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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 252
MODERNISM
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 globalized 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
simultaneous "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 286
ISLAM MODERNITY
Instructor: Babak Rahimi
A survey of developments in the Islamic world during the
period of European colonial domination and its aftermath, with special
attention to the works of leading Muslin thinkers (e.g. Sayid Ahmed
Khan, Muhammad Abduh, Hasan al Banna, Ruhallah Khomeini, among others).
CULTURAL STUDIES 210
HISTORY AND CULTURE
Memory, Trauma, History
Instructor: Lisa Yoneyama
“Memory” has been one of the central concepts
deployed in the human and social sciences for analyzing the problems of
power and knowledge, representation, subjectivities and social
identities. Concept of memory has also been regarded as a useful tool
for questioning the teleological and evolutionary sense of time that
underlies dominant modern/Western temporality and historical
consciousness. This course will offer several key texts that have been
central to recent discussions on philosophy of history, violence,
trauma, and the politics of remembering and forgetting. We will also
read several recent monographs that, through examining various cultural
production, including, the visual media, historical narrative,
testimonies, law, social space, etc., successfully explore the workings
of power and memory in the production of nationalism, diasporic
identities, sense of loss and trauma, vengeance, revolutionary
consciousness, and subalternity.
CULTURAL STUDIES 260
NATIONAL CULTURES
Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Criticism
Instructor: Yingjin Zhang
Merely a century ago, Chinese intellectuals were preoccupied with
constructing a national culture in the wake of China’s humiliating
defeats by Western and Japanese imperialist powers. Drastically
different versions of Chinese national culture emerged and competed with
each other over a century, from humanist and cosmopolitan to leftist and
Maoist and back to revisionist and deconstructionist. Since the early
1990s, the national—together with notions of China and Chineseness—has
become increasingly suspect, as scholars have moved to embrace critical
theory and discourses of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and
transnationalism in response to the fundamental transformation of
mainland China from a socialist party-state to a consumer society. In
order to survey rapidly changing critical terrains and to maintain a
historical perspective, this seminar aims (1) to differentiate critical
positions in various schools and/or theories of literature in modern
China, (2) to trace the intellectual influences from both Western and
Chinese traditions in the formation of those positions, and (3) to study
the divergence and convergence of literary and cultural trends in the
twentieth century and beyond. While readings are structured
chronologically from the late nineteenth century to the present, the
focus is placed on critical interventions in mainland China, Hong Kong,
Taiwan, and the West after the early 1990s. Weekly topics include late
Qing literary theories; discourses of May-Fourth enlightenment; literary
revolution and its discontents; humanization versus politicization;
paradigm shifts from Mao to post-Mao; Chineseness, ethnicity, and
postcoloniality; from modernism to postmodernism; mapping postsocialism
and
postmodernity; as well as globalization, everydayness, and intellectual
politics.
All students interested in Chinese literary criticism, cultural
politics, and current debates on ethnicity, postcoloniality,
postmodernity, globalization, and transnationalism are welcome. No
knowledge of Chinese is required, as all readings are assigned in
English, although those who read Chinese are encouraged to pursue
original materials.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 231
RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH
LITERATURE
The Eighteenth Century: Theatre, Performance, and Spectacle in the
Long Eighteenth Century.
Instructor: Kathryn Shevelow
This is a course about theatre in Britain during the long eighteenth
century, beginning with Restoration drama of the later seventeenth
century and then extending into the eighteenth century proper, when a
confluence of factors, including a backlash against the Restoration,
shifts in audience expectation, and various political pressures produced
significant changes in the status of the playhouses and the writing and
performance of plays. We will be reading different examples of
long-eighteenth-century comic and tragic drama, discussing generic
conventions and performance practices, and looking at the
eighteenth-century stage as a highly-charged, highly-contested social,
historical, and political site. We’ll be focusing on such issues as the
performance of gender and sexuality--including ambiguously gendered
characters such as the fop, the sodomite, and the male and female
cross-dresser--and the staging of class, racial/ethnic, and national
identities. And we’ll discuss how actors and actresses both exploited
and were exploited by their function as spectacle and the
commodification of their onstage and offstage personae.
Each week members of the seminar will be reading assigned texts, which
will always include a play, some historical material, and one or more
scholarly articles or chapters, with emphasis upon the exciting recent
scholarship on eighteenth-century theatre. Additionally, each week
everyone will be expected to read and report on another relevant play
and piece of scholarly writing, either chosen from a list I provide or
researched on your own in accordance with your own interests. We will
also be viewing videotaped performances certain plays and perhaps a film
or two.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 245
NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN STUDIES
Globalizing Antebellum America
Instructor: Nicole Tonkovich
The current global turn in American studies suggests we consider new
ways of periodizing and naming the writings produced in the antebellum
period. In this course, we will investigate how our understandings of
what has long been called the American Renaissance change if we rethink
the period’s chronological boundaries. We will posit one such
possibility (among many others), one that recognizes the importance of
maritime transport--Atlantic and Pacific, riverine and seafaring--in the
pre-Civil War period. How, then, might we re-think early- to
mid-nineteenth century understandings of gender and domesticity, slavery
and freedom, colony and empire, the local (traditionally centered on New
England) and the global (figured by maritime commerce and travel)?
