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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 274
GENRE STUDIES
Orientalism Revisited
Instructor: Oumelbanine Zhiri
What will in the 1830’s be known as the Great Game began in the last
decade of the 18° c. when the British, after the conquest of India,
sought to control its land route, that is the Islamic countries between
the Mediterranean and the Indus – Turkey, the Near East, Afghanistan,
Persia; they were competing against the other European powers,
especially the French. Thus began a new age of imperialism in the Old
World. One essential weapon was the knowledge about the Orient
accumulated in European countries – what had begun just a few years
earlier to be called Orientalism. The question is: how and under which
assumptions had this knowledge accumulated over the centuries? How did
it evolve through the progressive secularization of European culture,
through deep changes in their view of theirs and others’ histories?
If the word Orientalism did not exist before the end of the 18th c.,
there was a concept of the Oriental, of Oriental languages, of Oriental
history constructed over centuries. These concepts had been worked out
during a rich history of scholarship throughout Europe, in France, in
the Netherlands, in Switzerland, in England. In these works, one
particularly important aspect is the articulation between languages,
religion, and history. Understanding the evolution of this nexus is
essential in order to analyze how the “Oriental languages”, that began
to be studied in the Early Modern period as necessary adjuncts to the
study of the Old Testament, gave way to the establishment of the couple
Aryan/Semite in the 19° c.; how the theological view of providential
history gave way to the secular notion of racial competition. And when
the Great Game began, it is important to understand how not only
scholarship was used as an instrument of power, but also how this new
political reality changed Orientalism’s methods and objects.
We will study these issues through a number of primary and secondary
sources, beginning with a discussion, during our first meeting, of
Edward Said’s Orientalism, a well-known seminal text in the
understanding of the problem.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 283
LITERATURE AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Utopia
Instructor: Page duBois
The idea of utopia, which had fallen into disrepute through association
with notions of totality and totalitarianism, has been undergoing
something of a renaissance in recent theoretical work. In this seminar,
we will explore what is living and what is dead in utopian thinking. The
first third of the course will be devoted to a particular line of
utopian reflection, that following from Marx through the work of Ernst
Bloch, to that of Fredric Jameson. The second third of the seminar will
explore the value of this work for ancient utopian thinking, including
Plato's writing on Atlantis, on the "republic," Euhemerus, and Iamboulos,
and some slave revolts of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods. The
third will focus on students' investigation of the value of
utopian thinking for their own projects. Possibilities include the
theater as a utopian space, utopianism as a justification for
colonization, and utopian dimensions of science fiction.
CULTURAL STUDIES 210
HISTORY AND CULTURE
Transnationalism & the “American Century” in Asia
Instructor: Lisa Yoneyama
The course is designed for those who are interested in issues and
theories concerning transnational processes (e.g. imperialism,
neocolonialism, globalization, migration, etc.), but with special
geohistorical focus on the United States’ relationship to Asia.
The course has two objectives. First, it explores the relations of power
and knowledge that have conditioned America’s involvement in Asia from
the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. We will
examine the history of U.S. imperialism, missionary activities,
militarism and Cold War hegemony in Asia and analyze the specific ways
in which the United States and Asia have been mutually constituted
through cultural, political, and economic relations as a result of
colonialism, war, occupation, economic aid, military alliances, and
migrations.
Second, the course explores theories and conditions of transnationalism,
globalization, and (neo)colonialism to understand the central questions
and challenges that work in these areas has raised. We will examine
several specific discursive sites that will illuminate the trans-Pacific
construction of the United States during the last century. We will
examine, for instance, transnational feminism and its theorization of
labor, modernity and human rights; discourses on immigration, the
transnational public sphere, and citizenship; and literary and other
cultural responses to the globalized political economy and militarism.
We will consider the ways that critics who have observed the history of
American presence in Asia might intervene effectively to highlight the
contradictions, struggles, dangers and possibilities of the
transnational.
The course is designed to carry forward the recent move to
internationalize American Studies and to pursue the idea that U.S.
culture and history cannot be adequately grasped if studied only within
the limits of a single language or a national history. I wish to also
consider the similar concerns that have emerged in the field of Asian
Studies. While conventional Asian Studies, as a field of knowledge that
has been an apparatus of foreign policy, has drawn insular boundaries
between Asia and the U.S., recent scholarship has begun to attend to the
decisive presence of the U.S. in the formation of Asia and its
knowledge, and vice versa.
CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURE STUDIES
Enclosures, Old and New
Instructor: Rosaura Sánchez
Enclosures have traditionally been studied in relation to the breakdown
of the European feudal system. We know that the process of primitive
accumulation in the transition from feudalism to capitalism called for
the forced separation of producers from the means of production, that
is, for separating agricultural producers from the land, in the process
"freeing up" an entire population from the bondage of serfdom into what
would become wage labor. Marx notes that this expropriation of the means
of production established the preconditions for a capitalist mode of
production, further noting that if the expropriation of the Commons in
the 15th and 16th centuries was carried out by violence, by the 18th
century the law itself had become "the instrument of the theft of the
people's land." The work of Perelman, Linebaugh and Rediker has been
especially useful for understanding how this separation of producers
from their means of production led to forced displacement that resulted
in unemployment, poverty, incarceration, whippings and galley service
for vagabondage, and even death at the hands of the state.
More recently, scholars (Amin, De Angelis, Caffentzis, the Midnight
Notes Collective, etc.) have noted that primitive accumulation is an
ongoing phenomenon within the capitalist mode of production. De Angelis,
for example, studies the "extra-economic prerequisites to capitalist
production," that is, the military and political violence that is an
inherent part of overcoming one form of production and instantiating the
conditions for another. Today, new enclosures are being established
through various means under late 20th century neoliberalism, uprooting
millions from their land, their jobs and their homes and forcing them to
migrate or emigrate.
In this seminar we will first look at a number of theoretical readings
on old and new enclosures and explore how this process is configured in
literature, drawing in part on Jameson's critical work on realism,
allegory and the political unconscious. We will as a group analyze four
texts that deal with different types of enclosures: Linda Hogan's
Mean Spirit, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gardens in the Dunes, Mary
Austin's The Ford and Carlos Fuentes's Crystal Frontier.
Students will be asked to write a short paper (10 pages long) for the
seminar, choosing a text from their own field for an analysis in light
of the seminar readings on enclosures.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 222
ELIZABETHAN STUDIES
Marking the Social Body
Instructor: Louis Montrose
The seminar will explore some of the ways in which a wide range of
Elizabethan cultural practices imagined—and thereby legitimated and/or
contested—social identity and difference. We will focus on ideologies of
gender, rank (status, lineage, or "race"), religion and nation and on
their intersections, as these were mapped onto Elizabethan bodies.
Central topics in the course of our readings will be early modern social
coding of the body in dress, bearing, speech, and sexual practices;
debates regarding the nature and origins of gentility; and conflicts
regarding the moral legitimacy of state power. Readings will include
state documents, letters, and tracts, as well as a number of canonical
literary and dramatic texts in various genres, by Sidney, Spenser,
Shakespeare, and others. In studying these writings, critical emphasis
will be given to the socio-political instrumentality of rhetorical
figures and literary forms. For those who are not concentrating in early
modern studies, the seminar should prove useful as an introduction to
English Renaissance writing in a wide range of genres, as well as to
some major texts of the literary canon; it will also provide a useful
historical perspective to those working in cultural and gender studies.
Please send me an e-mail to indicate your interest in the seminar; this
will allow me to contact you if there are any readings for our first
meeting.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 254
STUDIES IN THE U.S. MINORITY LITERATURE/CULTURE
Contemporary Trends in Chicano/a Cultural Studies
Instructor: George Mariscal
A partial overview of recent methodologies in the discipline of
Chicano/a Cultural Studies. We will look at the more abstract
formulations that have emerged out of elite research institutions as
well as methods that are more fully grounded in the histories and
experiences of working class communities. In addition to judging the
usefulness of the readings (two or three books and a range of articles),
we will consider the following questions: 1) What is the role of
Chicano/a Studies thirty years after it emerged as a product of a social
movement?, 2) To what extent has the discipline been co-opted and
depoliticized by elite academic practices?, 3) What is the relationship
between the way in which Chicano/a Studies is practiced at privileged
institutions such as the University of California and the way it
functions in the Cal State or community college systems?, 4)To what
degree has the rise of conservative forces in the United States
generated a response from an academic field such as Chicano/a Studies?
Several invited guests who teach at institutional sites off-campus will
visit the seminar. Seminar participants will make one oral presentation
and write a final paper.
LITERATURES IN GERMAN 272
GENRES, TRENDS AND FORMS
Nietzsche
Instructor: William O’Brien
The impact of Nietzsche on contemporary critical thought is difficult to
overestimate, as it is mediated to us through its effect on Foucault,
Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Bataille, and the Frankfurt School, to name
just a few.
This course will concentrate on major texts from Nietzsche's career to
investigate, not only his philosophical and theoretical innovations, but
also the problem of Nietzsche.
