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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 210
CLASSICAL STUDIES
The Ancient History of Torture
Instructor: Page duBois
This course has been cancelled for Fall 2006.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 283
LITERATURE AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Colonialism and Modernity
Instructor: John Blanco
This course investigates a series of political and literary fictions
that produce the anomalous character of "colonial modernity": the
attempt to translate western Enlightenment ideas of reason, freedom, and
contract into the terms of colonial sovereignty; and the legacies of
that project in the post-colonial era.
Longer description: This course will focus on a series of questions
raised by the contradictory transplantation of western Enlightenment
ideas of progress, social contract, revolution, and modern civilization,
to those territories under the sovereignty of colonial empires or modern
imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will begin by
examining some of the originary "fictions" that claimed to reconcile the
post-revolutionary freedom from tyranny in Western Europe and the
Americas, with the maintenance of colonial sovereignty in the nonwestern
world. An understanding of these fictions will allow us to analyze the
critiques and legacies of colonialism by neo-colonial and nationalist
writers alike. We will also engage with the subaltern politics of
religious and social movements in the ostensibly "post-colonial" epoch,
which often point to the unprecedented reception and translation of
Enlightenment ideas among the very people most disenfranchised by them.
Lectures will be conducted in English. Reading knowledge of Spanish is
highly recommended.
CULTURAL STUDIES 210
HISTORY AND CULTURE
The “American Century” in Asia and the United States
Instructor: Lisa Yoneyama
The course is designed for those who are interested in issues and
theories concerning the transnational production of the United States
through its relationship to Asia.
It explores the relations of power and knowledge that have conditioned
America’s diplomatic, social, military, and political 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.
The course will also explore more generally 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 modernity, labor and human rights; discourses on
migration, 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. It also considers
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 225
INTERDISCIPLINARY AND HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF
CULTURAL TEXTS
Topic: Cinema and Modernity
Instructor: Yingjin Zhang
This seminar is an in-depth examination of the recent theorization of
cinema and modernity, which constitutes one of the most exciting
developments in film theory and film history. The core issues to explore
range from proto- and pre-cinematic experiences, cinema and the
invention of modern life, the cinema of attractions and the aesthetics
of astonishment, spectatorship and the public sphere, melodrama and
modernity, vernacular modernism, cinema as a global vernacular and
collective sensorium (Germany, Japan, Soviet Union), to cosmopolitanism
and urban culture in Shanghai. Readings cover selections from Thomas
Elsaesser, Ann Friedberg, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Andreas Huyssen,
Siegfried Kracauer, Leo Lee, Ben Singer, Vanessa Schwartz, Linda
Williams, Zhen Zhang, among many others. Weekly film screenings consist
of works by such artists as Busby Berkeley, Charles Chaplin, Buster
Keaton, Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi, Charles Musser, Walther Ruttmann,
Shen Xiling, King Vidor, Dziga Vertov, Josef von Sternberg, Wu Yonggang,
Yuan Muzhi, and Zhang Shichuan.
CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Volatile Bodies: Disability in Cultural Studies
Instructor: Michael Davidson
This seminar will provide an introduction to the emerging field of
disability studies and its relevance to cultural studies in general.
Although our focus will be on developing a foundational understanding of
the field, we will also be looking at intersections between disability
and other theoretical issues concerning nontraditional or “marked”
bodies. We will begin by reading basic texts in the field (Lennard
Davis, Bending Over Backward, Rosemarie Garland Thomson,
Extraordinary Bodies, Michael Berube, Life as we Know It,
Paul Longmore, The New Disability History) that have contributed
to the emergence of a social model of disability. Along the way, we will
consider some of the legal foundations for (and challenges to) the
Americans with Disability Act (AD) and other disability legislation. We
will also look at foundational documents in critical and gender theory
by Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem, Martha Nussbaum,
Henri-Jacques Stiker and Eva Kittay that have played an important role
in considerations of the social construction of embodiment.
Of particular interest in this seminar will be recent debates over the
status of embodiment in an era of neo-natal testing, physician assisted
suicide, and genomics. Recent debates over Terri Schiavo, the films
Million Dollar Baby and The Sea Inside and the documentaries,
Murderball and Sound and Fury have created divisions
within the disability and Deaf communities as well as among civil rights
activists over the existence of “lives not worth living.” At the same
time, disability scholars have become impatient with a disability
studies model based entirely on a western, state-centered model and have
argued for a global disability studies. Finally there is the controversy
developed around “dependency theory” and feminist implications of
care-giving, assisted living, and non-
traditional families.
In addition to theoretical and historical texts in disability studies,
we will look at a number of stories, films, documentaries, and plays in
which disability plays a significant role. Our focus here will be on the
ways that disability has served as prosthesis for representing other
forms of social deviance and stigma. Texts under consideration include
Shakespeare’s Richard III, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,
Gattaca, Tod Browning’s Freaks, Edith Wharton’s Ethan
Frome, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper,”
Djibril Mambety’s film, The Little Girl who Sold the Sun, Deaf
poets and performers (Clayton Valli, the Flying Words Project and Terry
Galloway), Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, and a selection of AID
education projects from the US to Africa.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 252
STUDIES IN MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
New American Studies
Instructor: Lisa Lowe
The study of modern U.S. literature and culture has been substantially
transformed in the last several decades by scholarship on race,
ethnicity and immigration; feminist critiques of gender and sexuality;
the critical placement of the United States within international
encounters, conflicts, and ambitions much before the recent so-called
era of globalization; and by studies of previously neglected or
illegible cultural forms, everyday life, and the less explored archives
in which we might retrieve their histories. In this course, we will
consider the interdisciplinary analytics generated by scholarship in the
"New American Studies," surveying work that explores the connections
between national-building and empire (A. Kaplan, S. Streeby, D.
