| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 8 | WRITING BEYOND THE RESERVATION | COX, A | The U.S. practice of forcibly removing Native American children from their families and institutionalizing them in boarding schools far from their homes began during the early English colonial period, and it reached its zenith in the late 19th century when General Richard Henry Pratt established the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the motto of which was “Kill the Indian, and save the man.” Dozens of Indian boarding schools operated until the 1990s, and this history is a crucial aspect of American Indian heritage. This course focuses on the ways in which former Indian boarding school students craft narratives that 1) respond to the physical, emotional, and spiritual violence they endured and 2) create methods of surviving cultural destruction and geographic displacement from their reservation communities. Students will examine themes of genocide, gender assimilation, trauma, resistance, and survival. Course readings include narratives written by former boarding school students from the Paiute, Ohlone, Hopi, and Lakota nations. To consider relations between indigenous experiences of assimilation policies in the U.S. and Canada, students will also read narratives by former residential school students from the Cree and Ojibwe nations. Additionally, students will learn the historical, linguistic, and cultural contexts of Indian boarding school narratives by considering indigenous perspectives of settler colonialism as expressed through films, music videos, and songs. |
| COM LIT 9 | CULTURAL CONTACT ZONES: US, GERMANY | SCHLICHTER, A. | Mary Louise Pratt describes contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” The class offers a look at the diverse societies of the contemporary US and Germany as “contact zones.” We will use literary, autobiographical, and theoretical writings, films and popular music in order understand different histories of migration, citizenship, discourses of race and ethnicity and their role in current events, such as the refugee crisis in Germany and anti-Black violence in the US. Readings will include texts by Gish Jen, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. We will also watch movies on tensions between East and West German cultures and on German Turkish life. The class format will include modalities such as lecturing, small group work, class discussion. Requirements: regular attendance, online quizzes, midterm and final, short writing assignments. Website will be available at the beginning of the quarter. |
| COM LIT 10 | TERROR & LITERATURE | MOR, L | The definition of terror is quite allusive, as is evident from the cliché that “one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." The possibility of understanding terror is further complicated by the fact that most of the current public discussion of this concept narrows its broader historical meanings: Since 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror, the notion of terror has come to be tied to certain forms of political violence and religious extremism. However, terror as a concept has a much longer history, one which is rooted in politics, philosophy and the arts and is linked to attempts to better comprehend aesthetics and the human psyche. From Aristotle’s musings on theatrical terror as emotional catharsis, through Edmund Burke’s notion of sublime terror in poetry and its relation to the French revolutionary terror, to the themes of terror and alienation in contemporary Middle Eastern literature, the notion of terror has long joined aesthetics to politics and vice versa. In this course we will therefore explore different conceptions of terror by examining the ways in which its aesthetic and political dimensions interact. Specifically, we will focus on the relationship between terror and literature. How is terror related to reading and writing? How does it function, at one and the same time, as an everyday feeling, an aesthetic effect and a political category? What do definitions of terror teach us about the perimeters of political communities? How does the “terrorist” or the “terrifying” define the limits of what is considered normal, or even human, in a given society? Topics may include: terror as catharsis, the grotesque, horror and monstrosity, the relationship between terror and colonization and between terror and gender, revolutionary and sublime terror, terrorism in the era of globalization, and the War on Terror. |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | JOHNSON, A. | Reading With Theory is one of the core courses of the introductory sequence to the comparative literature major/minor. When scholars in the humanities today refer to “theory” they mean something like the twentieth century continuation of a form of questioning begun with philosophy. Theory thus refers to attempts to inquire into why things are the way they are in our world today and/or build new models of how they can be. This course aims to give you some sense of the main traditions in theory that are at the root of important theoretical discussions today. In other words, the course aims to give you the tools to engage with contemporary theorization by showing you where they come from, how they dialogue with, challenge or extend earlier formulations in order to open up thinking about the world and make thinking more conscious and critical. The course will also pair theoretical material with fictional work (videos, movies, literary pieces) that help stage, visualize or extend the theoretical models we will be discussing. |
