Spring 1997 Graduate Course Descriptions

LTCO 274 -- Zones of Contact and Cross-Cultural Communication in Literature

This seminar focuses on the cultural production of three U.S. population groups--Chicanos (or people of Mexican origin), African Americans, and Puerto Ricans. The history, culture and audiences of these groups have been studied as discrete and separate entities, whereas their intellectual and cultural traditions have criss-crossed and interesected in the nations's history. This seminar will put these groups into interracial, intercultural, interlingual, and inter-ethnic contact. This contact perspective of literature and culture will include vertical relations between dominant/subdominant as well as lateral relations of inter-ethnic communication between sub-dominant groups. The specific historical context is the period of the 1960s through the 1990s, but students are invited to use the core readings--social and literary documents--as springboards into their own specific areas of investigation.

Consider the following examples: What are the paradigmatic issues that characterize these cultures and communities of color? What are the different relations they have to the larger culture? How might the North American testimonial-like narratives these cultural groups produced in the 1960s and 1970s relate to the testimonio that emerged from labor/peasant struggles and las guerrillas in Latin Amercia? How might the modern expression of these groups relate to 19th-century forms of writing--slave narratives and novels of passing for example--in Latin America and the U.S? How might we conceptualize relationships between North American and Latin American constructions of racial and cultural identity? How might the cultural expression of these groups relate to diasporic movements?

Readings will include texts in Spanish and English. Thus, students may use this seminar to complete their secondary language requirement in Spanish.

LTCO 274 -- FILM, HISTORY, AND NATION: Case Studies in (mostly) Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema

"History does not break down into stories but into images."- W. Benjamin

"The cinema is an illusion, but one that dictates its laws to life."- I.V. Stalin.

This course will investigate the ways in which films participate in debates about the relationship between a nation's past and its identity in the present. The course will address the following general questions (among others): what it means to speak of a "national cinema," how cinema constructs and/or contests "official" versions of history; cinema's impact on shifting notions of what constitutes a "historical" event; how the formal qualities of cinematic narrative shape on-screen histories; how particular cinematic institutions-i.e. studios, film schools, censors,-influence the kinds of films and film histories produced; where and how issues of gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity surface in cinematic articulations of the relationship between national identity and national history.

The particular films we watch will depend to some extent on the background and interests of the students who enroll, but all films shown will have English subtitles. Ideally, I would like to organize our discussions in the first 6-7 weeks of the quarter around films from the former Soviet Union-both because that is my own area of expertise and because the former Soviet Union has a long and rich tradition of using cinema to construct, revise, and resurrect national histories and identities. Depending on student preferences, we could organize our initial discussions around a historical survey of Soviet "classics" (i.e. Eisenstein, Ermler, Kalatozov, Tarkovskii) and post-Soviet film makers' response to both the popular and auteurist traditions in Soviet cinema Or, we could center our discussions on films that address two particularly traumatic moments in Soviet history-the Stalin era and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Films we might view in the first category include, among others: Stalinist musical comedies from the 1930s; Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible; Chiaurelli's Fall of Berlin (1950, a Technicolor epic starring Stalin as a military genius who gives advice to lovelorn but heroic steelworkers); Abuladze's Repentance (1982-84); Dykhovichnyi's Moscow Parade (1992); Kvirikadze's Comrade Stalin Goes to Africa (1993, a fantasy about a Georgian Jew in training to become Stalin's double); Livenev's Hammer and Sickle (1994; this film takes as its pomo premise a sex-change operation in 1937). Films we might view in the second category include, among others: Nugmanov's The Wild East (1994, a Kazakh remake of the Seven Samurai set in a post-apocalyptic, nationless landscape), Khudoinazarov's Kosh ba Kosh (1993, a Tajik film set in Dushanbe during the recent and ongoing civil war); Sparov's Little Angel, Make me Happy (1994, a Turkmen film about the forced exile of German settlers from Soviet Turkmenistan during World War II); The Creation of Adam (1993, a Russian film about a gay guardian angel who teaches a hapless Leningrad architect the meaning of true love); and/or others. We will decide at the first class meeting which of these directions to pursue and which films to watch.

Class meetings in the final 3-4 weeks of the quarter will focus on films and readings selected by students for discussion in their final papers. These films may come from any part of the world.

Readings will be drawn from a variety of texts by film scholars, cultural critics, and historians: H. Bhabha, S. Hall, F. Jameson, R. Rosenstone, V. Sobchack, H. White, P. Willemen, L. Williams, and others.

