| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 8 | WRITING BEYOND THE RESERVATION | COX, A. | What happens to the common conception of travel literature when we consider the context of colonialism in the Americas, including Indigenous peoples’ stories of how settlers forced them to move from their traditional homelands onto reservations and took their children to live in government institutions? This course focuses on the narratives of American Indian and Canadian First Nations peoples who were displaced to Indian boarding schools (U.S.) and residential schools (Canada) as part of colonial government policies to assimilate Indigenous peoples to settler cultures. Course readings include works by former Indian boarding school and residential school students from the Lakota, Dakota, Hopi, Paiute, Cree, and Ohlone nations. While this course foregrounds the autobiographical practices through which former Indian boarding school students craft personal narratives to respond to conditions of physical, emotional, and spiritual violence, students will also explore diverse forms of cultural production in boarding school discourses, including poetry, films, essays, and music videos. |
| COM LIT 10 | TERROR | MOR, L. | The definition of terror is quite elusive, 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 , 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? 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, the case of Israel-Palestine 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 102W | ECOPOLITICS | SCHWAB, G. | In this course we will study the entanglement of two of the gravest dangers humanity faces today, namely nuclear politics and environmental violence. The course will be divided into two sections: 1. Nuclear Politics; 2. Ecological Violence, Resource Depletion and Climate Change. Drawing on Gregory Bateson’s “ecology of mind,” we will open with questions regarding the production of ecological knowledge and consciousness. We then move to the legacy of Hiroshima and nuclear politics. In this section, we will discuss nuclear colonialism, critical nuclear race theory and the gendering of nuclear politics, nuclear war and transgenerational nuclear trauma, nuclear energy, nuclear accidents and nuclear waste. In the second section, we will discuss the anthropocene, slow ecological violence, climate change and the extinction of species and planetary life as well as a possible politics of resistance and ethics of trans-species care. |
| COM LIT 105 | EARLY AMERICAN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE | CHANDLER, N. | This course will introduce students to the history of the African American intellectual and literary construction of the American experience, focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries – highlighting its early emergence, intensity and breadth – the colonial period through the advent of the Twentieth century. The will focus will be on Phillis Wheatley, Oluadah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, David Walker, Maria Stewart, and Frederick Douglass. W. E. B. Du Bois’s reflections on African American intellectual traditions will be of basic reference. In addition to established and recognized literary and intellectual texts, the readings and lectures also include, or consider, inscribed oral texts such as orations and public addresses, sermons, testimonials, songs, especially spirituals, and folklore. Other readings referenced or discussed in the class include published poetry, essays, petitions, legal appeals and declarations, editorials, slave narratives and other autobiographical narratives, fiction, and histories. The student who completes this course will have an understanding of the African American intellectual and literary construction of the American experience and thus the emergence of a modern literature and intellectual tradition, noting its early announcement within the history of the United States and a profound sense of its intensity and breadth. |
| COM LIT 130 | BUTLER AND ATWOOD | CHANDLER, N. | This seminar considers the problem of how to understand the time of our own lives historically according to our senses of the future. It does so by way of an engagement with speculative fiction – the work of which is conceived as a critical archaeology of the future. This course is devoted to Octavia Butler’s Parable series, 1993-1998 (Parable of the Sower, 1993 and Parable of the Talents, 1998, of which a third volume remained incomplete upon her passing) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy from 2003-2013 (Oryx and Crake, 2003, The Year of the Flood, 2009, and MaddAddam, 2013). The 2015-2017 made-for-television Netflix series – led by Lana Wachowski – Sense8, along with the series long adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, presented by Hulu will serve as counterpoint genre and technique for our novels. The classic study They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1954), by Milton Sanford Mayer, will be referenced. If possible, the seminar members will visit the Octavia Butler’s papers and archives at the Huntington Library in Pasadena/San Marino. This is an upper division writing intensive seminar, fulfilling such criteria. In practical terms, this means that a student who takes this course should be prepared for both substantial reading and substantial writing |
| COM LIT 132 | CALIFORNIA LITERATURES | DIMENDBERG, E. | Whatever the eventual verdict on the ongoing experiment that is California, few can deny the range and fecundity of its literary traditions which span from Native American inhabitants and European explorers and missionaries to contemporary immigrants. This class will consider a wide range of California writing in the modes of folklore, the short story, novel, diary, literary essay, natural history, poetry, and cultural criticism. It will cover by texts by Spanish missionaries and conquerors, Native Americans, Sarah Royce, Helen Hunt Jackson, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Robinson Jeffers, Joan Didion, Blaise Cendrars, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, Raymond Chandler, M.F.K. Fischer, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Thomas Pynchon, Amy Tan, John Steinbeck, Clifford Odets, Louis Adamic, Nathanel West, Reyner Banham, Tom Wolfe, John Muir, Carey McWilliams, and Vikram Seth. Our goal will be to understand the interactions of culture and nature and the formations of community in a place defined by the myths of the Gold Rush, abundant natural resources, sunshine, noir, and boundless opportunity. Course assignments include take-home midterm and final research paper. |