Kazanjian); race, gender, immigration, and citizenship (S. Hartman, L.
Volpp, G. Sanchez, L. Berlant); the transformations of labor in global
economy (M. Denning, S. Sassen, G. K. Hong); religion and late modernity
(M. Bayoumi, M. McAlister); politics of cultural performance (J.
Halberstam, R. D. G. Kelley, D. Román); and space, territory and borders
(M. P. Brady, R. White, E. Cheyfitz); and the politics of memory (M.
Sturken, R. Flores, L. Yoneyama).
Students will do collaborative presentations and write a final research
paper.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 252
STUDIES IN MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Instructor: Eileen Myles
This course has been cancelled for Fall 2006.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 256
POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSES
African Diaspora Thought
Instructor: Fatima El-Tayeb
This course aims at sketching the history and current configuration of
African diaspora discourse, including its relations with and differences
from related fields, such as postcolonial or transnational studies. We
will read three books, C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Paul
Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, and Michelle Wright’s Becoming
Black, all of which are representative of African diaspora
scholarship in their transnational and interdisciplinary approach. In
addition we will use a number of other sources, essays, films, music, to
explore our subject. Each participant is expected to read an additional
book and present on it in class. For more information contact me or
check out our course website at
http://webct.ucsd.edu (which should become accessible to you as soon
as you sign up for the class).
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 252
STUDIES IN MODERN HISPANIC LITERATURE AND
CULTURE
Cine, cultura e ideología en la España Franquista.
Instructor: Luis
Martin-Cabrera
En este seminario analizaremos críticamente algunos de los ejemplos más
significativos de la producción fílmica del franquismo. A lo largo de
los cuarenta años de la dictadura española, el cine fue uno de los
principales vehículos de promoción y difusión de los principios
ideológicos del nacional catolicismo. Desde la realización del NODO (noticieros
y documentales que obligatoriamente debían exhibirse en los cines),
hasta el apoyo a las “películas de interés nacional”, pasando por el
guión del propio Franco en Raza, el régimen confió en el cine como lugar
privilegiado para la difusión de propaganda. A la vez, muchos cineastas
y guionistas desde Berlanga a Carlos Saura, inventaron formas cada vez
más sofisticadas de resistencia y subversión de los valores del régimen
y de la censura como mecanismo de control. Este seminario se plantea,
entonces, como una reflexión teórica y crítica sobre el lugar de la
cultura, en general, y del cine, en particular, dentro de un Estado
totalitario como el español. Algunas de las películas que analizaremos
son Raza, Bienvenido Mister Marshall, El verdugo, Los últimos de
filipinas, Calle mayor, La caza etc.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Instructor: Jaime Concha
El seminario se concentrará en explorar las diferentes visiones de
América Latina que surgen de importantes escritores recientes, varios de
ellos Premios Nobel de Literatura. Las perspectivas de Mistral, de
Neruda, de Asturias, de García Márquez y de Paz, entre otras, serán
tomadas en cuenta. El período cronológico cubierto será aproximadamente
la segunda mitad del siglo XX; y la variedad nacional y cultural se
proyectará desde México hasta al Conos Sur, pasando por Colombia y otros
países sudamericanos.
Una presentación oral y un paper basado en ella.
Se elaborará posiblemente un “reader”.
LITERATURE THEORY 200A
TEXT/CULTURE/CRITICAL PRACTICE
Instructor: Rosaura Sánchez
This seminar is the first in the introductory theory sequence for
incoming Ph.D. students and will begin by exploring a number of theories
central to the field of literary studies. The objective of the seminar
is to provide students with an opportunity to review a number of
theoretical approaches and analytical frameworks as well as key
categories for the study of cultural texts within a cultural/aesthetic
and historical context. Readings for the seminar will cover some of the
fundamental tenets of Marxist Literary Theory, Post-structuralism, New
Historicism, Feminist Literary Theories, Social Space Theory, Discourse
Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonialist Theories and Cultural
Studies Theories. In discussing these approaches, issues of textuality,
narrativity and history in relation to modernity, globalization, and
imperialism/empire will be highlighted.
LITERATURE THEORY 201
CONTEMPORARY THEORETICAL DEBATES AND
CRITICAL DISCOURSES
Critical Theory
Instructor: Oumelbanine Zhiri
An introduction to a number of major 20th century and early 21st century
intellectual movements in which literature and culture are studied from
various theoretical perspectives. The aim of the course is to give the
student a foothold in some of the basic categories and terminologies of
contemporary theoretical discourse, and to examine critically some of
the points of contention among different theoretical models. This is
intended as a foundation for further graduate work. While we shall have
to be selective in our reading, I hope that after taking this course you
will have a broad understanding of the kinds of theory that have had an
impact on contemporary literary and cultural studies.
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