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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 283
LITERATURE AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
From Machiavelli to Hegel
The Genesis of Modern Bio-Political Thought
Professor Marcel Hénaff
At the end of The Will for Knowledge [History of Sexuality vol.I], Foucault stated: “For millennia,
man has remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal capable of a
political existence. Modern man is an animal whose politics engages his
essence as a living being”. According to Foucault, from the late
18th/early 19th century on, the major objective of governments in
industrialized societies has been above all to manage increasing
populations in terms of circulation of goods, access to food, education,
hygiene, protection against epidemics or against « dangerous » groups or
classes etc. This management of populations through containment,
discipline, propaganda or military training has in many ways been
inseparable from technological progress and scientific discovery. The
“king of creation” has rediscovered his status as an animal among other
species.
This mutation was accomplished through 19th century various social
practices. But its philosophical framework is more ancient. It has been
conceptually built during the Early Modern times, between Machiavelli
and Hegel. In this respect, Machiavelli’s work was a watershed. While
the author of The Prince still belonged to the traditional world, he
already understood power as a mere technology of appearance and
manipulation of forces. The most fundamental turning point was provided
–for very different reasons- by Hobbes, Locke, and the new theoreticians
of Natural Law. During the Classical and Middle Ages, Natural Law had
been understood as the search for the Sovereign Good. Hobbes and Locke
interpret it as the right for a living being to stay alive; then as the
right to fight to the death against anybody who is threatening one’s
life (Hobbes) or as the right to appropriate what one needs to live
(Locke). In both cases, the issue was self-preservation: living is
surviving. Rousseau accepted these premises but placed freedom above
life itself (and Kant will praise him for that). Every one of these
authors (whatever their differences) considered society as an
association of individuals bonded to each other by a contract. Later,
Hegel’s theory of the State seemed to move beyond this way of setting up
the political problem, precisely at a time when, in Europe, new
governments, along with the democratic waves of the 19th Century,
confirmed the developing practices of biopolitics.
In short, this seminar will propose a philosophical “archeology” of this
biopolitics, from Machiavelli to Hegel. And it will conclude with the
perspectives opened by the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben in his controversial Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [Stanfod
UP, 1998, - orig. 1995] which broadened the scope of biopolitics to
include the operations of 20th century concentration camps.
NB- A reader will provide most of the texts to be read and discussed
during the quarter.
This seminar can also fulfill the requirement for the study of a given
period.
Reading the texts in the original language (other than English) could
also be
validated toward fulfilling the 2nd language requirement.
See the
instructor.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 289
HISTORY OF THE BOOK
Professor Stephanie Jed
In his essay “Morphology and the Book from an American Perspective,”
Roger Stoddard wrote: “Whatever they may do, authors do not write books.
Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other
artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and
other machines.” Although there are some exceptions to this “rule” –
some authors do write books – it is true that in our interpretation of
texts, we often ignore the historicity of books. In this seminar, we
will endeavor to examine the historicity of books and bring it to play
in the interpretive field.
After a theoretical introduction to the history of the book as an
epistemological problem, we will examine several aspects of the history
of the book:
- the practice of materialist bibliography
- books as expressions of graphic culture
- the social production of books
- the organization of libraries
- the social transmission of culture
- how books organize readers
- books in relation to texts
Readings will include:
Roger Chartier’s The Order of Books, D.F. McKenzie,
Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, Michel De Certeau,
The Writing of History, Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library,
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Robert Darnton,
The Business of Enlightenment, and Elizabeth Eisenstein, The
Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
The goal of the seminar is to enable students to incorporate book
history in their interpretive methodologies and interpretive
perspectives.
This seminar should fulfill the historical breadth requirement.
CULTURAL STUDIES 210
HISTORY AND CULTURE
History, Memory, Violence
Professor Lisa Yoneyama
In recent years "memory" has become a central concept for analyzing
problems of historical representation and identities. In this course
students will read a number of key texts that have become central to
recent discussions on history, trauma, violence and the politics of
memory. It also analyzes the specific ways in which the concept of power
and memory have been appropriated in diverse narrative forms --
including, novels, history textbooks, personal testimonies, spatial and
visual representation, and media reports. We will focus especially on
those writings that examine the ways in which the processes of
remembering and forgetting work in the production of official discourses
of nationalism, history of colonialism, and memory of violence, as well
as in the construction of subaltern subjectivities. We will discuss
whether and how the concept of "memory" might be a useful analytical
tool for dealing with problems of power and representations and
determine, through locally specific instances, the ways in which it
allows us to question the teleological and evolutionary sense of time
that underlies dominant modern/Western temporality and historical
consciousness.
CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Reading Literature and Culture through Marxist Theory and Criticism
Professor Winfred Woodhull
This seminar will introduce students to some key theoretical and
critical texts by Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Frantz
Fanon, Fredric Jameson, and some other thinkers, such as those
anthologized in a recent volume by Crystal Bartolovich, Neil Lazarus,
and Timothy Brennan, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies.
In addition, we will read Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This
World on the Haitian Revolution of the late 18th c.; Nancy Armstrong
on domestic fiction and one of the Brontë novels she analyzes; Moyra
Haslett on Jane Austen in the 1990s, as well as a novel and a film she
analyzes; Michael Sprinker on Proust and a volume of Remembrance of
Things Past; and Mike Wayne on Marxism and media studies (including
new media such as the internet). The idea will be to give considerable
attention to literature, mass media, and other kinds of cultural
production, rather than reading theory exclusively. Students will be
encouraged to link theoretical readings to literary or other cultural
texts in their field of specialization (Latin America, Africa, Asia,
etc).
The seminar assumes no prior study of Marxism. The bibliography will
list some very accessible, recently published overviews of Marxist
thought, eg. Jonathan Wolff, Why Read Marx Today?; Terry Eagleton
and Drew Milne, Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader, which contains
two helpful introductions by the editors; George A. Kennedy's The
Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Realism, Positivism, and
Marxism; and Gary Day, Class: The New Critical Idiom, which,
among other things, traces the evolution of class formations and
conflicts in England from the medieval period through the 20th c.
CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Theory of Religion
Professor Richard Cohen
This class provides an advanced introduction to “religion” as an
intellectual category. It considers history and theory in its survey of
several major nineteenth and early twentieth-century approaches to
religion in the post-Reformation West.
The first three weeks focus on the Reformation and Enlightenment, with
primary readings from Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Sadoleto, Descartes,
Voltaire, Lessing, Hume. The next four weeks are devoted to major trends
in the theorization of religion. In each class, we consider a seminal
thinker and his continuing influence. The foci here are Kant (religion
as rational), Schleiermacher (religion as experiential), Marx (religion
as ideological), Durkheim (religion as functional). In the final three
weeks we will read examples of contemporary, theoretically
sophisticated, studies of “religious” phenomena.
The class’ syllabus is available at
http://lit-faculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rscohen/. Right now it
is a work-in-progress. I have not placed an order at Groundwork Books or
the UCSD bookstore. You can buy the books wherever and however you
choose. Articles and essays will be made available through electronic
reserves.
Please note that there is an assignment for the first class meeting. If
you need further information contact me at
rscohen@ucsd.edu.
LITERATURE ENGLISH 224
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE
Modernity: Pre- and Post-modern Conditions
Professor Don Wayne
This course may also be taken in fulfillment of LTCS 225:
Interdisciplinary and Historical Analysis of Cultural Texts
This course is offered as much for students whose concentration is
outside Renaissance or early modern studies as it is for specialists in
the period. We will read selected early modern texts in light of the
question of "modernity" as it has been discussed in recent theoretical
and historical research. Our aim will be to discern some of the
distinctive features of early modern culture (mainly but not exclusively
in England) and, in particular, to identify features of the early modern
that were for a long time obscured by prevailing critical models in
fields such as literary criticism and intellectual history, models that
were largely inherited from the Enlightenment. Our approach will combine
aesthetics, social and cultural theory, and political economy, domains
that were until recently kept in discrete intellectual and
methodological compartments in a way that often deformed early modern
textual practices to make them fit Enlightenment or modernist
assumptions. One of the questions we shall be asking is: Why do some
features of early modern literature and culture appear (or reappear)
under the lenses of a postmodern, and in certain though not all
respects, a post-Enlightenment critical apparatus? Such features include
aspects of what we now call the history of subjectivity (a category in
which the interplay of race, class, gender, and sexuality involves a
complex historical dynamic and, moreover, a category that is set in
opposition to conventional high modernist notions of self and identity).
