| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | JOHNSON, A. | Introduction to theory and methods of literary and cultural criticism in a global context. Students read theoretical approaches to literature, culture, and ideas. Marx and Freud, e.g., may be studied alongside readings in narrative poetry, film, song lyrics, novel. |
| COM LIT 100A | THE AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVEL FROM ITS BEGINNINGS TO THE POSTMO | KEIZER, A. | The African American novelist Ralph Ellison wrote “I believe that true novels, even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core. Thus they would preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject.” This course explores the African American novel from the late nineteenth century to the present, investigating how these works “preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject” aspects of the genre and its sub-categories (e. g., the Bildungsroman, the postmodernist novel). As we examine the formal and thematic elements of the novels, we will pay particular attention to the representation of black folk culture, music, religious practices, and popular culture. We will also analyze the ways in which African American novelists respond to socio-economic and political realities, including the legacies of slavery, dominant-culture stereotypes of black men and women, black migration to northern and western cities, and the Civil Rights and feminist movements. Course requirements include midterm and final exams and an 8-10-page essay. |
| COM LIT 102W | GENDER IN GREEK LIT | JARRATT, S. | Classics 160W/Comp Lit 102W Speakers and writers in ancient Greek cultures used the beauty and power of language to persuade others to go to war or embrace peace, fall in love, punish wrong-doing, submit to belief systems or keep a skeptical distance from the claims of philosophy and religion. In this course, we will read examples of ancient Greek literature in translation from the 8thC BC to 4thC CE in several genres—epic, lyric poetry, legal argument, philosophical dialogue, and novel—focusing our critical attention on modes of persuasion. Gender is a key component in each case. Forms of masculinity demanded by warring states, feminine desire and creativity, homosociality in philosophical relations, and same-sex and heterosexual romantic love, among other topics, will engage our critical imaginations. As a “W” course, this course fulfills the upper-division writing requirement. The class will devote as much time to writing as to reading. Students will write in a variety of genres—reading response, textual analysis, legal argument, and creative reconstruction of classical texts. Readings include work by Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, Gorgias, Lysias, and Plato, along with some contemporary critical texts (Foucault; duBois). |
| COM LIT 120 | PHIL WRITING | BENCIVENGA, E. | Based on a specific view according to which philosophical practice amounts to a constant challenge to our received views, habits, and prejudices, this course will show how the philosophical substance of a piece of writing is a function of the level at which the text confronts diversity. Works written in four different genres will be studied, with emphasis not so much on their content as on their writing strategies: a dialogue, an essay, a series of lectures, and a pamphlet. Students will be required to write a 4,000-5,000 word term paper, in whatever genre they choose, for which they will have to provide first a summary and then a rough draft during the quarter. |
| COM LIT 122 | SURVEILLANCE MEDIA | AMIRAN, E. | The course examines the convergence of military and media The course examines the convergence of military and media technologies as ways of seeing and understanding the world. This convergence assumes a panoptic view of the world that increasingly penetrates every part of social space. We will discuss the use of visualization, gaming, and military technologies, and theories of the social construction and use of space. How do new technologies and social geographies like malls reconfigure both social and personal space? Surveillance media give rise to a space that is at once psychological and political, personal and social. In digital media in particular, material and psychological ideas of space converge. We consider both popular representations of mediated social space and the relation of subjectivity to emergent military media technologies. We will view a range of international film and other works, and discuss race, class repression, and spying, for example, as they are produced in USA and global contexts. Readings include theoretical texts by Heidegger, Virilio, and Puar, films including Dr. Strangelove and Hiroshima, mon amour, video game play, fiction, experimental video, and cultural theory. Assignments are graded equally and include in-class essays and a final exam. Attendance is required, and participation upgrades your score. |
| 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 1 being of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation. Oil, wheat, and lumber are fungible commodities. [Slaves are also fungible.] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fungible |
