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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 282
LITERATURE AND
PHILOSOPHY
Why Daoism Today: Reflections on Modernism and Postmodernism in a
Global Context
Instructor: Wai-lim Yip
"We are condemned to be modern [We might now add "postmodern"]. We
cannot (should not) dispense with technology and science. 'Turning back'
is both impossible and unthinkable...[T] raditional societies must be
defended if we wish to preserve diversity...The extinction of each
marginal society and each ethnic and cultural difference signifies the
extinction of a survival possibility for the entire species. With each
society that disappears, destroyed or devoured by industrialization [We
might now add the word "globalization"], a possibility of mankind
disappears--not only the past but also the future. History has been,
until now, plural: diverse visions of man, each with a distinct version
of his past and his future. To preserve this diversity is to preserve a
plurality of futures--which is to say life itself." (Paz) "
This seminar, using the Daoist project of the 6th-3rd BC, in my
shorthand summary here--" To deframe language's grip on us for the
liberation of mind leading to the retrieval of the vivid, virgin and
vivacious (w)holistic lifeworld, a lesson yet to be learned by the West,
seeks to reread the process of modernization, the resultant modernity
and the discourses of modernism as social-political imaginary
significations for and against the regimentation of the lifeworld and
the colonization of humanity. We will see that postmodernity, together
with the onslaught of globalization driven by the agenda of the
multinational corporatism, must be read as a furthering of Adorno's
"culture industry" and its threat to eradicate the diversity of cultures
feared by Octavia Paz.
Daoism is a root-awakening forward-looking horizon, which can be best
characterized by the double meanings of the English word "Radical". On
the one hand, it attacks the root questions of how language affects our
conceptions, both of the world and of our selves as beings in the world,
leading to opening up a new perception of total phenomena as an
interweaving, inter-disclosing, and inter-defining entity free from the
restriction and distortion of ideas, on the other, it offers us radical,
avant-garde subversive strategies to retrieve and re-inscribe such a
space in and out of which we are empowered to move freely.
In the Daoist discourse, we often find words, phrases, statements, or
stories of actions that take us by surprise, unconventional, strange
forms of logic, or anti-logic, teasing language and rhetoric, including
paradoxes and attacks by way of using off-norms to re-inscribe off-norms
as possible norms, and challenging norms to expose their acceptance as
treacherous. In the neo-Daoist developments, we find further the use of
actions or activities to tease and assail the life-imprisoning
institutions, including techniques of shouting and beating in Chan (Zen)
Buddhist kongan or koan. These language strategies and actions or
activities of ancient China have anticipated and previewed the three
stages of attack often used in Western avant-garde art events since the
Dadaist movement, namely, TO DISTURB, TO DISLOCATE, and TO DESTROY. It
is important to note that these triple stages of the Daoist attack are
inseparable from their target vision of retrieving the free flow of
Nature and humanity to the full. Without this understanding, all these
"disturb-dislocate-destroy" attempts in avant-garde art movements since
Dadaism, including deconstruction and poststructuralist attempts, will
remain merely shock techniques as such.
The Daoist Project, in deframing power structures of fuedalistic China,
reawakens the memories of the repressed, exiled and alienated natural
self, leading to recovery of full humanity. As a counterdiscourse to the
tyranny of language, it is at once political and aesthetic. Through the
texts of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, we will explore fully the decreative-creative
parameters of this ancient Chinese philosophy, as they operate both in
life and in the arts and the new points of departure for rethinking the
problems in the modern and postmodern world.
We can now look back on the theory of modernization of the West. This
theory, particularly when it is propagated to underdeveloped countries,
but in many ways also as it has been infiltrated into the minds of the
larger masses of the West, often eschews the ambiguous (i.e., at once
liberating and repressive) character of modernity and highlights its
capacity to deliver human happiness and fulfillment. This theory which
the First World attempts to sell to the Third World as development
theory, sees traditional, pre-capitalist, and pre-modern societies as
consisting all manner of social and material ills and unfreedoms which
greatly limit the possibilities for self-developments."People were held
in thrall to a variety of superstitions or dogmatic religious beliefs;
civil and political rights were few and authoritarian rule is the norm."