Other features of the early modern that have recently moved to the
forefront of scholarly inquiry include aspects of the history of state
and nation, the history of colonialism and racism, the history of
commodification, the history of education, the history of
professionalism and of authorship, the history of distinctions between
"high" and "low" cultures. While making every effort to be vigilant in
avoiding the pitfalls of "presentism" or "teleology," we will approach
our subject from a standpoint that insists on the validity of relating
past and present. Our understanding of that historical relationship will
depend on fine distinctions, involving both continuities and
discontinuities, regarding such categories of cultural analysis as
nation, state, race, gender, class, capital, global/local, as well as
the category of literature itself. In addition to primary texts from
England and Europe of the early modern period, we will read a number of
theoretical and historical studies devoted to the question of
"modernity," and recent works of literary criticism that attempt to
engage with the question of relations between the early modern and the
postmodern. Students concentrating in early modern studies are invited
to suggest early modern texts on which they want to work for possible
inclusion in the course syllabus. Students who are not concentrating in
early modern studies will be encouraged to develop term projects that
relate the materials and issues covered in this course to their own
primary research interests.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 245
19TH CENTURY AMERICAN STUDIES
U.S. Wars and Cultural Memory
Professor Shelley Streeby
Wars set the boundaries for most periodizations of U.S. history and
culture. Within such narratives, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War,
World War II, and Vietnam, especially, are important markers of
transformation and continuity. Why are some wars remembered and others
forgotten? What do we remember and forget about U.S. wars? How have
people used changing forms of popular, mass, and literary culture to
produce different kinds of war memories? And how have cultural memories
of past wars returned (or not) at more recent moments of crisis? These
are a few of the questions that we will discuss during the quarter.
We will view these questions through the lenses of different
methodologies and disciplines. Our texts will include recent
award-winning histories; seminal articles and books in the
interdisciplinary field of American Studies; and post-nationalist,
comparative, and feminist approaches to war in literary, visual,
popular, and mass culture. Each week there will be one or more required
texts and also a set of recommended readings. The recommended reading
will consist of other critical essays on the topic in question as well
as relevant works of literature and culture. Students will be asked to
do two short presentations on recommended texts during the quarter, and
one of these presentations may be used as the basis for the 10-12 page
required paper that will be due at the end of the quarter.
Although the syllabus is still under construction, we will probably
begin with King Philip’s War in colonial New England and wars in the
US/Mexico borderlands; then move on to the Civil War, 19th-Century
Indian Wars, and the “New Empire” of the 1890s; and finally (re)turn to
the twentieth century to consider the occupation of Haiti, World Wars I
and II, and Vietnam.
Seminar participants should read Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories
before the quarter begins. We will discuss it during the first
meeting of the class. Pay special attention to her analysis of the
concept of cultural memory in the introduction.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 256
POSTCOLONIAL DISCOURES
Introduction to Postcolonial Literature & Literary Theory
Professor Rosemary George
This course will introduce seminar participants to the major themes and
critical/fictional texts of literary postcolonial studies as constituted
as a field of study in western academia. The term “postcolonial” is
understood to refer to a critical framework in which literary and other
texts can be read against the grain of the hegemonic discourse in a
colonial or neocolonial context: this framework insists on recognizing,
and resisting the strictures and structures of colonial and
post-independence relations of power. It takes its inspiration from and
constantly refers to the intellectual work that contributed to the end
of Europe’s colonial occupation of the globe, beginning from the
mid-twentieth century to the present. But the postcolonial critical
framework is more than a condensed theory of decolonization. Rather, it
is a methodology especially invested in examining culture as an
important site of
conflicts, collaborations and struggles between those in power and those
subjected to power. In recent years the term “postcolonial” is
differently invoked by different practitioners. In this course, this
critical stance will be understood to counter the usual relations of
power between first and third world locations in the linked arenas of
economics, politics and cultural production. We will read and discuss
the work of the foremost theorists/novelists of the field: Aijaz Ahmad,
Ama Ata Aidoo, M. Jacqui Alexander, Benedict Anderson, Ayi Kwei Armah,
Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Frantz Fanon,
Ranajit Guha, Stuart Hall, Jamaica Kincaid, Mahashweta Devi, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Gauri Viswanathan and others. Seminar Requirements: All assigned reading
for each session, class presentations, and one 15-page paper that
engages with some of the issues raised in this seminar in the context of
a postcolonial text of your choice.
