| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 3 | JUST READING | TERADA, R. | It can seem like "reading is the easiest thing...freedom without work" (Maurice Blanchot), but it's easier to know what writing is and what we are supposed to do. Reading is hard to describe and a little bit beyond us to explain, as it seems both inside and outside the self. Even the most private experiences of reading are hurried and censored by something within the reader, in a way. This course suspends writing in arguments to register the edges of reading by pushing on its limits. What is really happening when we read without narrative (or as nearly so as possible), read violent or otherwise psychologically demanding material, or "read" in a foreign language? Can anything be read? Is it possible to feel read by a text? Instead of immediately making papers out of reading, this class shifts the focus to recording precisely what happens when we read and finally, what becomes visible then, which is not just an object outside. The course will be a collaborative discussion-oriented class with a syllabus of poetry, prose, and philosophy partly constructed by the group and ongoing writing that cultivates observation over conclusion. It will include our attempt to read [?] the Sufi poetry of Ghalib, the most brilliant writer of nineteenth-century Delhi, in Urdu--a language I don't know at all--with the help of internet resources. (But it's OK if you know Urdu! Everyone will read in a language foreign to them at some point.) |
| COM LIT 10 | PIRATES | JOHNSON, A. | In The City of God, Saint Augustine recounts the following exchange between Alexander the Great and a pirate he captured. “What gives you the right to disrupt the sea-lanes by force?” asks Alexander. To which the pirate boldly replied, “What gives you the right to disrupt the whole world by force? I use a small ship, so I’m called a thief; you use a great fleet, so you’re called an emperor.” In this class we’ll explore popular depictions of pirates (in movies such as the Pirates of the Caribbean series and literature) and compare these with historical narratives of piracy. We will also, as St. Augustine’s anecdote suggests, inquire into how piracy gets defined and what it might tell us about the dividing line between legality and illegality, relations of force, and the fantasies and practices of opposition to dominant social structures. While our main focus will be on piracy in the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th and 18th centuries, we will also discuss contemporary forms of piracy such as the Somali pirates and internet piracy. *Note*This course will be taught online. |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | ABBAS, A. | |
| COM LIT 100A | RENAISSANCE EUROPE GOES TO THE 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 that raged across Europe at the time. Production elements, director bios, and film marketing also discussed. Lecture attendance, completion of short reading assignments, and watching the films are mandatory as is completion of on-line quizzes, two movie reviews, and short final paper. |
| COM LIT 102W | ORIENTALIST VISIONS | MOR, L. | How did the West envision the Arab East and construct its own image in the process? How was the colonization of the Arab world facilitated by vision, both in the sense of ×´a way of seeing×´ and in the sense of ×´a plan for the future×´? And how do such Orientalist visions affect our world today? The term “Orientalism” was first used by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said to describe European and American prejudicial perceptions of the Arab world, which are regularly employed to rationalize colonial invasion and expropriation. We will begin this course by closely reading some of Said’s writing, as well as his interlocutors and critics, to better understand what Orientalism is, how it affects Western views of Arabs and Islam, and how it is related to such contemporary phenomena as immigration, the “war on terror” or cultural appropriation. We will then move on to examine the role of vision in colonial projects by focusing on three examples: Egypt, Algeria, and Palestine. We will read primary sources that document Orientalist visions for these lands, such as memoirs, travelogues, and personal letters. We will also engage with visual sources—photographs, art works, video games, television, and film—to better comprehend the function of visuality in Orientalism and to explore the responses of Arab artists to experiences of Orientalization. The seminar emphasizes critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. Through short writing assignments and in-class workshops, students will gradually develop independent writing projects. |
