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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 274
GENRE STUDIES Intercultural Poetics Instructor: Wai-lim Yip Central to our task is the attempt to widen the circumference of our consciousness and our literary and cultural horizon by bringing together differing literatures and cultural systems to engage in a form of dialogue in which the indigenous aesthetic horizon of each culture is allowed to represent itself as it is, and not as it is framed within the hermeneutical habits and the poetic economy of one privileged, dominant culture. There is not one center, but many centers, not one interest, economic or otherwise, but many interests, that make up this world. For us, the word "international" should mean, literally, international, interperception, and interreflection; it should mean that we must not see other cultures from one master code or one hegemonic center of concern but from several differing codes and several centers of concerns. The goal of cultural exchange, like economic exchange, should not be to conquer one mode with another but to provide an open forum for dialogue through interreflection and "double/triple perception" -- that is, a gap or rift created by the copresence of two or three sets of provisional responses to two or three cultural "worlds". This gap or double/triple perception allows us to mark the coding activities of one system by those of the others so as to understand more fully the making and unmaking of discourses: hierarchies of aesthetics and power. Different critical and aesthetic positions will have a chance to look at each other frankly, to recognize among themselves potential areas of convergence and divergence as well as their possibilities and limitations both as isolated theories/ modes of expression and as cooperative projects to extend one another. As such, we want to create a truly open dialogue that preserves the tension between cultural differences leading to rethinking the ways in which various trajectories of theories and literary creations have been constituted. The various margins must be brought back onto the stage as an equal partner to play out the differences. Our investigation, which must involve comparing and contrasting several different cultural models and expressive modes from their indigenous sources, attempts to achieve what might be called an inter-illumination or inter-recognition to replace the dominance principle currently used by many crosscultural comparatists and monocultural theorists. The true meaning of the interflow of cultures is, and must be, a mutually expanding, mutually adjusting, and mutually containing activity, an effort to push our boundary of understanding and expression toward a wider circumference. For example, by introducing to students modes of writing from other cultural systems vastly different from the cultural-aesthetic assumptions of Euro-American writing, and thus disclosing the limitations (as well as the true potentials) of the Indo-European languages as a medium for aesthetic expression, the seminar can provide new language strategies for new perceptual horizons, or new perceptual horizons for new language strategies. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 284 LITERATURE AND ETHICS Ethics and War Cinema Instructor: Alain J.-J. Cohen Please see the Literature Graduate Office, room 3139 for a copy of the course description for this course. LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 231 RESTORATION EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE Animals and Humans in the Long Eighteenth Century Instructor: Kathryn Shevelow This course will be concerned with the interrelationships between animals and people in Britain during the period extending from the later 17th century to the early 19th century. Its end points will be 1822, when Parliament passed the Martin Act, the first act regulating the treatment of animals (farm animals), and 1824, when the act’s sponsor, Richard (“Humanity Dick”) Martin, and others founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The purpose of the course will be to explore the ways humans thought about and interacted with animals in the century and a half prior to the Martin Act. Our scrutiny will include historical information about people’s interactions with animals, from references to house pets (the keeping of pets became a widespread practice at this time), beasts of burden, wild, and exotic animals, to accounts of blood sports, animal exhibits in venues such as Bartholomew Fair, and animals’ appearances in legal cases (including their criminal prosecution and execution). We will also be reading selections from the extensive eighteenth-century philosophical/political discourse about the nature and treatment of animals, and looking at varied representations of them in literature (poetry, fiction, essays) and painting (from satiric prints to portraiture), and in science writing (case histories and taxonomy, but also the growing debates about animal experimentation and vivisection). The focus of this course will be upon actual animals in Britain itself, but we will also look at some of the ways in which non-human creatures were used as metaphors and moral exempla, and figured in travel writing, abolitionist (and other social reformist) discourse, and discussions of race, monstrosity, and the boundaries of the human. Reading will include, but not be limited to, selections from: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Christopher Smart, John Gay, William Wordsworth, Aesop (18th-century translations), David Hume, early “animal welfare” philosophical/political writers such as John Lawrence, Humphrey Primatt, Thomas Young, and John Osborne, court cases, pamphlet and periodical literature, and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Graphic artists will include William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, and George Stubbs. We’ll be reading a varied selection of recent scholarly work relevant to our topic. LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 252 STUDIES IN MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Poetry and the Public Sphere Instructor: Michael Davidson This seminar will investigate modern poetry and its relation to the public sphere. More specifically, we will investigate the publics that poetry addresses and the alternative kinds of communication that poetry makes possible. The concept of the "public sphere" has been debated in a number of arenas, most famously by Jurgen Habermas in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). In that book, Habermas diagnoses a realm of communication, the "liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere," that is open and accessible to all. It is a model of community not defined within official (political, juridical and economic) modes of public discourse. Various commentators have argued that, however important his model of non-institutional communication, Habermas excludes important constituencies from the public sphere. Women, persons of color, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities often have