LTCS 201 -- AMERICAN STUDIES AND THE POLITICS OF LOCATION

Please see the Literature Graduate Office for a copy of the course description for this course.

LTEN 224 -- SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE: Aesthetic Interest(s)

In this seminar we will examine two of the current modes of historical inquiry into early modern culture, one emphasizing social, political, and economic history, the other concentrating on systems of representation (including the visual arts, writing, music, political and ethical theory). We will consider the possible interrelationship of these approaches and the difficulty for criticism of relating aesthetic to ideological concerns. Students already concentrating in the early modern period will be invited to discover some aspect of their ongoing projects that relates to the theme of the course, and to work on this during the quarter. Students concentrating in later periods will be invited to identify an aspect of the course material that may be part of the history of their own current projects in their area of concentration.

Early modern literature and art was produced without the benefit of the Enlightenment aesthetic doctrine (evident from Romanticism through Modernism in the arts) that the judgment of the beautiful is disinterested. The foregoing statement may seem absurdly anachronistic. Yet there have been scholars and critics in the twentieth century (especially those associated with the New Criticism) who have written as though Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought as Kant and his followers did. More recent efforts to contest this earlier twentieth-century view are not necessarily less anachronistic; we have late twentieth-century scholars who write as though Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought as Adam Smith did, as Marx did, as Nietzsche did, as Freud did, as Foucault did, as Derrida, or Habermas, or Rorty do. At the same time, cultural critics interested in questions concerning gender, race, class, sexuality have only recently begun to historicize the categories of their critical concerns; in some instances the ideological meaning of a text is inferred without sufficient attention to formal factors that are specific to a historical context and that constitute part of the history of forms embedded in our canonical and counter-canonical notions of "culture." If those of us trained in literature, as distinct from other branches of the humanities (philosophy, history) and from the social sciences, have a knowledge and a task that is specific to our discipline, it has been our attentiveness to language as rhetoric, narrative, genre, and formal device. One of the questions confronting our discipline today is how to link the call to historicize to concerns with form that in the past distinguished our work from that of social, political, and economic historians. In studying representative early modern texts and contexts, this course will attempt to consider theoretical and practical ways of historicizing aesthetics while recognizing the value of aesthetic concerns in a critical historiography.

The problem of anachronism may be inescapable whether from the standpoint of an aesthetic that seeks to defend art from moral, practical, political interests, or from the standpoint of a functionalist historicism that treats art as reflective of the social formation, or from that of a more complex historicizing allegorical practice that treats art as symptomatic of an investment that is both libidinal and ideological. At the same time, it seems reasonable to assume that these respective and, at times, opposed standpoints are themselves historically grounded, and that studying cultures of the early modern period may provide some insight into the modes of thinking about culture that are competing for authority today.

We will read primary texts in a number of genres: Alberti's treatise On Painting, More's Utopia, Sidney's Defense of Poesie, Jonson and Bacon on rhetoric and judgment, and a selection of dramatic works for the public playhouses and the Court. And we will read studies in the history of art, the history of economic, social, and political institutions, and the history of Western subjectivity. Topics may include: the relation between rational and imaginative constructions of psychological and social space, and the ways in which gender, class, race, nation, and empire enter into these constructions; the emergence of a distinction between "high" and "popular" cultures and the instability of such distinction; etc.

I would like to meet with interested students later this quarter in order to discuss work-in progress as a factor in planning the course.

LTEN 245 -- LATE 19TH-CENTURY AMERICAN STUDIES: Women of the West

This course will focus on images and writings by and about women in the trans-Mississippi West from approximately 1865 to 1915. We will begin with a discussion of the status of the so-called New Western History and its implications for literary study (in this regard, we will read essays from A New Significance, as well as fictions by Mary Austin and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton). Then we will discuss how geographic location encodes and/or modifies gender-related behaviors (in the cases of Sharlot Hall, Belle Starr, and Mountain Charley); how the West served as a location for export of illicit desires, outlaw behaviors, and peoples excess to "normal" social configurations (orphans, unmarried working women, polygamists, and abolitionists); how it is figured as a location of containment for marginal populations (with reference to the anthropological work of Alice Fletcher and its representation in image and text by Jane Gay); and how, at the same time, the West becomes a site from which and within which those desires are maintained and resisted (Sui Sin Far, Mary Tape, Sarah Winnemucca and other native American women performers, and Mexicana performers in the Wild West shows). Course requirements will likely include an oral presentation, a visit to a local historical society, and a conference-length paper.

