| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 10 | CITIES & CINEMA | ABBAS, M. | This course approaches cinema from the perspective of cultural studies by relating cinema to the city. Transformed at unprecedented speed by new forms of capital, politics, media, and technology, the contemporary city, especially the Asian city, threatens to outpace our understanding of it. Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei—each of these is a jigsaw puzzle of the mind, made up of fragments that do not necessarily cohere. The course will be introduced by a few seminal pages from Walter Benjamin on cities and cinema, and then proceed to a study of innovative films such as Wong Kar-wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love’, Ang Lee’s ‘Lust Caution’, Jia Zhangke’s ‘Still Life’, and David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’. The aim is to find new terms for describing cities and cinema, as well as to rethink old terms. Students should have watched the films as preparation for class lectures and discussions. Instead of a mid-term exam, students are asked to write a course journal , and submit a final 1500-word term paper. |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | JOHNSON, A. | COM LIT 60B: Reading with Theory 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 100A | MODERN MIDEAST 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. |
| COM LIT 100A | REN EUR GOES MOVIES | NEWMAN, J. | “History does not exist until it is created.” -- Robert A. Rosenstone In his essay in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1996), scientist Stephen Jay Gould writes that the film Jurassic Park contains several errors, but that these errors “belong to the juicy and informative class of faults” that has been described in the following way: “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truths for yourself.” In this course, we will examine the “juicy faults” about the European Renaissance that we find in a series of movies from the 1940s up through the early twenty-first century, and look at them in conversation with primary and secondary historical and literary texts from and about the period. We will ask what role cinematic representations of the European Renaissance and European early modernity (c. 1500-1650) played in the fashioning of modern and post-modern political, religious, cultural, and scientific identities in the West from the Cold War up through the aftermath of 9/11 (c. 1945-2007). Among the topics we cover will be the persecution of witches, female leadership, Machiavellianism, the Reformation, Dutch and Italian Renaissance art history, contact with the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and the endless series of wars. Lecture attendance, completion of short reading assignments, and watching the films mandatory; on-line quizzes, two movie reviews, and short final paper. |
| COM LIT 123 | MODERNITY'S RUINS | FREI, P. | In the 16th-century, the city of Rome and its ancient ruins weren’t just a tourist attraction, they embodied the artistic, philosophical and even political ambitions of the modern age. The paradoxical nature of ruins in particular, as figures of both a survival of the past and its irremediable loss in a disinherited present, informed an imaginary that will haunt modern literature, art and thought. The experience of a fragmented world, from the early modern anatomies of the microcosm that is man to the wastelands of postmodernity, defined a new experience of the past and the present which the Renaissance explored in its creations. Far from being just the source of an ideal to be imitated, Antiquity was thereby rediscovered as a powerful resource to reimagine the world in its forms and meanings. This course – taught in English – will look at important literary and artistic inventions of the modern world which the French Renaissance, rivaling both the authority of the Ancients and the prestige of its Italian precursor, will exemplify in its attempt to become the new Rome, the cultural and political capital of modernity. Works that will be discussed in this course (the relevant excerpts will be made available – in English – on the course’s Canvas page at the beginning of the quarter): Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Du Bellay’s Antiquities of Rome and his Defense and Illustration of the French Language, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and his Cicerionianus, Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, Louise Labé’s poetical work, Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things and its reception in the 16th century, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and their early modern translations/adaptations, Montaigne’s Essays and his Travel Journal, Petrarch’s Letters and his Canzoniere, Christine de Pizan’s contributions to the Debate on the Romance of the Rose, Plato’s Symposium and Rabelais’s Gargantua. |
| COM LIT 132 | LA CITIES | DIMENDBERG, E. | Tastelessness, avarice, and violence abound in the cultures and subcultures investigated in the literature of Los Angeles. Yet so do intelligence, compassion, and beauty. The despair of noir is leavened by the striving of first generation immigrants. Acrid skies, ostentatious wealth, Hollywood scandals, and vibrant neighborhoods compose a mix that resists summation and frequently puzzles outsiders. The most rewarding Los Angeles novels often convey a sense of loss and a recognition of limits paradoxically at odds with the city's optimistic public face, continual growth, and dominion over nature. How Los Angeles acquired an undertow of homegrown American tragedy is among the puzzles this class will consider. Readings by Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Helen Hunt Jackson, Reyner Banham, Nathanael West, Janet Fitch, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and others. Assignment structure: Take-home midterm and final research paper. Instructor: Edward Dimendberg |