Students from all sections of the Literature Department, as well as
students from other departments, are most welcome. The works, to be read
in English, are:
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
"On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense"
Human, All-Too-Human, Book 1
The Gay Science
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Beyond Good and Evil
On the Genealogy of Morality
The Twilight of the Idols
The Antichrist
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Letras de la colonia, temas pre-postcoloniales
Instructor: Jaime Concha
Centrado en el período colonial ( siglos xvi – xviii), el seminario
tocará temas como conquista y literaturas aborígenes, barroco colonial,
erotismo y misticismo femeninos, sistema de géneros de la pre-independencia,
aporte jesuíta, etc.
Los estudiantes podrán hallar su propio camino y elegir tópicos
relacionados con sus intereses actuales.
Participación en las sesiones y paper final.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Memoria y Justicia en las Postdictaduras de España y el Cono Sur
Instructor: Luis
Martin-Cabrera
En este seminario estudiaremos como articulan distintos textos
literarios y fílmicos de España y el Cono Sur las complejas relaciones
entre memoria y justicia. El seminario pretende ser, por un lado, una
introducción a los recientes debates en el campo del hispanismo sobre la
cuestión de la memoria y, por otro, un intento de articular una posible
historia transatlántica del desastre que exceda los límites de los
discursos centrados en la nación. La relación entre memoria y justicia
es particularmente relevante en sociedades como Argentina, España o
Chile que provienen de un Estado dictatorial y que, por lo tanto, están
fuertemente marcadas por un pasado traumático que se pretende borrar o
domesticar. ¿Cómo responde la cultura al imperativo categórico
neoliberal de olvidar ese pasado? ¿Qué redes de poder atraviesan la
construcción de la memoria? ¿Cómo reaccionan los “nuevos” estados
democráticos a estas presiones de la memoria? ¿Por qué la recuperación
de la memoria aparece ligada a la cuestión de la justicia en estas
sociedades? ¿Qué implica leer este debate sobre la memoria desde una
perspectiva transnacional y anti-capitalista? Estas y otras serán las
preguntas que nos haremos en el seminario. Algunos de los textos y
películas que discutiremos son: Galíndez de Manuel Vázquez
Montalbán, Picadura Mortal de Lourdes Ortiz, La guerrilla de
la memoria (España); Mala Onda de Alberto Fuguet, Estrella
distante de Roberto Bolaño Machuca de Andrés Wood,
Respiración Artifcial de Ricardo Piglia, Una Sombra ya pronto
serás de Osvaldo Soriano y Buenos Aires viceversa de Alejandro
Agresti.
LITERATURE THEORY 200C
CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES & CULTURAL CRITICISM
Instructor: Lisa Lowe
In this third quarter of the introductory theory and methods sequence,
we continue to explore the international context for universalist
notions of text, author and audience. As our nominal focus is “culture,”
we will attempt a critical genealogy of the concept of “culture” in
literary studies, tracking it through the idea of national literature
within modernity, to comparative method, and to contemporary alternative
studies of world literature and culture.
In the mid-20th century, the disciplines of English and Comparative
Literature tended to conceive 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; varieties of
diaspora or transatlantic studies – to discuss and devise alternative
models for understanding literature and culture within the global
conditions their emergence.
Our aim is to devise a study of culture 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 literature
procedures.
Students will write response papers and present collaborative work.
LITERATURE WRITING 260
ETHNOGRAPHIES OF LITERACY
Theory and Research
Instructor: Linda Brodkey
This seminar examines the lives of "literates" and "illiterates" in the
United States. Students read influential ethnographies, along with
related scholarship on theoretical, methodological, and practical issues
raised by anthropological representations of self and other via literacy
practices. Readings and discussions concentrate on how definitions of
ethnography and literacy articulate class, gender, race, ethnicity,
nationality, as well as the place of education, work, and religion in
our lives. Possible texts include: Shirley Brice Heath’s “Ways with
Words,” Janice Radway’s “Reading the Romance,” and Robert Emerson et
al., “Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” and Deborah Reed-Danahay,
“Auto/Ethnography.”
In addition to leading class discussions, students write
autoethnographic accounts of their own literate practices, based on
a series of writing assignments designed to simulate fieldwork (e.g.,
literacy inventories, memory work, narrative) and produce cultural
information from what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “contact zone.” The
autoethnographies are constructed from material generated and composed
and revised in the light of peer review.
Ethnographies of Literacy is cross-listed with Cultural Studies and
Literatures in English.
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