restricted access to venues of public debate and discussion implied by Habermas's model. In this seminar I would like to explore the "alternate publics" missing from Habermas's model and the role that poetry plays in imagining them. Recent developments in the poetry world--rap, poetry slams, collaboration, performance poetry, Nuyorican Cafe, d/Deaf poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, pidgin and dialect poetry, prison poetry, poetry therapy--suggest that poetry is assuming new, collective and dialogic forms. To this extent, it is necessary to look at poetry and poetic communities as complex networks of publishing, printing, distribution, performance venues, bars, art spaces and coffee houses--sites in which community is formed and instrumentalized communication tested. That this interchange occurs in a vehicle usually thought to be the most private, aestheticized of genres, poses a special challenge in developing a historicized cultural poetics. In order to see poetry as a form of community formation, we will look at poems as they have appeared in magazines and anthologies, as read and recorded at public readings and as debated in public venues such as conferences and editorial columns. In addition to writing a seminar paper, students will be asked to present research on the material aspect of poetry as it engages with (or produces) new public arenas: little magazines, spoken word performances, public readings, website constructions, zines, posters, public signage, performance art, Deaf club slams, etc. LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 256 POSTCOLONIAL DISCOURSES Lives and Ideas: Considerations of Blackness and Diaspora Instructor: Nicole King In this seminar we will be concerned with twentieth-century theorizations of black subjectivity from comparative perspectives that emphasize time and place. We will study the works and, in some cases, the biographies of several black authors/intellectual figures for whom the notion of blackness is indelibly an internationalist one forged at the nexus of exile, colonialism and/or political struggle. In the first half of the quarter we will immerse ourselves in works by and films about two black U.S. intellectuals: Paul Robeson and Richard Wright. In the second half of the quarter we will turn our attention to cultural producers, ideas and representations of blackness and black diaspora that have originated and circulated outside of the U.S. Our goals in this course are to assess various meanings and deployments of the terms blackness, black diaspora, and racialized identities, particularly as they interact with other aspects of identity and subjectivity such as class, gender, sexuality and place. In so doing we aim to reach a complex understanding of the idea of blackness and black identities which displace U.S.-centered conceptualizations. This course cannot serve as a comprehensive study of the idea of blackness and the idea of black diaspora. There is, for instance, an emphasis on the U.S., the Caribbean and Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, and a relative exclusion of Africa and African writers. Our readings will include works of fiction and non-fiction by authors including Edwidge Danticat, Samuel Selvon, Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, George Lamming, Merle Collins and Paul Gilroy. The reading list will be available before the beginning of spring quarter and is likely to include Wright’s Black Power, Robeson’s Here I Stand, Selvon’s The Lonely Londonners, Collins’ Angel, and Phillips’ The Atlantic Sound. Assignments include a seminar paper (10-15 pages) and a class presentation of 15-20 minutes. LITERATURES IN SPANISH 272 LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES Instructor: Max Parra A description of this course was not available at the time of printing, so please contact Professor Max Parra for the course description. LITERATURE THEORY 200C CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES & CULTURAL CRITICISM Instructor: Lisa Lowe In this third quarter of the introductory theory and methods sequence, we examine various approaches to the study of world literature and culture. We will be concerned to understand the genealogies of the idea of “national literature,” of modern methods of “comparison,” and of aesthetic concepts like “modernism.” In the mid-20th century, the disciplines of English and Comparative Literature tended to read literature and national aesthetic cultures as originating in metropolitan Europe, especially London and Paris, extending out towards the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Beginning with an analysis of the adequacy or necessity of this comparative and national model, we examine a range of approaches that reverse, displace, or simply conceive differently, this particular itinerary of literary, aesthetic, and cultural origin and progress. We will consider British cultural materialism and French poststructuralist theories; studies of colonialism and postcolonial theory; ideas of transculturation, indigeneity, créolité, and hybridity in the Americas; and Black diaspora or transatlantic studies – to discuss and devise alternative models for understanding “literature” and “culture” within the global conditions their emergence. Readings will include selections from Erich Auerbach, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Gauri Viswanathan, Tejaswini Niranjana, C. L. R. James, José Martí, Roberto Fernando Rétamar, Néstor García Canclini, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Françoise Lionnet, Mary Louise Pratt, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ann Laura Stoler, Srinivas Aravamudan, Gayatri Spivak, and others. One aim is to conceive a study that would both situate national and comparative literature study and attend to the remainders of mixture, encounter, entanglements, intimacies, conflicts and convergences that may be “lost” through some comparative procedures. Students will write brief response papers, present collaborative work, and conclude with a final paper. LITERATURE WRITING 272 RESEARCH IN COMPOSING AND WRITTEN DISCOURSE Instructor: Linda Brodkey The readings (several books and a variety of journal articles) in this seminar survey literature on composition published since the early 1970s in light of the institutional arrangements under which writing has been taught and studied in U.S. colleges and universities since the mid-nineteenth century. Special attention will be given to language theories used to warrant writing research and pedagogy, namely, what the theories set out to explain and what part those explanations then play in establishing research and pedagogical agendas for the field of composition. For the most part, we concentrate on structural and poststructural language and discourse theories, and the research methods (protocols, case studies, historiographies, discourse analyses, ethnographies) that support and are also supported by them. Participants will compile a bibliographical essay as their primary writing for the seminar, and will be asked to discuss their work-in-progress periodically with the class. |