| COM LIT 144 | AMERICAN INDIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY | COX, A. | In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin famously “asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize” and argues that “The answer is inevitable: with the victor.” Certainly, popular histories of the United States marginalize the experiences and viewpoints of indigenous Peoples and portray the vanquishing of Native nations through genocidal violence as inevitable or justified for the sake of spreading Western civilization. This course explores how American Indian people have authored autobiographies as a way of telling the histories of their lives, tribes, and Indian-white relations from their own perspectives. In the process, Indian autobiographers have established a structural pattern of blending personal experience with tribal mythography and oral traditions. Students will gain a transnational indigenous perspective as course texts include autobiographies by Native people from the Pequot, Paiute, Lakota, Dakota, Kiowa, Hopi, Laguna, and Ohlone nations. The historical and social contexts of these autobiographies include: Euro-Americans’ desire to abolish Indian nations’ sovereignty and treaty rights, the enactment of the Indian Removal Bill of 1830 and the westward migration of whites who settled on Indian land, the relocation of all Indian tribes onto reservations by the 1880s, the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887, the displacement of Indian children to off-reservation federal boarding schools by the turn of the twentieth century, and contemporary Native authors’ use of autobiography and memoir to give voice to indigenous Peoples’ continuing presence and resistance to ongoing U.S. settler colonialism. |
| COM LIT 210 | NATIONALISMS RIGHT AND LEFT | AHMAD, A. | The starting point for the course is the promiscuous use of the term ‘nationalism’ for a whole range of right-wing pathologies that are currently swirling around in various regions of the world: the so-called ‘Hindu nationalism’ in India, ‘Islamic nationalisms’ of various sorts across the Greater Middle East, ‘white nationalism’ in the US, and, again, a large variety of movements in different zones of Europe, from Poland and Hungary to France and Britain. This straightforward identification of nationalism with rightwing projects is itself problematic. It occludes the whole history of anti-colonial movements which too used the term ‘nationalist’ for themselves. Similarly, any concerted movement against corporate globalisation of our time or against the autocratic financial regime of the Brussels bureaucracy in the EU can be dismissed as forms of xenophobic nationalism. Even any affirmation of a national culture, national economy, national sovereignty can be dismissed as nostalgic longing for pre-postmodern world swept aside by the forces of globalisation. The conceptual premise that will generate our exploration is that as a system of interpellations 'nationalism' has had enormous mobilising power over the past two centuries but it has no inflexible, a priori content. That content is given to any particular nationalism or any particular theory of the nation by the power bloc that takes hold of this ideological artefact and mobilises it in pursuit of power for itself. The meanings, in other words, are not static but conjunctural and there always are particular social agencies that generate those meanings. Thus, we shall be studying particular moments in this complex history: the powerful discourses generated during the Enlightenment and then in opposition to the French Revolution as well as its Napoleonic aftermath; the Marxist tradition (Lenin/Luxemburg debate, Gramsci’s theory of the ‘national-popular’); theorisations in anti-colonial movements and their conjunctions with the Marxist tradition; thought worlds of the Right, including the Nazi/fascist configuration, between the two World Wars; and of course some of the salient moments in our precarious present. |
| COM LIT 210 | ORIENTALISMS | MOR, L. | 2018 marks forty years since the publication of Edward Said’s influential work, Orientalism. Is Said’s work still relevant to our conception of “the East” today? What is “the East” today? How is Orientalism, per Said, different from other forms of racism or colonization? Are there other ways of thinking through the relationship between East and West? And what could literature contribute to this theorization? This seminar is dedicated to critically exploring the implications and relevance of Orientalism to our current theoretical understandings of "the East." We will examine this work in the context of Said’s broader oeuvre and in relation both to Said’s critics and to his disciples. In addition to reading different theoretical conceptions of Orientalism and various works on colonization in the Middle East and North Africa, we will attempt to theorize the perception of this East, as well as its relationship to the West, out of literature. We will therefore also examine literary works that take on the questions raised by Orientalism or perform different forms of "self-Orientalization." Readings may include: Edward Said (mainly, Orientalism, The question of Palestine, Reflections on Exile), Aijaz Ahmad, Hamid Dabashi, Talal Asad, James Clifford, Samera Esmeir, Shaden Tageldin, Gil Anidjar, Leela Gandhi, Lila abu-Lughod, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Assia Djebar, Elias Khoury, and the art of Sharif Waked. This seminar could be taken as a proseminar as well. |