| COM LIT 130 | WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? | KEIZER, A. | What’s Love Got to Do with It? Gender, Power, and Sexuality in African American Literature Since the era of American slavery, African American writers have grappled with the difficulties of representing love and sexuality in the context of coercion and the negative stereotypes that have dominated representations of black people in the Americas. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African American fiction emphasized black morality, respectability, and “uplift” in order to counter widespread denigration. While critical for US race politics, such a stance became a constraint as nineteenth-century literary cultures gave way to Modernism and subsequent experimental movements. In the wake of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and feminist movements, new possibilities for representing gender and sexuality became available to African American writers. This course will examine fiction, poetry, drama, and film by twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American writers, with particular attention to the influence of nineteenth-century concerns upon more recent works. Through our close readings, we will trace thematic and stylistic continuities and discontinuities between the texts under study, and we will consider the socio-economic and political factors that established the parameters of African American creative expression, including the legacies of slavery, stereotypes of black men and women, sexual violence, and movements for social, political, and sexual liberation. We will use critical essays to enhance our analyses of primary texts. Course requirements will include a midterm exam, a 5-page essay, and a take-home final exam. |
| COM LIT 130 | O.BUTLER & M.ATWOOD | CHANDLER, N. | Provides students with an opportunity to pursue advanced work in African American studies from one or more humanities approaches (literature, film and media studies, art history, and others). |
| COM LIT 150 | MOD MIDDLE EAST LIT | RAHIMIEH, N. | The very designation, the Middle East, raises complex historical and political questions we will attempt to address through selected literary works written originally in Arabic,Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish. All readings for the course will be in English. Our discussions will take into account colonial and national histories as well as questions of literary genre and their travels across languages, regions, and cultures. Few can lay claim to knowledge of the many languages and cultural and literary histories a course of this nature would require. We will engage in a collective effort to gain some appreciation of the challenge of reading in translation and we will remain attentive to national histories invoked or resisted in the works. We will also draw on documentaries and films to complement our readings. |
| COM LIT 160 | FRENCH FILM FROM SURREALISM TO THE NEW WAVE | SCHLOSSMAN, B. | Internationally influential and highly innovative, French film has a long history. It is best known for the invention and early experimentation with the new medium; for the transformation of photography, theater, and literary influences into the new styles and techniques of an enduring national cinema; for cinema d’auteur (author-based film), derived from the “poetic realism” of the films of Jean Renoir and Jean-Pierre Melville, among others; and for major films and writings by the New Wave, especially François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Jacques Rivette, and Agnès Varda. The films of major directors studied in the course influenced other national and avant-garde cinemas around the world. Readings in French film criticism (in translation) by André Bazin, Jean Renoir, and New Wave critics are an essential component of the course. Films screened and assigned are in French, with English subtitles. Lectures, readings, screenings, midterm, and final exam. |
| COM LIT 210 | DISPOSABLE LIVES: THEORY, LITERATURE, FILM | SCHWAB, G. | CL 210/ H270 This course explores the increasing global neoliberal production of disposable lives from the perspective on new trends in critical and cultural theory. Disposability is linked to violent histories ranging from the spectacular violence of warfare to the slow violence of neoliberal capitalism and its spreading economics of abandonment. Colonialism, WWII, the Holocaust and Hiroshima inaugurate a new form of disposability linked to the specter of genocide and ecocide, including the nuclear destruction of life on earth. Disposability is, however, also inherent in the proliferating forms of slow violence (Rob Nixon) that threaten human and species life. We will discuss a range of theories that address the question of disposable lives from different perspectives such as, for example, the haunting reality of genocide and nuclear war, ecocide and the planetary crisis, spectrality and the haunting from the future, the attacks on civil society, the social contract and the common good; resilient subjectivities and resistance, cruel modernity (Franco) and “cruel optimism” (Berlant), the “equivalence of catastrophes” (Jean-Luc Nancy), “ecologies of fear” (Mike Davis) and the ambivalence of apocalyptic fantasies. Theory (we will discuss specific selections of the following texts): Giorgio Agamben, Bare Life Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now” (essay in Nuclear Criticism) Paul Bernstein, “Post Cold-War US Nuclear Strategy,” (essay in: On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century) Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza Rob Nixon, Slow Violence Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity Joao Biehl, Vita Elisabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment William Connolly, The Fragility of Things Literature and Film Samuel Beckett, Happy Days Michael Ondaatje, Anil' s Ghost Svetlana Alexievitch, Voices of Chernobyl Marcos Prado, Estamira (documentary) Patricio Guzman, Nostalgia for the Light (documentary) |
| COM LIT 210 | ALTHUSSER AND HIS LEGACIES | FARBMAN, H. | This course will examine key moments in the development of Althusser’s thinking, from his rereading of Marx with his students and his encounter with Lacan in the early ‘60s through his late work on “aleatory materialism.” It will also consider some aspects of his enormous and multifarious influence—in the first place on his students (here we will focus on the cases of Foucault, Derrida, and Rancière) and then, partly via his students and partly in spite of them, on the subsequent generation (here we will focus on the cases of Butler and Zizek). |