Spring 2008 Graduate Course Descriptions

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 281
LITERATURE AND FILM
The City in Literature and Culture
Instructor: Yingjin Zhang

In order to accommodate students of various disciplinary, historical, national, and area concentrations, this seminar begins with a general survey of scholarship of the city in literature and culture. We will read thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Max Weber, in addition to pursuing contemporary work from a selection of critics and theorists. Weekly topics in the survey section include the city as ideas and institutions, the city as images in literature, the city as signs and spaces, the city in gender representation. The second half of the seminar will take us from modern to postmodern, global to local by “zooming in” on Berlin, Paris, Los Angeles, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

This seminar does not require reading of specific literary works, but several films are included to flesh out ideas and images presented in scholarship and to help facilitate class discussion. Week 10 is set aside for students to present and comment on each other’s proposed projects, which can focus on any viable topics within the general parameters of urban culture.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 285
LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS
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 cross cultural 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.

Text: Wai-lim Yip, Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics (University of California Press, 1993); Selection of Articles Relevant to Seminar Topics.

CULTURAL STUDIES 210
HISTORY AND CULTURE
Violence and Justice
Instructor: Lisa Yoneyama

The course is designed for those interested in theories and cultural analyses of violence and justice. The aim is to explore the ways in which the discourse on violence and justice has come under new scrutiny as part of the broader reorganization of knowledge in the social and human sciences.

The understanding I would like to bring to the seminar is that this renewed scrutiny of theories and concepts related to violence and justice reflects intensifying intellectual concerns for coextensive yet seemingly bipolarized historical developments. These include: the new internationalism, the rise of the human security paradigm and international feminist jurisprudence, the intensifying quest for redress, reparation, and reconciliation, on the one hand; and the precariat and other new social movements under neo-liberalization and in the face of failing juridico-political premises of modernity, the simultaneous banalization and (re)spectacularization of weapons of mass destruction, and the (re)assertion of the sovereign and the expansion of thanatospaces such as refugee and migrant camps, prisons, the global ghettos, the so-called ‘low-intensity’ conflict zones, etc. on the other. The readings will include classic philosophical texts on violence, power, and law (e.g. Arendt, Benjamin, Fanon, Hegel, Kant, etc.), but more centrally we will explore how their insights have come to be revisited and rearticulated in light of such late-capitalist, late-colonial, turn-of-the-century sensitivities, particularly those concerned with the predicaments of historical and other forms of justice (e.g. Agamben, Butler, Derrida, Mbembe, Minow, etc.).

The course is divided into the following sections: ((1) Law, Violence and the Sovereign; (2) Politics of Injury; (3) Gender Justice; (4) Violence of Governmentality: Spaces of Intimacy, Biopolitics, Benevolence; (5) Between Truth and Justice: Trials, Transitional Justice, Reconciliation; (6) On Forgiveness; and (6) Geohistory of Violence and (Un)redressability. Please contact the instructor via e-mail if you are going to take the class and wish to know the tentative readings.

LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 243
EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Unruly Women
Instructor: Nicole Tonkovich

According to historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” In this course, we will consider how history about women is made, taking a dual focus. Reading primary and secondary sources from the early modern period, we will consider how these women contravene our usual stereotypes about colonial dames and good wives, the social, legal, and racial constraints that positioned them as dissenters, and the consequences (real and imagined) of their perceived misbehavior. We will also examine how subsequent historical and literary representations dealt with these women. Our readings will include the conventionally literary (novels, plays, poems, and letters) as well as histories, political tracts, and legal documents written by and about women of the period (1650-1800).

I will divide the readings for this course into several thematic clusters:

• Tenth Muses and covered women (early women writers and poets)
• Errant, erratic, and uncontainable women (The Widow Ranter, Lucy Terry, Hannah Duston, and Eunice Williams)
• Coquettes and other sexual renegades (women who committed infanticide; cross-dressed women; prostitutes; pirates; The Coquette; The Female Marine)
• Women and the church (Ann Hutchinson; Salem witchcraft trials; nuns and convent tales)
• Inventing and marketing American history (the deification of Martha Washington; Heroic Women of the Revolution; The Scarlet Letter)

This course can be used toward satisfying the Ph.D. Historical Breadth requirement.

LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 254
TOPICS IN U.S. MINORITY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Cultures and Politics of the Racial Capitalist Prison
Instructor: Dennis Childs

In this class we will examine narratives of the (formerly) incarcerated and the way captive narration interrogates liberal tenets such as progress, freedom, and citizenship. Some questions of concern will be: Why do prison narratives repeatedly invoke chattel slavery in reference to supposedly post-slavery moments? What is “crime” in the US context and how has its meaning changed and/or resisted change over time? How do the forms of expression produced by the incarcerated challenge hegemonic articulations of American legal and social history? What institutional, social, and cultural apparatuses inform America’s current status as the most incarcerating nation in the history of humankind? Our readings of captive narratives will be supplemented by analysis of alternative cultural forms—e.g. chain gang songs, blues, hip-hop, visual art—that have been produced by the incarcerated to give expression to (and protest against) the experience of state terror. We will also engage with various theories and histories (both archival and legal) of imprisonment along with these cultural forms. To this end, we will not be looking for a theory of the carceral to supplement the “real” experience as set down in the expression of prisoners, but to analyze the ways in which certain methodological encounters with the prison intersect with and/or diverge from the praxis deployed in the cultural production of the (formerly) incarcerated. In other words, we will be interested in exploring theories of the carceral both as they are set down by self-identified academics and by prisoners themselves.

LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 271
GENRES IN ENGLISH
Ideology, Utopia, Modernity
Instructor: Don E. Wayne

In addition to the following description, I have other information on this course that I will share with those who are interested. Among other things, I would suggest that the current climate in the 2008 Presidential election campaign indicates a revival of utopian discourse in the U.S. Does this shift at the popular level, especially among young people, signal a rejection of the anti-utopianism that has characterized the dominant intellectual culture in the media and in academia for more than two decades? What appears now to be a wave of anti-anti-utopianism (Jameson’s term) makes a seminar such as this especially timely. Also, I am open to suggestions for readings related to the theme of the course. Please get in touch soon if you are interested.

In this course we will examine early and later modern ideological formations and the utopian critique of ideology in literature and other media. We will start from a reading of Thomas More’s Utopia and from Louis Marin’s critical-theoretical study of Utopia and of utopian discourse after More. According to Marin, utopia is an “ideological critique of ideology. Utopia is a critique of the dominant ideology to the degree to which it reconstructs present or contemporary society by displacing and projecting the latter’s structures into a fictive discourse.” Marin develops Althusser’s theory of how ideology works in interesting ways, especially for an understanding of the role of imaginative literature (not only of the utopian genre proper) and of other media in modern societies. His idea of utopian discourse as “spatial play,” as a dialectic between description and narration, between geography and history, between space and time, is important for an understanding of early modern cultural practices (in, for example, literature, painting, architecture, cartography, political and natural philosophy). It is also an idea that has been influential on postmodern cultural theories concerning literature (especially in such genres as science fiction and magical realism), film, architecture, social space, technology, and “virtual reality.” Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and others have drawn on Marin’s model in developing more recent arguments concerning utopian aesthetic and political practices.

Beginning with More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, we will examine how early modern utopias figure both existing and alternative social spaces, and how they mediate actual histories (including the history of the modern nation state, the history of the modern subject, the history of globalization, the history of bureaucracy and technocracy). We shall go on to extend Marin’s notion of utopia beyond the specific genre associated with the term, looking for examples of utopian discourse in selected readings from a wide range of literary genres and modes in early modern English and American literature and, toward the end of the course, in more recent cultural forms.

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 principal research interests.

Possible primary texts include works by More, Sidney, Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Gerrard Winstanley, Benjamin Franklin, Kant, Marx, and, for comparison, contrast, and a sense of historical development, one relatively recent work of fiction (to be announced). Additional readings will include theoretical and historical texts by Marin, Jameson, Harvey, Jatinder K. Bajaj, Philip Wegner, and others.

This course can be used toward satisfying the Ph.D. Historical Breadth requirement.

LITERATURES IN GERMAN 272
GENRES, TRENDS, AND FORMS
The Frankfurt School
Instructor: William A. O’Brien

An examination of work produced by the Frankfurt School.

We will begin with a brief look at early or founding documents written for the Institute for Social Research, and will then concentrate on writings produced by the most prominent thinkers associated with it: Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse.

All readings will be available in English and German (with the exception of those originally written in English). Class discussion in English.

This course can count as a German-language class if you make initial arrangements with the instructor.

LITERATURES IN SPANISH 258
SPANISH AMERICAN PROSE
México: la cultura y el Estado en perspectiva crítica
Instructor: Max Parra

Este curso está diseñado para estudiantes que desean obtener una visión de conjunto, pero crítica, de la cultura mexicana moderna y abordará diversas problemáticas vinculadas a la formación y transformación de la identidad cultural mexicana en función de la consolidación y crisis del estado-nación. El paradigma cultural nacionalista, indesligable del proyecto estatal, su gradual cuestionamiento, y el creciente debate en torno a un emergente modelo transnacional, migrante, producto del proceso económico de globalización, servirán como marco conceptual para la discusión de las obras estudiadas. Nuestros referentes serán la literatura y el cine mexicano desde 1940 hasta nuestros días.

