Comparative Literature Undergraduate Course Descriptions
Winter Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| COM LIT (W26) | 6 INDIG RESISTANCE | CARROLL, A. |
| Indigenous Resistance Literature This course examines works of literature (broadly conceived) by authors from various Native/American Indian/First Nations tribes and nations to explore how storytelling functions as a creative mode of Indigenous people’s resistance to sociopolitical oppression and a continuation of their traditional knowledges and practices. Course materials may include autobiographies, memoirs, short stories, poems, critical essays, historical non-fiction, documentary films, and multi-genre works by Acjachemen, Anishinaabe, Cherokee, Dakota, Laguna Pueblo, Lakota, Lenape, Menominee, Ohlone, Pequot, Potawatomi, and Tongva artists. These materials may feature the colonizers’ foreign English language as well as the artists’ Indigenous languages, transliterated using the Latin alphabet or their own unique writing systems. This interdisciplinary course is organized around past and present conditions of Native/American Indian literary production, including the social, political, and cultural contexts of ongoing settler colonialism, and the historical frame of four periods of U.S.-Native relations: massacres and removals, allotment and assimilation, termination and relocation, and sovereignty and self-determination. Course requirements will include reading assignments, in-person attendance and participation in lecture classes and discussion sections, a midterm exam, and a final exam. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 10 LATIN AMER CITIES | COLMENARES GON, D. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 10 WOMEN WRITE THECITY | DIMENDBERG, E. |
| Women Write (and Read) the City Through close readings of novels by women or with central female protagonists, this class will consider modern urban experience in Budapest, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris, Rome, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Authors to be studied include Joan Didion, Irmgard Keun, Valeria Luiselli, Sayaka Murata, Muriel Spark, Magda Szabo, and Emile Zola. We will investigate their books for clues about the cultural work accomplished by urban narratives and the agency of women in the metropolis during times of political and social transformation. Paris—capital of the 19th century and crucible of metropolitan culture and subjectivity will figure prominently in these explorations. Readings by theorists such as Lauren Elkin, Elizabeth Wilson, David Harvey, Deborah Parsons, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Lefebvre, and Walter Benjamin will provide an armature for thinking broadly about cities and space. The course will likely interest anyone interested in stories set in a large metropolis. Class assignment structure: Weekly reading questions, take-home midterm, and final essay. Regular attendance, keeping up with the reading, and active participation in class discussions will be expected. There are no prerequisites for enrollment and DCE students are welcome. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 60B READING WITH THEORY | HARRIES, M. |
| READING WITH THEORY (or, Identification) This winter, “Reading with Theory” will focus on one psychoanalytic category: identification. What are the mechanisms and consequences of identifying with others? In psychoanalysis, identification is crucial to subjectivity: our selves are made up of other selves. As the theorist Diana Fuss puts it, “In perhaps its simplest formulation, identification is the detour through the other that defines a self.” We will read psychoanalytic and other texts that theorize identification and literary works concerned with identification. Theoretical texts will include works by Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Diana Fuss, Ian Hacking, and José Muñoz. Literary, dramatic, and cinematic works will include Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White and People Who Led to My Plays, Samuel Beckett’s Not I, and a film: possibilities include All About Eve (directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1966), and Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010). Written work will include in-class exercises, a midterm in class, and a final in class. You will have a choice for the most substantial writing assignment: early in the term, you will decide whether to write (1) a term paper in several stages (proposal and bibliography; draft; final draft) or (2) a chronicle of your identifications based on Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 101W TRANSLATION STUDIES | WOLPE, S. |
| Translation Studies 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 various forms of translations as well as theories and practice of literary translation and 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 project, as well as individual creative projects. Working knowledge of a language other than English is required. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 110 COMICS | AMIRAN, E. |
| 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 without the use of computers or the internet and will make a final presentation. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 121 NRRTVE, PTTRN, TXT | DIMENDBERG, E. |
| 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 texts. 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 discussions of works by Virginia Woolfe, Italo Calvino, Annie Ernaux, Raymond Queneau, Uwe Johnson, Martin Amis, and Risa Wataya. Assignments include weekly reading questions, a take-home midterm, and a final research paper. Instructor: Edward Dimendberg. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 130 RACE MEETS RELIGION | CARTER, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 143 AUTOMATION/AUTOMATA | JOHNSON, A. |
| Automation/Automata Generative AI language models seemed to burst into the world of the university like a storm, a new disruption following the pandemic, with both promises and perils. This course seeks to establish a larger context for these debates, thinking more broadly about the histories of automation and figures of automata. Class materials include science fiction, films like Chaplin's Modern Times, Marx's writing on labor and machines, and essays on thinking about the automaticity of perception, cognition and language. We will end with GenAI. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 150 AZTEC LITERATURE | COLMENARES GON, D. |
| The course offers an introduction to the literary production of the Nahuas of central Mexico—the indigenous Nahuatl-speaking peoples commonly referred to as "Aztecs". Students will explore the largest and most varied corpus of literature in any indigenous language of the Americas, spanning from the end of the Pre-Columbian era through the eighteenth century, in translation. The course begins with pictorial narratives in the Mesoamerican tradition and their sophisticated visual systems, then examines the transformations of the early colonial period through Franciscan liturgical drama performed in Nahuatl for purposes of evangelization and acculturation. We will analyze the rich poetic and ceremonial tradition preserved in the Cantares mexicanos collection, engage with Guadalupan literature including the Nican mopohua, which narrates the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe and became central to Mexican religious and cultural identity, and study the historiographical prose works of seventeenth-century Nahua historians such as Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who documented their communities' pasts and preserved the native archive for future generations. The course continues into the eighteenth century, tracing how Nahua intellectuals maintained, adapted, and transformed their literary traditions across three centuries of profound cultural change under Spanish colonial rule. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | AMIRAN, E. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | CARROLL, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | COLMENARES GON, D. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | JOHNSON, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | MOR, L. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | RAHIMIEH, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | SCHWAB, G. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (W26) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | TERADA, R. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