| COM LIT 107 | REALISM IN THIRD WORLD LITERATURE | AHMAD, A. | This course offers readings in forms of narrative prose, mostly fictional prose, in texts drawn from literatures of Africa, Latin America and Asia (including the Middle East). In terms of critical theory, we shall be engaged with issues related to the rather complex category of ‘Realism’. This will be supplemented with a few critical essays related to the main themes. We will also grapple with implications of using terms like ‘the Third World’, the ‘Tricontinent’, ‘Global South’ etc. 19th century European Realism has undoubtedly been very influential in a considerable body of Third World fiction. Much of it abounds, however, in literary experimentation and technical innovation. Some have borrowed narrative techniques from Western Modernism and even postmodernism, often weaving those into strongly realist narrative content. Others have turned to premodern and precolonial narrative traditions, deploying various aspects of the oral traditions, folktales, fables, allegories, myths, and so on. This is as true of African writers, from Amos Tutoula to Ngugi wa Thongi’o, as of Asian and Middle Eastern ones (e.g., Mahasveta Devi, Intezar Hussein, Tayib Saleh). In Latin America, writers as different as Carpentier, Asturias, Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende generate narratives with such mixture of forms that terms like ‘magic realism’, ‘marvellous realism’, ‘fabulism’ etc have had to be used to capture not just their uncategorizable novelty but also their difference from traditional distinctions between Realism, Modernism and Postmodernism. Eduardo Galeano has introduced the magical and the marvellous, allegory and fable, even in a unique kind of historical narrative (the trilogy Memory of Fire) In most cases, this technical innovation and experimentation goes hand in hand with radical social and political commitments. A question then arises: what is special to the historical conditions prevailing in Third World countries that so often requires a departure from established European forms and the constant invention of new hybrid forms that mix the formal properties of modern fiction with prolix borrowings from narrative forms of the indigenous past, while composing highly charged political narratives of the present with a strong realist content? |
| COM LIT 107 | DEFINING DECOLONIZATION | COX, A | Defining Decolonization: Indigenous Theories of Intellectual Sovereignty Insisting that the colonization of the Americas persists today, many American Indian intellectuals reject the term postcolonial to name the present situation of their various Native nations or the United States more broadly. Indeed, as the Standing Rock Lakota nation’s recent struggle to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline demonstrates, the sovereign rights of Native nations to self-govern and steward their lands are often overthrown by corporate interests. The field of Native American studies recognizes that colonialism is perpetuated in the ideological as well as economic and political realms. For example, when non-Native scholars control academic discourse about Indians and their cultural productions, racial identity politics often shut out other significant issues affecting Indian peoples, such as class, gender, sexuality, land relations, and sovereignty. Goals of this course include centering indigenous conceptual frames of reference, constructing genealogies that challenge the master narratives of U.S. history, and training students in the cultural literacy needed to be a good guest in the homeland of American Indian peoples, specifically here in the Acjachemen and Tongva Traditional Territories where UC Irvine is located. This course will engage with works by indigenous scholars who develop research methodologies and modes of critique, analyses, and debate that work to decolonize the educational system. Students will explore a range of American Indian intellectual traditions from the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Kiowa, Pequot, Acoma Pueblo, Kumeyaay, Hopi, and Ojibwe nations including oral narratives, speeches, essays, poetry, autobiography/memoir, and novels as well as educational art forms such as songs, wampum belts, birch bark writings, pottery, and baskets. Students will also engage with the works of scholars who contribute indigenous perspectives to the fields of feminism, queer studies, and critical race theory. |
| COM LIT 121 | THE DETECTIVE STORY | ABBAS, A. | ‘X’ marks the scene of a crime; but ‘X’ also marks the site of reading, in the sense that, like a puzzling crime, an innovative text (story or film) challenges our ability to read it. This course proposes to use the detective story (texts about how crime can or cannot be solved) to introduce theories of reading. By examining different kinds of detective stories and the critical and theoretical issues they directly or indirectly pose, the course will serve as a gentle and entertaining initiation to current critical theory. Texts studied will include the pioneering work of E.A.Poe and Conan Doyle (‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Purloined Letter’, and the Sherlock Holmes stories); the ‘hard-boiled’ transformation of the genre in films like ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and ‘Chinatown’; the tales of Patricia Highsmith and J.L.Borges on the ‘metaphysical’ dimensions of crime (‘Strangers on a Train’ and ‘Death and the Compass’); and stories showing the detective at the center of a new kind of malaise in the contemporary city (Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’) and in cyberspace (William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’). |