| COM LIT 102W | LA LITERATURE | DIMENDBERG, E. | Architectural historian Reyner Banham called Los Angeles “the city of second chances,” underscoring both the malleability and instability of the metropolis and the varied identities of its inhabitants. This class seeks to introduce some of the literary forms (the essay, the letter, and the novel) through which a city often thought to be unlike any other has been understood, experienced, and documented. It will explore key genres such as the detective novel, the myth of Hollywood, and the recent proliferation of literary explorations of ethnicity and community. Assignment structure: Short essays, take-home midterm, and final research paper. Instructor: Edward Dimendberg. |
| COM LIT 121 | 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. SYLLABUS 1/Conan Doyle ‘The Speckled Band’; Poe ‘Man of the Crowd’ (Genre and History) 2/Poe ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (Hermeneutics of Belief, Hermeneutics of Suspicion) 3/John Huston ‘The Maltese Falcon’ (1941 Film) (‘Film Noir’, the ‘Femme Fatale’ and ‘the Male Gaze’) 4/Roman Polanski ‘Chinatown’ (1974 Film); Orson Welles ‘Touch of Evil’ (1958 ) (Nietzsche—lies, truth, myth, ‘beyond good and evil’) 5/Alfred Hitchcock ‘Vertigo’ (1958 Film) (Pyschoanalysis and the ‘objet petit a’) 6/ J.L.Borges ‘Death and the Compass; Robert Bresson ‘Pickpocket’ (1959 Film) (Metafiction, metacriticism) 7/Paul Auster ‘City of Glass’ (novel and graphic novel) (Urban/Textual Ecologies) 8/Ridley Scott ‘Bladerunner’ (1982 Film) (The ‘hyperreal’) 9/Christopher Nolan ‘Memento’ (Crisis of Linearity) EVALUATION, based on: 1/Class attendance and participation 2/ Class Journal 3/2000 word term paper |
| COM LIT 150 | NOVEL IN THE CITY | DIMENDBERG, E. | Approaching the urban novel as evidence of the varied paths to modernity pursued by different cultures across distinct time periods, this course will concentrate on identifying key concerns of novelistic treatments of the metropolis. Literary narratives set in Istanbul, New York, Paris, Shanghai, and other cities will be studied with an eye to discerning the fantasies, myths, and stories elicited by cities. We will consider how identities, global forces, and political conflicts are refracted by the concentrations of people, wealth, ideas, and architecture found in the largest human settlements. Readings in literary and cultural criticism will supplement the analysis of novels. Assignment structure: Take-home midterm and final research paper. Instructor: Edward Dimendberg |
| COM LIT 210 | PUBLISHING | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 210 | LAW, RACE, COLONIALITY | MOR, L. | How do legal concepts, procedures, and institutions facilitate colonization and the construction of racial difference? What role does the rhetoric of the rule of law play in imperial projects? Does the law merely restrict and separate out certain populations or is it productive in constituting racial and ethnic identities and subject positions? In exploring these and related questions, this seminar surveys the ways in which “the juridical” constructs race in various colonial and settler colonial contexts. We will therefore investigate such juridico-political concepts as property, human rights, internationalism, violence, and sovereignty. Due to its comparative nature, this seminar is also concerned with the question of comparison itself: how do we think about different cases of juridical colonization together without equating their mechanisms or simply importing epistemes from one site to another? Readings may include selections from Patrick Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism, Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular, Samera Esmeir’s Juridical Humanity, Gary Fields’ Enclosures, Brenna Bhandar's Colonial Lives of Property, Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, and Nasser Hussein’s “Hyperlegality.” |
| COM LIT 210 | BECKETT IN THE END TIMES | SCHWAB, G. | In this course we will revisit some of Beckett’s major works in the context of current debates about the end times. Like no other author, Beckett confronts the psychological and epistemological dimensions of ending and its discontents. In this context, he challenges major (mostly Western but also some Eastern) philosophies about life and death, being and nothingness as well as mind and language, constantly pushing the boundaries of literary language and genres. We will discuss novels, short fiction, and plays and we will also watch a few pieces from the DVD Box Set Beckett on Film. In addition, we will have a guest lecture by Ackbar Abbas on Beckett and Quantum Theory. Plays: Endgame, Happy Days Short Plays: Not-I, Breath Novels: Malone Dies, The Unnamable Short Texts: The Calmative, The Lost Ones Beckett on Film: Play, Rockaby |