LTEN 252 -- STUDIES IN MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE: The 1950s: Culture of Containment

This seminar will study the 1950s, an era usually regarded as placid, conservative and conformist--the "tranquilized fifties," as Robert Lowell said. But this same decade saw the emergence of significant artistic and literary innovation, a powerful Civil Rights movement, the inauguration of alternative lifestyle options and bohemian communities whose social impact continues to be felt. The seminar will be based on the idea that the Cold War was fought both on a geo-political as well as domestic front, and that conflict in one sphere could often be read as concensus in the other. On one level, this means that the ideology of containment--the need to restrict Soviet expansionism abroad and monitor Soviet influence at home--manifested itself not only thematically in novels or movies about the Atom Bomb or the Communist menace, but in works having ostensibly little to do with American foreign policy.

In order to explore these issues, we will study key cultural documents of the cold War--J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, the essays of James Baldwin, the writings of Muriel Rukeyser and Gwendolyn Brooks, the Beat and Confessional poets, the painting of Jackson Pollock, and Willem deKooning. We will set such works within intellectual debates of the period concerning mass society and consumerism, consensus and individualism, subversion and surveillance, racial prejudice and racial equality. Many of these debates are underwritten by the normalization of gender roles as embodied in the new corporate organization man and the suburban domestic female worker. Yet these stereotypes of the "other-directed" individual were contested by new versions of masculinity and femininity being presented in literary works such as those listed above as well as in mass culture icons like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Hence in reading the culture of the national security state, we will also be looking at a state of national gendered insecurity.

Students in the seminar will be asked to develop a research proposal on some aspect of 1950s literary culture, culminating in a conference paper. These papers will be critiqued through peer review and revised, based on comments received. Students will also be asked to give informal oral reports on the reading.

LTSP 252 -- STUDIES/MODERN HISP LIT & CULT

(See instructor for Course Description)

LTTH 200C -- CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES AND CRITICS: Marxism & Post-Marx-isms

This course will deal with the impact of globalization and shifts taking place in our thinking on cultural production, theorization, constructs of nation, class, gender, race and ethnicity. The purpose of this 3rd course of the introductory sequence will be to situate the following theories central to the field of literary studies today: Marxist Theory, Postmarxism, poststructuralism, neohistoricism, socialist feminist theories, space theory, discourse theories, postmodernist theories, Critical Race theory and cultural theories, including perspectives on Cultural Studies. We will explore, briefly of course, various approaches to textuality and narrativity and look at current debates within the field, especially at the impact of "multiculturalism" on New American Studies. Among the texts to be read are those Marx, Gramsci, Harvey, Hobsbawm, Meiksins Wood, Macpherson, Amin, Larrain, Jameson, P. Anderson, Callinicos, Eagleton, Miyoshi, Laclau, Mouffe, Lefebvre, B. Anderson, Spivak, Chatterjee, Soja, Adorno, Balibar, Althusser, Ebert, Hennessy, West, Hall, Grossberg, E. San Juan, Gilroy, Hebdige, Pecora, Fraser, Kaplan, Pease, Berube, Sundquist, Delgado, Bell, K. Williams Crenshaw and Palumbo-Liu.

LTTH 297 -- DIRECTED STUDY TWO-UNIT MINI-SEMINAR

• Friday, April 25 1:00-4:00pm
• Saturday, April 26 10:00-1:00pm
• Monday, April 28 4:00pm (Public Lecture)
• Tuesday, April 29 1:00-4:00pm

Instructor: Fredric Jameson

(Description of the course will be announced soon.)

READING LIST

• I. A.J. Casoardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge) Descartes, Discourse and Meditations (Penguin)

• II. Foucault, The Order of Things (Vintage)

• III. A. Compagnon, 5 Paradoxes of Modernity (Columbia)
  Bruno Latour, We have Never Been Modern

LTWR 280 -- WORKSHOP/IMAGINATIVE WRITING

This workshop in imaginative writing is for students who wish to work on an extended piece of writing--poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction--of fifteen or more pages total. I am particularly interested in issues of diction, narration and argumentation as these are effected by genre. Students should have some material in draft form so that we can set to work on critiques and revisions of work.