We will begin with several early nineteenth-century readings focused on
Mediterranean commerce and Barbary captivity, in the process critiquing
the nationalizing function of more traditional stories of captivity. As
we turn our attention to the authors usually taught as major figures of
the American Renaissance, we will read texts that have traditionally
been seen as their “minor” works: Melville’s Typee, for example. A
maritime focus asks us to look both at New England-driven commerce in
the Pacific (hence, a set of readings on Chinese in American boarding
schools and American missionaries in China), as well as the Atlantic and
the Caribbean, whose commerce depended upon the transport of enslaved
bodies, but also spread news of slave revolts and discussions of
slavery’s abolition. We will consider the importance of central America
and Mexico in an era driven by gold fever, since travelers to the gold
fields of California were forced either to traverse Central America by
land routes or to sail around Cape Horn. Remembering that maritime
travel included river navigation we will turn our attention northward to
Canada and to the anti-Catholic hysteria that ignited and fueled the
debates about Canada’s possible annexation to the United States.
Our readings may include the following:
Stephanie LeMenager, Manifest and Other Destinies
Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the
Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Slavery in the British West Indies”
Martin Delany, Blake
Herman Melville, Typee
Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery
William Hickling Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico
John Stehens, from Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan
Walt Whitman, “Song of the Exposition”
George Catlin, from Notes of Eight Years’ Travel in Europe, with His
North American Indian Collection
Sophia Hawthorne, from Cuba Journals
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Yung Wing, from My Life in China and America
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 259
TRANSNATIONAL LITERARY STUDIES
New Debates on World Literature
Instructor: Rosemary Marangoly
George “Nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean
much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should
contribute to hasten its advent.” Goethe (1827)
“National one-sidedness and narrow mindedness become more and more
impossible, and from the many national and local literatures, a world
literature arises.” Marx and Engels (1848) Over a
hundred and fifty years after the pronouncements quoted above, the
hegemony of the national framework for apprehending literary texts
continues unabated in academic circles. And yet, in recent years
scholarly attention has once again turned to reconsider and rework
Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur. In this seminar we will examine key
formulations in 21st century debates around the politics of this
categorization of “world literature” in the current era of
globalization. Working with newly published work by Franco Moretti,
Pascale Casanova, Christopher Prendergast, Benedict Anderson, Emily
Apter, Francesca Orsini, Dilip Menon, Terry Eagleton, Stephen Heath, and
others, and focusing mainly on the novel genre, we will track new
directions in comparative and postcolonial literary studies through our
study of: world literary systems; the question of “small literatures”;
translation and global languages; the establishment of national literary
canons; cosmopolitanism; diasporic aesthetics; international literary
awards; minor writers; global writers; publishing protocols; new
localisms; variations on national periodization and other related
issues. We will read a small selection of literary texts that are either
repeatedly cited or completely ignored within this alternative
systemization of literature. There will be some expectation that seminar
participants will have read some (not all) of the fiction written by
Coetze, Kafka, Márquez, McEwan, Mehfouz, Murakami, Naipaul, Ondaatje,
Rushdie and Xingjian prior to taking this seminar. Please email me at
the end of spring quarter 2008 for a suggested summer reading list. This
course should be of special interest to students working on literary and
cultural politics in a global context. Students will submit written work
on a writer or group/circle of writers of their own choosing.
LITERATURES IN FRENCH 240
TOPICS IN FRENCH LITERATURE
The Historical Novel in French
Instructor: Oumelbanine Zhiri
This class will be devoted to reading and discussing the tradition of
the historical novel in French, from Mme de La Fayette to Assia Djebar.
Please contact the instructor for a more detailed description and for a
bibliography, composed of novels and critical texts.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 224
GOLDEN AGE STUDIES
Representaciones de la conquista de México.
Instructor: George (Jorge)
Mariscal
Un estudio preliminar de la literatura producida en los siglos 16 y 17
sobre la conquista de México. Los temas incluyen las cartas de Hernán
Cortes, selecciones de la "verdadera historia" de Bernal Díaz del
Castillo, el teatro religioso, el debate ideológico sobre los derechos
humanos y sus autores más conocidos (Las Casas, Sepúlveda) y algunas
crónicas indígenas (mexica y maya). Hablaremos brevemente de algunos
textos teóricos sobre el colonialismo y los primeros racismos. El
propósito es comprender un ejemplo clave de la historia del capitalismo
y la expansión europea. También miraremos algunas representaciones
cinemáticas de la conquista.
LITERATURES IN
SPANISH 272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Sor Juana en el Marco del Barroco
Instructor: Jaime Concha
Estudio de la obra de la monja Mexicana en relacion con tres coordenadas:
la cultura filosofica europea de la segunda mitad del XVII, el fenomeno
barroco colonial y la casuistica jesuita y dominicana del tiempo.
Se leeran las obras principales de Sor Juana y otros textos adicionales.
Se preparara un Reader. Paper final requerido
LITERATURE THEORY 200A
TEXT/CULTURE/CRITICAL PRACTICE
Instructor: Meg Wesling
In this first course of the theory sequence we will survey recent
interventions in literary and cultural criticism, and study some key
selections from significant scholars in the field. Possible required
books include Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction (second ed., 2000), David Macey, The Penguin
Dictionary of Critical Theory (2000), and Terry Eagleton,
Literary Theory (2nd edition, 1996); a course packet with selections
from Benedict Anderson, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Ferdinand de
Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Elizabeth
Grosz, Stuart Hall, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Georg Lukacs, Karl
Marx, Denise Riley, Edward Said, Hortense Spillers, and Gayatri Spivak,
among others, will be required.
LITERATURE THEORY 201
CONTEPORARY THEORETICAL DEBATES AND
CRITICAL DISCOURSES
Instructor: TBA
An introduction to a wide range of theoretical and methodological
issues, schools of thought, and interpretative styles in contemporary
literary studies. Required of all M.A. students in the Department of
Literature, normally in their first quarter in the program.
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