Modernity, according to this theory, in particular, "the scientific
rationality and the liberal-democratic political projects associated
with 'enlightenment'" will deliver emancipation from many of these forms
of domination. With a bourgeois economic theory characterized by highly
stratified administrative and management structures, coupled with
industrialization and urbanization, progress and affluence will be
achieved. But this theory chooses to gloss over the warnings of
Baudelaire, Marx, Weber, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and many others:
that modernization also comes with regimentation of the lifeworld, an
"iron cage" of instrumental reason leading to a reductive humanity --
"one dimensional man", alienated, reified, commodified, and
"colonized"-- in other words, another form of domination what Adorno has
characterized as "cultural industry" (culture tailored to economic
impulses). In the gobalized postmodern world, this form of domination in
which commodity fetishism has engendered a high degree of superficiality
and a renunciation of constitutive subjectivity and concomitant
individuality of works as well as a pronounced sense of
political-cultural resignation, among other things.
It was and still is against this form of domination that we must study
modernism and postmodernism as various forms of counterdiscourse to the
colonization of humanity. Many of the language renovations in these
poets such as non-matrixed presentations characterized by the
destruction of linearity, syntax, and temporal order, calling for a
simultaneaous "happening" or acting-out of luminous textual and cultural
moments as patterned energies, as well as their quests for new
perceptual grounds, including the appropriation of Oriental poetic
strategies and Amerindian perceptions, can then be understood as
attempts to dethrone the fundamentally repressive linguistic and
cultural framing of the Western tradition which is still continually
perpetuated under the flag of supposedly liberating modernization and
the supposedly free exchange in globalization.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 285
LITERATURE AND ÆSTHETICS
Film Æsthetics and Art History
Instructor: Alain J.-J. Cohen
Please see the Literature Graduate Office, room 3139 for a copy of the
course description for this course.
CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Twentieth-Century Literature Multi-Ethnic Southern U.S. and Caribbean
Instructor: Winifred Woodhull
The Multi-Ethnic Caribbean. This seminar will look at 19th and 20th
century literatures of the Caribbean and the Southern U.S. originally
written in Spanish and French as well as English. It will emphasize
transcultural flows throughout the region and will consider the history,
for example, of Africans, Creoles, and Cajuns in Louisiana (eg
through Erna Brodber's novel Louisiana and Charles Chesnutt's Paul
Marchand, Free Man of Color, as well as Cajun and Creole
folktales, and recent studies of Africans and Seminoles in Florida. In
addition to various literary texts from the Caribbean islands (Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Guadeloupe), we will read recent studies
re-envisioning Caribbean literature and culture, such as Caribbean
Creollization, The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean, and
Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 252
STUDIES IN MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Keywords in Modernism
Instructor: R. Michael Davidson
Based on the model of Raymond Williams’ Keywords, this seminar
will explore ten key terms in modernism and modernity. The purpose of
the seminar is to provide a solid foundation for the study of modernist
works, based on basic texts and debates. Although our focus will be on
the use of these keywords in Anglo/American Literature, theoretical
materials will be chosen from a number of national literatures. Each
week we will touch on one keyword as exemplified in a short work (poem,
play, short story) and through a variety of critical texts, essays, and
manifestos. Thus we may read a short story by Henry James in order to
illustrate “cosmopolitanism,” followed by supplementary readings in
Huyssens, Baudelaire or Benjamin. We may read a poem by Mina Loy or
Gertrude Stein to illustrate the phrase “avant garde,” but we may also
read Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant Garde or one of
Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos. Although the list of terms is still
developing, at present it includes the following (along with their
cognates and associations):
The Aesthetic (aestheticism, formalism, aura, objectivity),
Avant Garde (manifesto, montage, quotidian), Cosmopolitanism
(travel, expatriate, emigration, flaneur), Defamiliarization (ostrenenie,
alienation effect, materiality), Repetition (duration,
hermeneutic circle, eternal return), Race (racism, orientalism,
nativism, eugenics), Ocularcentrism (Imagism, objectivism,
photography), Nation (imperialism, nationalism, nativism),
Sex/Gender (Oscar Wilde, Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, Weininger), The
Crowd (shock, public sphere, mass culture, urbanism).
