrilogy in the course schedule. |
| COM LIT 143 | SPECTACLE FASHION | ABBAS, M. | Fashion is a part of everyday life that is often dismissed by the serious-minded as frivolous. Yet Baudelaire begins his seminal essay on modernism ('The Painter of Modern Life') with a discussion of fashion plates, and Benjamin describes fashion as 'a tiger's leap into the past'. A similar ambiguity adheres to image and spectacle, but their importance can be seen in the fact that contemporary society has been characterized as a society of image and spectacle. Working with popular cultural materials as well as with groundbreaking theoretical texts, this course will present 'fashion, image, and spectacle' as related ways of interrogating and understanding the cultural history of the present. |
| COM LIT 144 | THE WRITER AS FIGHTER OR THE POLITICS OF LITERARY ENGAGEMENT | MORISI, E. | French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre articulated the not-so-easily-translated concept of “littérature engagée” in the mid-20th century. Yet the practice with which it is often associated, namely an author using his or her pen as a sword to defend a cause, existed long before the term became widely used—and, arguably, fashionable. Through the study of film, newspaper articles, pamphlets, manifestos, fiction, political speeches and iconography, this course sets out to identify the meaning(s) of literary engagement. We will investigate key examples of renowned French and francophone writers fighting actively for an ethically crucial or pressing matter, against what they believed to be an injustice, and/or in defense of a wronged individual or group of people. Such instances will include some of the following: Voltaire’s opposition to torture, his defense of civil and religious liberties, as well as his passionate involvement in the Calas and the La Barre affairs; the pleas of prominent Revolutionary thinkers for the rights of men and women; Victor Hugo’s commitment to social justice, the abolition of slavery and capital punishment, and the rejection of despotism; Émile Zola’s activism during the Dreyfus affair and his defense of the working class; 19th- and 20th-century French feminism, as incarnated by such figures as Georges Sand, Flora Tristan, Louise Michel, or Simone de Beauvoir; the critical publications of Résistance writers during WWII; and the opposition to colonization and imperialist oppression forcefully formulated by such thinkers as Fanon, Memmi, and Senghor, among others. The relationships between literature—in all its forms—visual culture, politics, and ethics will therefore be the center of our attention as we examine the tools and causes chosen by prominent authors as well as the impact of their prose on society. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE DECEPT | ABBAS, M. | Epistemology, conventionally understood, concerns how we know what we know; consequently, it must guard constantly against the danger of deception and self-deception. But are epistemology and deception necessarily so opposed? Can there be an epistemology of deception? Can “deception,” under certain conditions, be in some paradoxical way a form of knowing? Is it possible that between the concept and the percept as ways of knowing lies--the decept?
Not for the first time do the deceptive, the false, and the aberrant seem to be everywhere. Yet it just may be that every age has its own specific forms of deception, so much so that it might be possible to say: to understand an epoch, study its deceptions. Here the question becomes not so much one of exposing and correcting deceptions, as of locating them in all their specificity: what prompts them; what work do they do socially, politically, economically, culturally; what interests do they serve; what do they hide from view; what social ordering and modes of governance do they enable? In short, what is the significance and value of deceptions, of deception as such? Through deceptions, an other history, other readings and meanings may be invoked, those that may otherwise remain indiscernible.
What, finally, might all this suggest for critique? Might it suggest, under the critical conditions of our time, that critique cannot be a matter merely of separating true from false, of knowledge from deception, but a matter of finding a relation to what we don’t know?
The literary, philosophical, and visual texts discussed will include Shakespeare, Kleist, and Kafka; Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Deleuze; Welles, Polanski, and Wenders; Poe, Robbe-Grillet, and Magritte. |
| COM LIT 210 | HEAVEN AND HELL: BAUDELAIRE AND THE POÈTES MAUDITS | MORISI, E. | [NB: Course taught in French; also open to undergraduate French majors. Assignments and readings will be tailored for each constituency. Papers submitted by graduate students can be written in English.]
"Heaven and Hell: Baudelaire and the Poètes Maudits" examines the works of the most famous and infamous poets of France: Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Either separately or in response to one another, these poets explored and represented anew the heights of beauty and appeasement as well as the depths of brutality and pain. In doing so, they pursued a long literary tradition dedicated to exploring the riveting twin faces of heaven and hell—from the Bible, to Dante and Milton, for instance. But these poets were also inventors. Baudelaire innovatively depicted heavenly and hellish beauties with the same intensity and claimed to find an aesthetic heaven in hell. His followers Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé were nicknamed “poètes maudits” (“cursed poets”)—supposedly misunderstood or misrecognized, writing and/or living in a transgressive way, and, often, flirting with self-destruction: they too identified and sang original paradises, which led them to (be said to) probe a novel inferno by confronting the limits of their art and social status. In short, we will ask: Where did these masters locate heaven and hell? How did they choose to depict them? With what tools, experiments, to what end, and at what cost? |
| COM LIT 220 | TRANSLATION WRKSHOP | SCHLOSSMAN, B. | This graduate seminar on translation emphasizes theory, methodology, and practical approaches to translation. The three-‐pronged focus of the workshop is as follows: 1) the exploration of projects by individual students presented and discussed by the class; 2) the reading and discussion of essays on translation theory, especially “The Task of the Translator,” the influential essay by Walter Benjamin, the literary critic, writer, and translator of modern French literature into German; and 3) the investigation of some examples of poetry translated into English.
The theoretical and poetic readings for the course are intended to complement and enhance the work on projects. Students will give brief project presentations early in the quarter, and again, in greater depth, in the second half of the quarter. Presentations of projects in progress, substantive class discussion of student projects and other readings, and final projects (including an introduction designed to reflect on the processes of translation) are the essential components of the seminar. |