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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 214
THE BIBLE AND CRITICAL THEORY
Gender, Sexuality and Death in Biblical Literature: Embodying Otherness in Ancient Jewish and Christian Communities
Instructor: Dayna Kalleres
The bible (Tanak and New Testament) provided the primary anchor for formulations of gender, sexuality and death in both Jewish and Christian communities in the ancient and late antique worlds. In this seminar we shall comparatively explore how the reading practices of ancient Jews and Christians cultivated distinctive, even polemical or subversive, conceptualizations of embodiment, which carved an often intentionally marginal religious identity in the ancient world. Topics include: circumcision, laws of purity, rites of passage, ‘the body of Christ’, incarnation, resurrection, martyrdom and holiness.
This course fulfills the historical breadth requirement.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 282
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY
The «Conflicted Psyche» in Cinema
Instructor: Alain J.-J. Cohen
How is the conflicted psyche represented in film? How are various
representations of psychological conflicts and states of mind
accountable to a director’s mise-en-scène? to his/her recursive images,
obsessions, and style? to film (image/sound) editing? How much is due to
the actors’ craft? Or to the screenwriters’ sense of action and
dialogue? Or the presence of a therapist in a film? or at a film? or to
therapeutic effect? How are audiences emoted to pity and fear, mood
swings, emotions, sentiments and filmic passions?
Clips from cult and classic films, such as M. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver,
Hitchcock’s Psycho, S. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, L.
Visconti’s The Damned, L. Cavani’s Night Porter, I.
Bergman’s Passion of Anna, P. Schrader’s The Comfort of
Strangers, C. Denis’s Trouble Every Day, and many others,
will be used to highlight issues of trauma, sex and gender, the psyche’s
complexities, conflictual entanglements, masochism, violence and
cruelty, aggression and self-aggression, et al.
Readings include texts in contemporary film theory as well as
psychoanalytic theory from Freud and Klein and Lacan up to the present.
At the end of this seminar, students will become conversant with: a)
technical methods of film analysis, b) the delineation and
representation of evolving emotion systems in film, c) the
psychological, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic mind models and theories
addressing issues of sex and gender and trauma in relation to the
“conflicted psyche”, d) the integration of film style and techniques
within the history and philosophy of cinema and the history of mind
models.
CULTURAL STUDIES 220
FILM/TV/VIDEO STUDIES
Globalizing Glamour: From Icon to Flesh
Instructor: Roddey Reid
This course will look at the changing notions of modern glamour
principally in North America, Europe, and East Asia from its mythical
beginnings in 19th and 20th-century European capitals, classic cinema
(Hollywood, Europe, Shanghai, Kyoto and Tokyo), and glossy magazines
(1920s-1940s) to the rise of television, independent cinema, video, and
digital imaging. While cultural sites of glamour such as fashion, film
stardom, celebrity culture, photography, and advertising have been the
subject of much commentary, glamour in and of itself is an understudied
topic, and is generally understood within a national frame. This course
seeks to explore glamour as a transnational practice in democratic and
mass societies with a special focus on visual culture. Subjects will
include theories of glamour; glamour as commodity and fetish, as image
and performance, as form of subjectivation, as democratic fantasy, and
as nostalgia; the question of camp (as failed glamour); the threat of
aging and illness; glamour as violence; the social and economic contexts
of glamour; and subcultures of glamour and their audiences.
We will study films, video, TV serials such as George Cuckor, The
Women (1939), Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard (1950),
Federico Fellini, La Dolce vita (1959), Jean-Luc Godard,
Breathless (1960), Suzuki Seijun, Tokyo Drifter (1967),
John Cassavetes, Opening Night (1977), Isaac Julien,
Looking for Langston (1989), Chuck Workman, Supertar: The Life and
Times of Andy Warhol (1990), Jenny Livingston Paris Is Burning
(1991), Madonna, The Immaculate Collection (1990), Julie dash,
Daughters of the Dust (1992), Yvonne Rainer, MURDER and
Murder (1996), Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine (1998), Wong
Kar Wai, Chungking Express (1994) or In the Mood for Love
(2001), Sex and the City, and Mad Men; the videos and
photography of Yang Fudong and the photography of Izimi Kaoru and
Morimura Yasumasa. Possible reading includes writings by Roland Barthes,
Jackie Stacey, Douglas Kellner, Valerie Steele, Wayne Koestenbaum, Susan
Sontag, Stephen Gundle, Jodi Brooks, Judith Mayne, Richard Dyer, Sarah
Berry, Ginette Vincendeau, Gilles Lipovesky, Linda Ditmar, Christy
Turner, and Carol Squire.
CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Place and Displacement in Latino/a and Native American Literature
Instructor: Rosaura Sánchez
This seminar will look at issues of displacement, relocation,
transnational identities and disidentification within societies marked
by U.S. capitalism, expansionism and imperialism. The following recent
Latino/a and Native American novels will be read in tandem with
theoretical and critical readings dealing with historical,
socio-economic and political issues that are configured in this
fiction.
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Ana-Maurine Lara, Erzulie's Skirt
Ana Castillo, The Guardians
Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo
Mayra Santos Febres, Sirena Selena
Linda Hogan, Solar Storms
Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Seminar members should make it a point to be familiar with the work
of Helena María Viramontes, Angie Cruz, Ernesto Quiñonez and Maritza
Loida Pérez, and other contemporary U.S. Latino/a writers, for purposes
of comparison.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 254
TOPICS
IN U.S. MINORITY LITERATURE AND CULTURES
Neoslavery, Civil Death, and
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? How do social
structures such as capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and
homophobia inform strategies of criminalization across different
time-periods? Even with the narratives that we read that reach back to
the “Movement Era” (e.g. writings by the Black Panthers) we will attempt
to read texts as a “history of the present”--i.e. we will be concerned
about how narratives of slavery and imprisonment shed light on the
current prison industrial complex, a system of state terror that now
incarcerates well over 2.3 million people both domestically and
globally. 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 subjection. 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 256
POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSES
Gender, Sexuality, and Globalization
Instructor: Meg Wesling
Does globalization have a gender? What are the gendered politics of
globalization? This seminar will investigate the often vexed but historically
productive relationship between Marxism, feminist theory, and queer theory,
first by questioning feminist theory’s historical ties to poststructuralist
theory and psychoanalysis, and next, by thinking about the contemporary
materialist turn as these fields work to deal with the transformations of
globalization. Readings will include texts by authors such as: Judith Butler,
Miranda Joseph, Rosemary Hennessy, Amy Villarejo, Gayatri Gopinath, Martin
Manalansan, Roderick Ferguson, David Eng, Judith Halberstam, Gayatri Gopinath,
Paul Gilroy, Saskia Sassen, and Roger Rouse.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 252
TOPICS IN MODERN SPANISH LITERATURE AND CULTURES
Genealogies of Globalization / El Barroco de Indias
Instructor: John Blanco
“El barroco,” Cuban writer José Lezama Lima famously declared in 1957, “fue el
arte de la contraconquista.” Half a century after his remark, the cultural
production of the Americas associated with the word “baroque” and the
intellectual currents inextricably tied to it – from the cultural anthropology
of mestizaje to the literature of the “marvelous real,” the political theology
of catastrophe, and the study of subaltern relations – this “art of the
counter-conquest” has aspired to be nothing less than a grand theory of Latin
American poetics and cultural politics that defies our basic understandings of
Western modernity and postmodernity. Yet if one can safely say that the
American (and Philippine) culture of the baroque was founded on different
premises than those of Italy and Spain (or for that matter, France, Austria, and
the Low Countries), how does this difference inform our understanding of
colonialism and empire, subaltern agency and elite crilloismo, theological power
and transculturation? And why has it received so much attention as a cultural
discourse in recent years?
Partiremos de las tensiones y ambigüedades en el uso / abuso del término barroco
en la historia del arte y la filosofía de la historia, teniendo en cuenta su
adopción por los escritores y pintores latinoamericanos durante la primera mitad
del siglo 20. Abordaremos los temas de las diferencias entre las culturas del
barroco español y el americano; la genealogía de la teoría de la “hibridez /
mestizaje cultural” y su culminación en el Nuestroamericanismo del fin de siglo
(19); la ambivalencia del discurso teológico en el Latinoamericanismo; la
epistemología / recepción de la imagen barroca en su contexto colonial; y la
conceptualización del barroco como una “lógica” o un “estilo” transhistórico en
la producción contemporánea de la crítica cultural latinoamericana.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Testimonio y Memoria en la Guerra Civil Española y la Dictadura Franquista.