| COM LIT 140 | CRIT CULTURAL ST | ABBAS, M. | Is it true that the value of cultural studies lies in its enlarged, non-elitist and inclusive notion of culture, where all marginalities can find a place in the academic curriculum? Is cultural studies a more populist, media-wise and sexy replacement for literary studies? While it is important for cultural studies to develop an enlarged and inclusive notion of culture where alternative positions can find a place, it is even more important for it to problematize the notion of culture itself. Cultural studies did not emerge only out of a sense that previous notions of culture have been privative and limiting -- ethnocentric, imperialistic, chauvinistic, racist and so on; it emerged also out of a sense that the very space of culture is somehow not what it used to be, that something has shifted. Cultural studies can therefore be regarded as an attempt to rethink the problematic address of culture. We have cultural studies because we do not know what or where culture is. Through a discussion of different kinds of texts, images, and videos (such as short excerpts from Levi-Strauss’s ‘Tristes Tropiques’, Tanizaki’s ‘In Praise of Shadows’, Lorca’s ‘In Search of Duende’, and Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’) the course will introduce the issues of ideology, ethnocentrism, media, race, post-coloniality, and gender that dis-placed our notions of culture. The course focuses not on copious reading, but on thinking and writing about the short assigned texts. Instead of a mid-term exam, students are asked to write a course journal and submit a final 1500-word term paper. |
| COM LIT 210 | COL & POSTCOL THRY | KATRAK, K. | Our study involves an analysis of British colonial documents and creative and scholarly writing by the colonized from ex-British colonies in India Africa, and the Caribbean. We explore theoretical writings and dramatic representations of colonialism and neo-colonialism, postcolonialism and decolonization, along with recent decolonial challenges in the persistence of colonial symbology from statues to educational curricula. Colonial domination via the English language and hegemonic notions of English and European culture as superior to other languages and cultures is contested from various postcolonial perspectives in speaking back to empire. We engage with a palimpsest of selected colonial era documents, such as Lord Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education, February 2, 1835” among others. We juxtapose such readings with postcolonial dramatic texts, adaptations, and theories that take on colonial-era stereotypes of race, gender, class as in Martiniqan playwright, Aime Cesaire’s, A Tempest, an Africanized version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, as well as Cesaire’s theorizing in Discourse on Colonialism, a major contribution to postcolonial theory along with theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. We analyze Ngugi’s theorizing in Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing along with his co-written drama (with Micere Githae Mugo), The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, set in colonial Kenya of the 1950s. We discuss Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman that draws on Oyo history to explore a troubling tradition with evocations of postcolonial Nigeria. Our study of postcolonial theory includes scholarly and creative contributions by Nobel Laureates, Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), and Derek Walcott (St. Kitts), along with creative thinkers on language such as Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya). Among British colonial and imperialist controls, South Africa, that carried the additional scourge of the racial apartheid system, became independent only in 1994. Apartheid-era wounds, physical and psychological persist. We analyze performative works and essays by Jay Pather in post-apartheid South Africa. We also explore hybrid transformations of classical Indian dance styles as in Anita Ratnam’s feminist re-working in movement, and story-telling entitled, A Million Sitas, based on the Indian epic, The Ramayana, among others. |
| COM LIT 210 | IN NATIONS NAME | 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 a large variety of xeno-racist movements in different zones of Europe, from Poland and Hungary to France and Britain. At the same time but in a very different register, 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. This straightforward identification of nationalism with rightwing projects is itself problematic. It occludes great many histories across the Tricontinent in which the term ‘nationalism’ signified a struggle against colonial autocracy and subjection. In Europe, at a somewhat earlier juncture, discourses initiated by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution often deployed the figure of the nation as signifier of popular sovereignty and rights-based citizenship against monarchical absolutism. In the theoretical field, national liberation movements in the colonies often borrowed very extensively from the whole range of the Marxist tradition. The conceptual premise that will generate our exploration is that nationalism per se has had enormous mobilizing 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, from Marx to Cabral so to speak; thought worlds of the Right, including the Nazi/fascist configuration, between the two World Wars; and of course the movements of our own time mentioned in the opening sentence above. This is a considerably modified version of a course, Nationalisms Left and Right, that was offered in Winter 2018. |