| COM LIT 150 | THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT IN LITERATURE | MOR, L. | The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been one of the major political and military conflicts of our time. With no conceivable end in sight, we might wonder: How has this conflict come to be? How is it sustained? What are the implications of this conflict for peoples’ lives, cultures, and economies? And how does literature convey, and respond to, this conflict? This course will survey the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—from the inception of Zionism to the Second Intifada—through the lens of literature. We will combine readings of relevant historical documents with explorations of prose and poetry in order to comprehend the nuances of the different ideologies, sentiments, and perspectives involved. Specifically, we will examine the capacities of literary (and cinematic) texts to contest historical narratives and allow for alternative understandings of this conflict and its past. Investigating the particular ways in which literature communicates past events, we will pay special attention to the role of conflict as a literary device in narratives. By focusing on poetic moments in the texts, which are fraught with meanings and thus mirror the conflicts discussed, you will be introduced to the practice of close, critical reading and develop sensitivity to the rhetorical dimension of the text. While originally written mostly in Arabic and Hebrew, all required readings will be discussed in English translation. This situation will afford us with an opportunity to address the intricacies of cultural and linguistic translation in general, and in the context of Israel-Palestine in particular (students interested in the original Hebrew or Arabic texts are welcome to contact me for copies). Readings may include: Fadwa Tuqan, Emile Habiby, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Liyana Badr, Edward Said, Haim Hazaz, S. Yizhar, A. B. Yehoshua, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Etgar Kerrett, Ella Shohat, and Almog Behar. |
| COM LIT 160 | FRENCH CINEMA | 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 | BENJAMIN & THE CITY | SCHLOSSMAN, B. | At the moment when the surrealists combine new media of photography and film with texts that often look back to earlier forms of modernist aesthetics, the Berlin literary critic and theorist Walter Benjamin launched an ambitious work of literary criticism that combined elements of psychoanalysis, philosophy, aspects of cultural studies and history, Marxism, and philology. In several completed essays on Baudelaire and in the unfinished masterpiece of citation and interpretation, the Arcades Project, Benjamin names the focus of his work the capital of the nineteenth century. The modern city is the site where urban development is characterized by its intersections with culture, writing, commodification, fashion, and a loss of tradition. In theoretical essays, but also in diaries, short texts, and a major memoir, Benjamin writes about the old and new in Berlin, Naples, Moscow, and especially Paris (considered at times in relation to other modern Western cities, including London and New York). Benjamin views Paris as the city that best represents his conception of a “capital of the nineteenth century.” The seminar will explore The Arcades Project and several short texts in English translation in Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings. |
| COM LIT 210 | QUEER THEORY | SCHLICHTER, A. | Sexual politics "after" Foucault Michel Foucault's thinking of "the body" and "sexuality" has been both highly influential and severely contested in different fields of the study of "sexuality." His History of Sexuality is often conceived as the most influential single text in contemporary sexuality studies. This course will discuss the interventions his work made possible in queer and feminist debates of gender and sexuality as well as their limits. What are Foucault's strategies of "queer thinking?" What forms of critique of and resistance against heteronormativity do his writings propose? How do central notions, such as "reverse discourse," "bodies and pleasures," "biopower", "biopolitics", "care of self", "governmentality" offer starting points to rethink what we might conceive of as a "sexual politics?" Where do such concepts appear to become problematic? How are they racialized? In addition to Foucault's own writings, we will explore queer and feminist responses to his work. The reading list will include work by theorists such as Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, Sadyia Hartman, Jose Munõz, Beatrice Preciado, Lauren Stoler et al. Requirements: regular postings, leading discussion of one text during the quarter and writing assignment (seminar paper or annotated bibliography.) |
| COM LIT 210 | KANT, CONCEPT, TELEOLOGY, RACE | CHANDLER, N. | This course will work through the concept of teleology in Immanuel Kant’s thought of the human, especially with regard to his production of the first philosophical concept of race. Key texts are: sections from both The First Critique and the Third Critique, the essays “Determination of a Concept of Race” (1785), “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” (1788), and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1795). As such it will examine the relative and interwoven status of organic teleology and aesthetic teleology, in particular as it is staged as a problem of the diversity of the human, both as homo sapiens and as an historial being, in the work of Kant. Notably, while key texts are indicated above the course works with texts across the entirety of Kant’s mature discourse, on the matter of teleology therein. |
| COM LIT 210 | EUROPHONISM OR POSTCOLONIALISM | THIONG'O, N. | Europhonism or Postcolonialism: Language and Identity in African Literature In Africa, and generally in nations that were formerly colonized, most of the writing is largely in European languages. This is a phenomenon can be described as Europhonism. Europhonism is a situation in which writers have chosen or forced by history to abandon their languages and write in that of another, mostly the formerly colonizing nation. In Africa it has given rise to Anglo-phonism, Franco-phonism and Luso-phonism. This raises the question of literary identity, in particular that of Literary Identity Theft. Using literature written by Africans, the course explores Europhonism as an important feature of postcolonialism and postcolonial theory. The course will draw on other histories to see if literary phonism is a theoretical category in its own right. |