Obviously any one of these terms could be the topic for an entire
seminar, so our coverage will necessarily be cursory and partial. The
main point will be to develop an understanding of how given terms were
developed, what historical forces contributed to their usage, how they
have changed over time. Students will be asked to develop their own list
of keywords, along with definitions, and brief bibliographies that may
serve as a seminar-generated companion to modernist studies.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 252
STUDIES IN MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Pathetic Literature
Instructor: Eileen Myles
This
seminar will look at a literary phenomenon mainly American but with
European and Asian antecedents and fellow travelers. “Pathetic” emerged
in the art world of the early 90s (“Pathetic Masculinity”) to describe a
group of visual artists, mostly male and mostly educated on the west
coast ((Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Jack Pierson) who work in both media
and crafts, producing alternately cuddly, abject, direct or vaguely
hostile mostly “personal” work that was possibly influenced by an
earlier generation feminist artists who were dominant in the LA art
world of the 60s-80s. Is the pathetic a masculinized feminism? Can women
be pathetic too? What about Nicole Eisenman, Su Williams. Is it white?
Meanwhile I’m thinking pathetic is a subversion of gender stereotypes
that seems to be reanimating literature. This seminar will also float
the suggestion that the pathetic might be a more emo way to describe a
new mostly queer literary avant garde that has been slowly making
inroads from the fringe to the mainstream (and back) since the late
seventies. Too, I’m throwing out the idea that a wealth of popular
Japanese work (Hello Kitty: kawaii) lately getting showcased in the US
by Takashi Murakami has long been exploring power and powerlessness
around war, gender and technology. The artists we’ll be looking at will
include some of these: Bob Gluck, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Richard
Hell, Sam Dalessandro, Rebecca Brown, Jane DeLynn, Ali Liebegott,
Benjamin Weissman, Dennis Cooper, Chris Kraus, Lawrence Brathwaite,
Dennis Johnson, Laurie Weeks, JT Leroy, Mary Gaitskill, Joe
Westmoreland, Lucinda Williams, Bruce Benderson, Samuel Delany, Violette
LeDuc, Elliot Smith, Robert Walser, Ben Marcus, Gerard De Nerval, Yukio
Mishima and Knut Hamsun. Our focus’ll be these writings, plus visual
art, including films and listening to some songs too.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 252
STUDIES IN MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
What’s Left of the Popular Front?
Instructor: Meg Wesling
This course takes a critical look at our current drive toward
progressive coalitional politics by taking an historical approach and
looking back to the Popular Front, a name used to describe the complex,
often contradictory alliances formed in the early 20th century in the
name of fighting fascism. What we want to consider here is twofold.
First, what was the substance of these coalitions – that is, what were
the aims, platforms, and compromises that characterized the Popular
Front alliances between working class and bourgeoisie, communist and
nationalist, labor and capital? Second, how did this historical
configuration produce a cultural moment from which we still have much to
learn? We’ll spend much of our time in the 20th century, roughly
beginning in WWI and moving through WWII. Ultimately, however, this
course wants to think about the possibility and promise of Left politics
in the present, and so we’ll expand upon this historical perspective to
consider how the legacy of this earlier moment informs contemporary
theories of coalitional politics like “the multitude” and “the global
left.” While our readings will focus largely on the US, students are
encouraged to pursue their own research and writing in other
geographical and political contexts.
Readings will include primary fictional and political texts from authors
including Carlos Bulosan, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel
LeSueur, art and essays from the WPA, excerpts from magazines and
journals such as PM, Partisan Review, Anvil, and New Masses,
and critical works by Perry Anderson, Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Negri,
Michael Denning, Barbara Foley, George Lipsitz, Michael Hardt, and Harry
Harootunian, among others. Writing assignments will include short weekly
response papers and a final seminar paper.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 252
STUDIES IN MODERN HISPANIC LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Políticas del (neo) Barroco
Instructor: John Blanco
Este curso abordará los temas de transculturación, “lo real maravilloso,”
y el barroco o “neobarroco” a través de la producción literaria española,
caribeña, estadounidense, y filipina en los siglos XIX-XX. A partir de
una lectura del locus classicus de Maravall sobre la cultura del barroco,
vamos a trazar la reintroducción del barroco en la visión martiana al
fin de siglo XIX y la antropología de transculturación y contrapunteo en
Fernando Ortiz.