| COM LIT 210 | ETHICS EROTICS WILL | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | Contemporary black politics research raises important questions about will in the face of enduring violence. From scholarship on gender, sexuality, childhood, youth, spatiality, and media and popular culture increasingly what we know about race and ethnic politics is keening toward humanistic methods and topics. This course deals with racialized sexual politics, racialized heteropatriarchy, and ethics. It offers several modes of inquiry that constitute ethical criticisms of the holy trinity of LGBTQ politics: marriage equality, integration into military employment via DADT, and adoption protection. These scholars walk us through the long genealogy of black sexualities in the public sphere and public policy and remind us of other legal concerns and other political and cultural agendas that shape understandings of racialized sexualities. As sexuality and gender and other topics proper to the consideration of humanistic inquiry become central projects for black politics does this change what we think the role of scholarly analysis of queer of color politics is for? What are these other projects and how do they extend and return and stretch disciplinary ideas about politics and embodied practices of black being and sexualized racisms? How are genealogies of black heteropatriarchy distinctive from and entangled with genealogies of black queer studies? This course will explore the terrain of ethics and erotics as windows into the nature, history, and scholarly and knowledge formations associated with gendered black politics, black queer studies, black feminisms, and black sexual politics. What if we walked away completely from the politics of leadership, representation, interest groups, pinkwashing geopolitics, and the homonormative racial liberalism that attenuate antipolitical genealogies? The assigned readings and my lectures explore readings in black queer studies that pay close attention to the way that the field has been institutionalized in higher education. Along with a measured critique of this process of canonization, readings draw on scholars who attend more to queer methodologies and queer approaches to historiography, ranging from the actual presence of perverse sexualities in the archive to concern for queered identities as markers of inclusion and exclusion into the social. Reading Zenzele Isoke, Erica Edwards, Greg Thomas, Darieck Scott, Cathy Cohen, Richard Iton, Kara Keeling, C. Riley Snorton, Dayo Gore, Carole Boyce Davies, Roderick Ferguson, Trimiko Melancon, Matt Richardson, Rudy Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Sharon Holland, and LaMonda Horton-Stallings raises important questions about the relationship between the humanities and social sciences and the intersections between queer defined as a sexual and gender identity, on the one hand, and the queer defined as the processes associated with entrenched structural violence and state terror of bodies made to carry the mark and status of gender and sexual outlaws. |
| COM LIT 210 | DELEUZES CINEMA 1 | ABBAS, A. | Graduate Seminar on Deleuze’s Cinema 1, Winter 2020 This is the first of a 2-part seminar on Deleuze’s groundbreaking cinema books. Each seminar can be taken independently. Spring 2020 will focus on Cinema 2. For Deleuze, philosophers construct concepts, while filmmakers construct images, so much so that filmmakers can be classified in terms of the type of image they create. The cinema books do not give us a ‘philosophy of cinema’, or treat filmmaking as ‘thinking in images’. Rather, ‘thinking’ and ‘image-making’ are seen as independent but related activities; which is why the books on cinema can complement and extend Deleuze’s philosophy in important ways. Taking a hint from Bergson, Deleuze organizes cinematic images into two main types, the Movement-Image (Cinema 1), and the Time-Image (Cinema 2). The Movement-Image is not the same as the ‘image of movement’. For one thing, it is related to perception and affection, which may or may not entail any discernible movement. What it produces, even at a very early stage in the history of cinema, are destabilizations of various kinds. The perception-image and the affection-image prepare the ground for a provocative and surprising discussion of the third type of Movement-Image, the action-image. Everywhere, the stress falls not so much on classification but on transformation. Hence, Cinema 1 ends with a discussion of ‘the crisis of the action-image’, which is the hinge between the two cinema books and absolutely crucial for an understanding of cinema today. The seminar will also have occasion to discuss the work of important filmmakers The seminar will not encumber students with excessive readings. Students will keep a journal on the subject of the seminar, based on lectures, discussions, and further research; do class presentations; and submit a final term paper of around 2500 words. |