| COM LIT 210 | POSTCOLONIALISM, GLOBALISM,AND AFRICAN NARRATIVES | THIONG'O, N. | The course examines issues and themes in African fictional narratives in the context of postcolonial theories. Central to the course is the exploration of the intersection of class, gender, ethnicity, the cold war, military coups and dictatorships in the shaping of nations and nation-states in the decades that follow independence from colonial rule. The course tries to narrow down the concept of the postcolonial by examining closely the ‘neo’ hidden in the ‘post’ of many theories of the post-colony and the globe. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE IMAGE AFTER DELEUZE:PHILOSOPHY, NEUROSCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY | ABBAS, M. | Deleuze’s two books on cinema (Cinema 1 and 2) are still arguably the most important works on the image and the cinematic image for our time. He sees the task of cinema to be one of ‘extracting an image from the cliché’, and so administering ‘a shock to thought’. In this course, ‘after Deleuze’ suggests less an ‘updating’ of Deleuze than following up on the provocations and insights found in his work on the image. While assuming no detailed knowledge of these books, the course will place some of his key arguments side by side with other important theorizations of the image, including: Deleuze’s related work on the painter Francis Bacon; Guy Debord on the ‘informational image’ or ‘the spectacle that is no longer spectacular’; Jean Baudrillard on ‘simulation’ and Paul Virilio on ‘speed’; Vilem Flusser on ‘the technical image’ and Gilbert Simondon on ‘the mode of existence of technical objects’; the important work on the ‘neoro-image’ (‘The Brain Is the Screen’) and the phenomenon of ‘phantom limbs’ in studies by neuroscientist V.S.Ramachandran and others. Throughout the course, films and other visual documents will be an integral part of the theoretical discussion. Crosslisted with Visual Studies 295 |
| COM LIT 210 | PYRRHIC VICTORY | TERADA, R. | "If we are victorious in one more battle . . . we shall be utterly ruined." Plutarch's famous paraphrase of Pyrrhus indicates a moment when strategy turns around to look at itself and the identity of the "we" is no longer secure. It also indicates, however, that others not the "we" have already lost even more. Taking the figure of pyrrhic victory broadly to encompass various lose/lose and anticlimactic situations, this seminar aims to track closely what happens in encounters between various forms of political and ethical thought and flatlining cost-benefit analyses of history. One principle for this tracking is that ruin that is feared and avoided in most political and strategic discourses has already occurred along racial lines (as we can read in those same discourses). Another is the appearance of a conceptual space for something incapable of being affected by the ongoing calculation of historical loss and win, for having nothing to lose without having something to gain. The seminar will spend a little to some time on a canonical Romantic genealogy of historical anticlimax (Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud), reconsidering it in light of colonialism and race. Then it will spend more time on the difficult fine-tuning of historical thinking by Hegel and Marx (with reference also to Du Bois and Luxemburg). The main texts for this part are Phenomenology of Spirit and Grundrisse. The auto-destructive elements of capital in Marx (capital's victory is Pyrrhic for capital) are part of the larger problem--that is, not just a problem for capital--of what Etienne Balibar and others call Marx's "catastrophism." There may also be other readings or viewings TBA. Throughout, what this figure opens up is not passivity or inner contradiction for contradiction's sake but avenues for exploring situations beyond the current bounds of historical and world-systems thinking. Seminar and proseminar members are invited to discuss exactly how we would like to work collaboratively, and what we would like to write, at the first meeting. Possibly, we could make intensive and copious notes together, as has happened in some past seminars, or possibly something else. It would be nice if all seminar members did a presentation based in their own area of interest. |
| COM LIT 210 | WORK AND PLAY | FARBMAN, H. | This course will explore some of the anxieties that build up at the borders of the “world of work,” particularly the borders between what is called “work” and what is called “play.” A central aim of the course is to get some handle on the fascism involved in the policing of these borders at the present moment—to get a handle on the fascism of the present moment this way. This aim determines the parameters of the course reading, none of which predates the rise of fascism in the early 20th-century, even though plenty of work and play happened before then. Reading will include texts on the relation between work, play, and unemployment by psychoanalysts (Freud, Klein, Reich, Winnicott) and by major figures of the Collège de Sociologie (Bataille and Caillois); on the questioning of the thesis of the “alienation of labor” in post-WWII French Marxism (Althusser); on “workerism,” the strategy of the “refusal of work,” and unpaid work in post-WWII Italian Marxism (Bifo; Tronti; Federici); on issues with Marxist accounts of “work” (Arendt and Foucault); and on “désoeuvrement” and “inoperativity” (Blanchot and Agamben). Fascist and neo-fascist problem-areas to be considered will include discourse in and around the professionalization of sports—particularly of men’s team sports, beginning in the early 20th-century; and of “extreme sports,” “esports,” and women’s team sports, beginning in the early 21st. Papers can be written on any topic where anxiety about “work” is near enough to a breaking point that a push from the theorists on the syllabus might help. (Crosslisted with Hum 270 and French 250) |