For the first class meeting on January 7th, seminar participants
should read the introduction and first chapter of Edward Said's
Orientalism & the introduction and first chapter of Edward Said's
Culture & Imperialism. All readings will be available at Groundwork
Books & at Calcopy.
LITERATURES IN FRENCH 240
TOPICS IN FRENCH LITERATURE
Melodrama as Democratic Aesthetics and Genre
Professor Roddey Reid
This course will investigate melodrama in French-language texts and
artifacts with a view toward teasing out how it has operated since the
eighteenth century as peculiarly powerful cultural and epistemological
aesthetic form and genre in emerging and established liberal democratic
societies from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Over time it has traveled from theater to visual arts (painting,
sculpture) to the pastoral and serial novel, early social science
inquiries, medical and psychiatric treatises and finally children’s
literature, film, radio, television, and advertising. As we trace its
genealogy, particular attention will be paid to its politics of affect
that stimulates democratic desires of community and selfhood and
challenges theories of culture as representation and ideology and
studies of melodrama that view as essentially a static, conservative as
opposed to a destabilizing and dynamic cultural practice. I will argue
that melodrama did much to discredit the Old Regime and its colonial and
gendered practices, construct both working class revendications and the
working class as classes dangeureuses, and deconstruct bourgeois
social norms even as it seems to reinstantiate them. We will examine how
it unsutures and resutures identities, desires, and entire social
landscapes for fictional protagonists, readers, viewers, and social
experts alike.
Texts will be available in French and English. They may include
Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788), selections
from social inquests such as DeGérando’s De la bienfaisance publique
(1839) and Eugène Buret’s De la misère des classes laborieuses
(1841), selections from Eugène Sue’s long serial novel Les Mystères
de Paris (1842-43), Zola’s la Curée (1872), André Gide’s
La Porte étroite as well as several films and TV shows (depending on
availability). Theoretical reading will include essays or book chapters
by critics such as Peter Brooks, Steven Neale, Janet Feuer, Roddey Reid,
and Linda Williams.
Class discussions will be in English. Email:
rreid@ucsd.edu
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 258
SPANISH-AMERICAN PROSE
Central American Literature 1950-2000
Professor Milos Kokotovic
We will dedicate the first few weeks of this seminar to Miguel Ángel
Asturias’s Hombres de maíz. Our focus will be the manner in which
Asturias used Maya cultural elements to structure the novel. To help
with this, we will read selections from the Popol Vuh and some
critical articles on the subject. The second part of the seminar will be
devoted to a few representative works from the 1970s-1980s wars in
Central America, including poetry by Ernesto Cardenal and Roque Dalton,
selections from one or two testimonios, and a novel by Manlio Argueta.
Beverley and Zimmerman’s Literature and Politics in the Central
American Revolutions and other critical articles, particularly on
the testimonio, will help us to analyze the relationship between
political mobilization and literary representation. In the final part of
the seminar, we will read several recent works of postwar narrative by
Franz Galich, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Jacinta
Escudos. Students are required to give an oral presentation and write
three short papers of 5-6 pages, one on each section of the seminar.
LITERATURE THEORY 200(B)
PROBLEMS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERARY
THEORY
Professor Nicole King
In this second course of the theory sequence the focus is on feminist
literary/cultural theories and their relations with major contemporary
theoretical discourses. Topics will include psychoanalysis,
transnational feminisms, and the intersections between race, gender,
sexuality and class. Readings will be announced before the start of the
quarter.
LITERATURE WRITING 282
WRITING STATES
Libretti
Professor Eileen Myles
I think libretto just means little book and many little books become
‘libretti.’
Yet the little book either drives or informs the big opera. You may have
already written plays, poems, or screenplays or you may be entirely
focused in another genre. But increasingly you will have noticed that
opera is the art form of the moment. Public and insistent. The new punk
rock. An opportunity to be heard at a busy and complex culture and time.
So this might just be the art form for you. This writing class invites
writers, scholars and all kinds of artists to participate in a group
effort to reinvent a vibrant but old form that changes even as we speak.
During the quarter we will think about and read some plays and poems and
libretti and look at films that are relevant. We will listen to music.
Naturally we will look at opera, both on video, and live somewhere in
southern California during the quarter. By mid-quarter each participant
will write a proposal for an opera. The group will decide whether they
ought to go ahead, or might suggest changes in each project. Ultimately
each member of the class will produce at least a 25 page libretto, and
make the beginnings of a plan to produce it.
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