Esta reintroducción dará paso a una reflexión sobre la construcción de
las identidades diaspóricas del Caribe, las rutas de “detour” y “retour
au pays natal,” el proyecto de representar la heterogeneidad caribeña en
las ficciones del mestizaje e hibridez, y el valor redemptivo de las
narrativas de decadencia barroca.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 258
SPANISH AMERICAN PROSE
La Novela Negra del Neoliberalismo
Instructor: Milos Kokotovic
En años recientes ha ocurrido una especie de boom latinoamericano de la
novela negra o policiaca. La hipótesis de este seminario es que la
creciente producción de este tipo de novelas, desde mediados de los años
1980s, tiene algo que ver con la caída de las utopías de la izquierda y
la reestructuración neoliberal de las economías y sociedades
latinomericanas por la misma época. De hecho, la novela negra o
policiaca está emergiendo como una de las principales formas literarias
contemporáneas de crítica social. Los efectos de las políticas
neoliberales—el crecimiento notable de la pobreza, la desigualdad, la
corrupción, el crimen y la violencia—son temas comunes en estas novelas,
que frecuentemente plantean preguntas como las siguientes: ¿Qué es el
crimen cuando el sistema mismo es criminal? ¿Quién mantiene el orden
público cuando el estado ni está en orden ni pertenece al público? ¿Quién
está libre y qué significa la libertad en una economía de libre mercado?
Sin embargo, no vamos a limitarnos a un análisis del contenido de estas
obras, sino que vamos a examinar también qué aspectos formales de la
novela negra o policiaca se prestan a la crítica del neoliberalismo,
tanto como a la representación de los espacios urbanos de las
megalópolis latinomericanas. Además, vamos a explorar algunos de los
límites de la novela negra, que a pesar de su crítica al neoliberalismo,
generalmente no logra plantear alternativas al libre mercado. Es también
un género literario sumamente masculino, cuya representación del género
sexual tiende a afirmar, en vez de criticar, las relaciones de poder
tradicionales en este campo. Las lecturas incluirán novelas de Paco
Ignacio Taibo II, Ramón Díaz Eterovic, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Mario
Mendoza, y Franz Galich, entre otros.
LITERATURE THEORY 200A
TEXT/CULTURAL/CRITICAL PRACTICE
Instructor: Roddey Reid
In this first course of the theory sequence we will study some of the
key texts that have been crucial for current scholarship in fields of
literary and cultural analysis. Possible required books include David
Macey, The Peguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (2000), Terry
Eagleton, Lterary Theory (2nd edition, 1996), Roland Barthes,
Mythologies (1957/1972) and Camera Lucida (1980/1981), Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975/1977) and History of
Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (1976/1978), Edward Said,
Orientalism (1978), Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction
(1987), and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (second ed.,
1983/1991). Other recommended books: Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de
Saussure, Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism, vols.1
and 2, and Michael Ryan, Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction.
A final list of books will be mailed to entering PH.D. students in late
June.
LITERATURE THEORY 201
CONTEMPORARY THEORETICAL DEBATES AND CRITICAL
DISCOURSES
Critical Theory
Instructor: Donald Wesling
This is the required seminar on critical theory for new M.A. students.
Using primarily THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF THEORY AND CRITICISM, edited by
Vincent B. Leitch (2001), we will survey all the major movements in
critical theory in the twentieth century, with emphasis on the last
generation of work. For instance, there will be weeks or part-weeks on
Russian Formalism, American New Criticism, structuralism,
deconstruction, Marxism, Feminism, Bakhtinian dialogism, the new ethnic
criticisms, queer theory, and New Historicism.
Members of the seminar will write two short papers, and will give oral
presentations on single essays as assigned in the readings.
The course could be open to undergraduate seniors who want a survey of
current literary theory: see instructor before the first meeting.
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