Entre las problemáticas a tratar, cabe destacar: 1) la imagen de la “alteridad indígena” en la cultura nacionalista (narrativa y cine) y el rechazo de esta construcción cultural, especialmente a partir de las luchas recientes de autonomía indígena (el movimiento zapatista, las luchas por los derechos indígenas, et al.); 2) el espacio de la mujer en la cultura nacionalista y las voces contestarias desde la cultura femenina; 3) las expresiones en torno al “ser mexicano” en el cine, la narrativa, y el ensayo sobre la identidad nacional; 4) la frontera norte como espacio de choque y de negociación de las identidades en la cultura nacional y en el discurso identatario de la cultura chicana. El curso concluye con una discusión de las nociones de familia, comunidad, y pueblo en los testimonios de las poblaciones migrantes.
Estudiaremos obras canónicas y no canónicas, desde Octavio Paz y las películas indigenistas de la “época de oro” del cine mexicano hasta la autobiografía de la militante comunista Benita Galeana y los cuentos fronterizos de Rosario San Miguel. Para enmarcar las discusiones utilizaremos diversos textos antropológicos (Warman, Bonfil Batalla), de crítica literaria y de cine (Angel Rama, Joanne Hershfield) y de sociología política (Héctor Díaz Polanco) e historia (Lorenzo Meyer).

Los estudiantes deberán escribir un trabajo de fin de curso (10-12 cuartillas) y una o dos presentaciones orales.

LITERATURES IN SPANISH 272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Cultura, memoria y justicia en la novela policial  y los documentales políticos de España y el Cono Sur
Instructor: Luis Martin Cabrera

En este seminario estudiaremos como articulan distintos documentales y novelas policiales producidos en 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. En este contexto, tanto la novela policial como el documental político son géneros privilegiados para pensar críticamente tanto la relación entre memoria y justicia como su opuesto, la relación entre amnesia e impunidad. Algunas de las preguntas que nos plantearemos en el curso son: ¿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? Algunas de las novelas policiales y documentales que discutiremos en el seminario son: Los Mares del Sur de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Nadie sabe más que los muertos de Ramón Díaz Eterovic, Cuarteles de invierno de Osvaldo Soriano, Picadura Mortal de Lourdes Ortiz, H.I.J.O.S. el Alma en dos, de Carmen Guarini, Santa Cruz…por ejemplo de Gunter Schwaiger, Los rubios de Albertina Carri y El caso Pinochet de Patricio Guzmán, entre otros.

LITERATURE THEORY 200C
CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES AND CULTURAL CRITICISM
Instructor: John Blanco

When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.” This (mis)quote from a play by Bertolt Brecht introduces this third quarter of the introductory sequence, in which we explore the idea of culture as a modern object of investigation: one that is distinguished from the modern dialectic of state and society, on the one hand; and one (on the other hand) that is negatively characterized as a threshold of insurmountable difference between (Eurocentric) modernity and “pre-modernity”; production and reproduction; the city and the countryside; norm and exception; aesthetic and epistemology. On the side of negativity, culture oftentimes becomes the shibboleth of irrational violence, associated with the floating signifiers of race, primitivism, nationalism, identity, and community. Conversely, on the side of what Marx called commodity fetishism, the idea of culture serves as a placeholder for a spiritualized, “It” quality of social distinction (a “cultured” person, a place that “has a lot of culture”).

Setting aside the frenzy of capturing “cultural practices” through “cultural theories,” this course will examine various texts and debates that highlight the antinomies of (the idea of) culture as discourse and event. We will proceed by analyzing a series of fundamental questions and debates wherein the idea of culture enters into the study of literature. How and under what conditions does the invocation of cultural difference or cultural identity become meaningful? To what degree do these identities and differences reiterate, reinvent, commodify, or refuse existing social relations as they are represented in texts like novels, images, films, performances (commercial and artistic), and so forth? What legacies do discourses and events leave for our approximations of the object called “culture?” Topics will include the formation of British cultural studies; studies of colonialism, decolonization, and the postcolonial predicament; the genealogy of modern racism; and the imaginary constitution of trans-regional (pan-Africanist and Latin Americanist), “Third World” and “minority” literature.