Teoría y Práctica.
Instructor: Luis Martín-Cabrera
El siguiente seminario está diseñado como una introducción metodológica para la
realización de entrevistas con supervivientes y militantes de la guerra civil y
la dictadura franquista. El objetivo del curso es, por lo tanto, preparar a los
estudiantes para que entiendan los distintos registros del género testimonial y
dotarles de las herramientas metodológicas y prácticas necesarias para
participar en la producción de testimonios de eventos traumáticos tales como la
Guerra Civil o la dictadura franquista. A diferencia de otros enfoques más
extendidos en las ciencias sociales, las lecturas del seminario se basan en la
teoría psicoanalítica del trauma, la historiografía marxista y las distintas
corrientes de la historia oral y los estudios subalternos.
En términos prácticos, el curso ofrecerá una combinación de lecturas históricas
de la guerra civil y la dictadura junto con lecturas teóricas y análisis en
detalle de varios testimonios audiovisuales. Al final del curso, los estudiantes
deberán entregar un análisis detallado de uno de los testimonios con que
contamos en la colección Southworth de la Guerra Civil. El seminario está
especialmente dirigido a aquellos estudiantes que quieran participar en la
realización de entrevistas en España como parte de la construcción de una
archivo audiovisual de la memoria, pero la participación en el curso NO
garantiza necesariamente la participación en el proyecto. Aunque el seminario se
centra específicamente en la Guerra Civil y la dictadura, el curso ofrece una
aproximación metodológica y teórica que puede ser útil para quiénes interesados
en pensar la relación entre testimonio, violencia política y trauma social.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos y Fronteras Culturales
Instructor: José Manuel Valenzuela Arce
Uno de los reposicionamientos en las Ciencias Sociales contemporáneas refiere a
la importancia adquirida por los aspectos culturales. Los acercamientos para
comprender los procesos intersubjetivos y simbólicos cobran fuerza como
elementos que posibilitan una mejor comprensión de la acción social, la conducta
humana, los procesos identitarios o la emergencia de nuevos actores sociales. Al
mismo tiempo los estudios interpretativos sobre las fronteras culturales ganan
espacios en los enfoques de género y en las investigaciones sobre cuestiones
étnicas, culturas juveniles, así como en las múltiples formas de articulación
entre lo local y lo nacional con los procesos globales.
Esta situación se inscribe dentro de procesos intensos de cambio social, además
de transformaciones del propio campo académico, donde destaca la creciente
porosidad de las disciplinas y la construcción de preguntas construidas desde
sus umbrales.
Es un objetivo de este curso problematizar la producción de saberes en el campo
cultural e identificar el papel de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos en
las nuevas discusiones de las Ciencias Sociales. No pretendemos realizar una
discusión exhaustiva, sino reconstruir el papel de los estudios culturales desde
miradas diversas que permitan interpretar algunos de los principales procesos
socioculturales de América Latina, especialmente aquellos que convergen en la
frontera de México y Estados Unidos.
Organización:
Se trabajará con base en exposiciones y discusión de los textos de lectura, así
como con la presentación de temas que han cobrado centralidad en la situación
sociocultural latinoamericana: migración, culturas juveniles, identidades de
género y fronteras.
Evaluación:
Se evaluará a partir de tres insumos: Participación en clase, exposición de los
temas y la elaboración de un ensayo referido a la temática discutida en clase (cada
uno de estos insumos de evaluación representa la tercera parte de la
calificación)
Prerequisites: Ability to read Spanish and understand spoken
Spanish.
LITERATURES IN THEORY 200C
CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES AND CULTURAL CRITICISM
Instructor: John Blanco
In this seminar, we will look at how feminist, gendered, and queer perspectives
provide an opportunity to rethink traditional categories such as nation/state,
genre, fact, library, archive, narrative, and theory. We will discuss practical
questions of methodology in relation to theory and literary research. We will
especially ask the question: how does theorizing take different forms in
different cultural contexts? Areas of focus will include: post-colonial
theory, political theory, historiography, Marxism (and Hegelian thinkers),
psychoanalysis, immigration and diaspora.
“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 (on the other hand) one 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 unstable relationship
between culture and the aesthetic; the development of the cultural industry;
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”
literatures.
LITERATURE WRITING 260
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIES 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.
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