| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 9 | COLONIAL SCHOOLS | CARROLL, A. | Winter 2024 COM LIT 9: Colonial Schools Course Code: 22710 Professor Alicia Carroll This course examines the role that schools have played, historically and presently, in the structure of settler colonialism throughout the Americas. Students will engage with stories of Indigenous people who were compelled to attend colonial schools/assimilatory institutions from the 18th–20th centuries, including the Spanish California mission system, the US Indian boarding school system, and the Canadian residential school system. Students will gain an introduction to Indian boarding school studies, which is one of the most critical fields of inquiry in Native American and Indigenous studies as it unites literary, critical race, colonial/postcolonial, feminist, trauma, and visual culture theories. Course materials include autobiography, memoir, poetry, scholarly essays, documentary films, and music videos by artists and scholars from the Anishinaabe, Dakota, Esselen, Lakota, Muskogee/Creek, and Ohlone nations. |
| COM LIT 10 | FEMNSMS IN GLBL S | MEHRA, G. | Feminisms in the Global South Today, the global south is united by the unimaginable distress that its disaffected populations face. Condemned to "underdevelopment", these postcolonial countries are not only gripped by extreme political instability, communalist violence, unbearable poverty, unsanitary living conditions, but they also bear the brunt of climate change. Moreover, with the deterioration in living-conditions, these regions are also witness to an increase in patriarchal violence, leading scholars to argue that globalization is "especially catastrophic for women". With this context in mind, this course will pay attention to two types of feminisms within the global south. We will juxtapose the "serious" feminism of novelists from Nigeria and India (Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (1979) and Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) along with the "fun" feminisms seen in popular culture. While the feminist novel, in the hands of political writers like Emecheta and Roy, represents the many problems affecting different classes of women in the global south, the "new" and popular" feminisms depict empowered and successful women. We will study these new "fun" feminisms via movies such as Dear Zindagi (India), Lionheart (Nigeria), popular fiction (Chetan Bhagat's One Indian Girl), and advertising campaigns (Ariel's "Share the Load"). We will compare these different feminisms and ask the following question: How do we understand the representation of the new empowered women in popular feminism given that patriarchal violence is increasing in the global south? |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | HARRIES, M. | What is reading with theory? What is reading? Does “reading,” here, imply interpretation? “Reading with Theory” will explore these questions by focusing on a central and contested mode of critical and theoretical reading and interpretation: allegory. “In the simplest terms,” writes a critic, “allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what we say.’” But doesn’t literature almost always destroy this expectation? Is it ever not allegorical? Is meaning what we say ever that simple? Are there ways of not meaning what we say that are not allegorical? We will explore these questions by reading theoretical accounts of allegory and literary and other texts that invite allegorical reading. But we will also consider texts that resist allegorical reading and critiques of the notion that to “read” is, simply, to read allegorically. Theoretical readings will illuminate histories and political questions that have haunted allegorical reading. Plato’s Republic, which includes the allegory of the cave, will initiate our discussions of the complexities of the topic. Other texts will include Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and Caryl Churchill’s apocalyptic play, Far Away (2000). The aim of the course is to think together about what we mean when we say that we read, with theory and otherwise. |
| COM LIT 102W | CREATIVE TRANSLATN | WOLPE, S. | Creative Translation Prerequisites: Working knowledge of a language other than English. Description: Literary translation is not the transparent inter-lingual transfer of ideas out of one language into another. Rather, it is always conditioned by assumptions, values and codes proper to both the source- and the target-language, and often relies upon the hierarchies of power and prestige that structure both the discourses and realities of gender, race, class, sexuality, and national identity. This course will: 1. Introduce the students to theories and practice of literary translation as well as the challenges that contemporary translators face today in a variety of cultural and political context. 2. Guide the students towards exploring their own creative writing through translation, culminating in a group a project, as well as individual creative projects. Working knowledge of a language other than English is required. Assessment: Students will be assessed through writing and translation assignments (15%), attendance (20%), participation (25%), and final translation/creative writing projects (40%). Required Texts Required readings are available as PDF files through Canvas. |
| COM LIT 121 | NRRTVE, PTTRN, TXT | DIMENDBERG, E. | Comparative Literature 121: Narrative, Pattern, Text Stories surround us and are essential to making sense of the world. This class will explore ideas of narrative and genre through close readings of literary theory and novels. We will consider beginnings and endings, point of view, causation, character, masterplots, traits of fictional worlds, and distinctions between fiction and non-fiction. Theorists to be discussed include Hayden White, Northrop Frye, Roland Barthes, Peter Brooks, Umberto Eco, Sigmund Freud, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Their ideas will inform our discussion of works by George Eliot, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, Uwe Johnson, Martin Amis, Laurence Sterne, Ali Smith, and Sheila Kohler. Assignments include weekly reading questions, a take-home midterm, and a final research paper. Instructor: Edward Dimendberg |
| COM LIT 140 | COMICS | AMIRAN, E. | Eyal Amiran CL140 GC103A Comics This course studies early newspaper comics that address social topics like immigration, sexual identity, racism, and the cold war under cover of personal issues, such as eating disorders, paranoia and narcissism, separation anxiety, and OCD. We’ll see that in comics, you can’t separate psychological from social and political arguments. We’ll pay particular attention to questions of state identity and the symbolic social order as represented in these comics. Readings and viewings include Foster’s Prince Valiant, Ormes’s Torchy Brown, McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Disney’s (Gottfredson’s) Mickey Mouse, Foster’s Prince Valiant, Hanks’s Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle and Stardust the Super Wizard (and other of his weird work, like Big Red McLain and Space Smith), Segar’s Popeye, June Tarpé Mills’s Miss Fury, Hergé’s Tintin, Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol. 1, and superheroes like Spiderman and Wonder Woman. Students will write in-class essays and take a final exam. |
| COM LIT 150 | ANTI-CLNL ARBC NOV | MOR, L. | CL150: The Anticolonial Arabic Novel This course surveys the multifaceted history of the Arabic novel through the prism of anticolonialism. While the origins of the novel, a genre often perceived as completely Western, could be traced to Arabic literary works, the rich tradition of Arabic literature greatly differed from the novel form that was developed in Europe in the nineteenth century. Thus, when Arabic literature first encountered the European novel in the context of colonization, it developed a very uneasy relationship with this genre. Arab authors both embraced this literary form, using it for various political, social, and affective ends, and challenged its axioms and its complicity in European imperialism. With the rise of liberation struggles all throughout the Islamic world, the novel became key to rethinking and protesting colonial domination. We will start by examining the colonial encounter between the Arab world and the West, as well as the literary and political phenomenon known as the nahda—the Arabic political and literary revival of the nineteenth century. We will then move on to explore several anticolonial novels from various locales across the Arab and Islamic world to better understand the history, politics, and theorization of colonialism and anticolonialism in the region. |
| COM LIT 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE | FACULTY | To be taken only when the materials to be studied lie outside the normal run of departmental offerings. Repeatability: May be repeated for credit unlimited times. |
| COM LIT 210 | SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE | AMIRAN, E. | Violence is symbolic, symbolism violent: violence constitutes the social world even though it is destructive. In a world on fire, we’ll study critical works that theorize the co-construction of violence and the symbolic by Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, Samera Esmeir, Jean-Joseph Goux, Karl Marx, Stefania Pandolfo, Eve Sedgwick, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sara-Maria Sorentino, and Calvin Warren. We’ll focus our cultural analysis by reading works that are at or about the margin of conventional society, works that theorize social worlds constituted by self-destruction: Marina Abramović performance art, Ghayath Almadhoun video poems, Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, Henry Darger’s “In the Realms of the Unreal,” Francis E. Dec psychotic radio letters, Pearl Fryar topiary, Fletcher Hanks’s “Fantomah: Mystery Woman of the Jungle” and “Stardust” newspaper comics, Daniel Johnston lyrics, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, and Xu Lizhi’s Foxconn poetry, among others. These cultural and theoretical works argue not for improving the social world but for the necessity of thinking other worlds. Written responses to the reading, class presentations, seminar essay. |
| COM LIT 210 | TRANSPACIFIC CINEMA | KUNIGAMI, A. | In this course we will consider the many ways the world is mapped and imagined in cinema, by focusing on the relations, separations, and interconnections between Asia and Latin America. We will not only explore the cinematic relations between these two regions as they appear on screen, but also what visualizing alternative geographies potentially entail, produce, and hide. We will consider not only the images on screen, but also the historical flows between these two regions. Screenings will include works by Wong Kar-Wai, Carlos Reygadas, Tizuka Yamazaki, Sebastián Borenzstein, Carlos Reichenbach, Masato Harada, Akira Kurosawa, Marcos Yoshi, Thais Fujinaga, among others. |
| COM LIT 210 | NORMALIZED ABNORMALITY OF THE POST-COLONIAL | THIONGO, NGUGI WA | Normalized Abnormality of the Post-Colonial: African Literature in European Languages The course looks at the African novel in European languages as an example of the normalization of the anomalies and abnormalities of the post-colonial situation in the globe. So although the course is based primarily on texts from Africa, it will make comparisons with the Irish and other post-colonial situations. |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | FACULTY | Studies in selected areas. Topics addressed vary each quarter. Repeatability: May be repeated for credit unlimited times. |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | FACULTY | Studies in selected areas. Topics addressed vary each quarter. Repeatability: May be repeated for credit unlimited times. |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | FACULTY | A units-only course for students in the dissertation phase. Grading Option: Satisfactory/unsatisfactory only. Repeatability: May be repeated for credit unlimited times. Restriction: Graduate students only. |
| COM LIT 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | MOR, L. | Limited to Teaching Assistants. Grading Option: Satisfactory/unsatisfactory only. Repeatability: May be repeated for credit unlimited times. Restriction: Graduate students only. |