Winter 2009 Graduate Course Descriptions

TRITONLINK (course dates/times)

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 287 (and POLI 213)
CULTURE AND POLICAL THEORY
SECULARIZATION - Beyond Political Theology and Disenchantment of the World
Instructor: Marcel Hénaff

We generally hold it as self-evident that the phenomenon of secularization is a recent one. We view it as one of the main consequences of the industrial revolution, at least as the West experienced it from the second half of the 18th century onward. We assume the existence of a precise connection between secularization and modernity. Those assumptions are not false, but they are insufficient. Secularization phenomena are observed in many cultures as far back as the classical age. Conversely, today movements of return to religion are observed that appear to contradict the purely linear views according to which the religious fact would be fading away. 
 
In the 1st half of the 20th century, two major theses dominated the debate.
- the 1st belongs to the field of political philosophy; it was stated by Carl Schmitt as  
follows:  “All the leading concepts of the modern theory of the State are secularized
theological concepts.”
- the 2nd, stated by Max Weber, belongs to the field of historical sociology.   It can be
summed up in the form of Weber’s famous observation about the “disenchantment of
the world”  [Entzauberung]. Weber’s statement has often been misunderstood. Its
literal meaning is that of a fading away of magic and a loss of legitimacy of rituals,
proportional to the ongoing process of rationalization of social and political  
institutions.
 
Those are powerful theses. They occasioned intense debates, such as those C. Schmitt had with Leo Strauss, Jacob Taubes, and Hans Blumenberg, and those developed more recently by Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Marcel Gauchet, Giorgio Agamben, and a few others. They call for a reexamination of the heritage of Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud.

As for Weber’s analyses, they have been taken up in order to evaluate the three great monotheistic religions, in the sense that those religions are viewed as contributing to the disenchantment of the world by calling for the development of a more internalized form of faith compatible with the requirements of scientific reason.

Presenting and documenting those two approaches might be sufficient to produce valid research on this topic. The purpose of this seminar, however, is to question those theses and to go beyond them. We will see that, as attractive as Schmitt’s thesis may be, it rests on assumptions that must be subjected to critical examination: can the religious and the theological realms be identified with each other? Does Schmitt’s thesis have relevance beyond his theory of the State and outside the western tradition? In Weber’s case, the role of rituals in religion must be reexamined. Can they be reduced to irrational and purely archaic practices? Can we ignore the mode of thinking that characterizes oral cultures ? Anthropological research conducted over the past 50 years has taught us that rituals are symbolic systems that constitute procedures full of meaning and that the myths produced by oral cultures are highly complex systems of thought. We, Moderns, reject rituals in the name of reason, and yet we constantly resort to rites, symbolisms, and myths that we are unable to take charge of or of which we are not even aware. This is the blind spot of social and political life in our time—a blind spot that certain media and religious movements eagerly exploit by manipulating emotions in need of an object. Secularization might therefore be as much of an illusion as an observable process.

The approach presented in the seminar will be distributed into three main parts:

1. Philosophical Discussion [A--Sessions 1 & 2; B--sessions 9 & 10]: theories of secularization; see the authors cited above.

2. Historical Approach [Sessions 3, 4, & 5]: the undermining of rituals in classical Greece (the Cynics) and in ancient China (the Taoists); two watersheds in western history—the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; the paradox of postmodern worldviews.
3. Anthropological Approach [Sessions 6, 7, & 8]: religion and culture; the production of  symbolisms; example: sacrificial practices in India, Greece, and Mexico and their disappearance; symbolism and socialization. The failure to recognize ritualized practices in today’s societies.
   

Please see Graduate Office for a course description for this course.

CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
The Politics of Migration in World Cinema
Instructor: Winifred Woodhull

This seminar will introduce students to the analysis of films dealing directly or indirectly with the politics of migration.  Our objects of study will be drawn from contemporary world cinema, meaning cinema that in some meaningful way goes against the grain of Hollywood entertainment cinema and that may be (but need not be) produced both outside the US and outside the global North.   Seminar readings include recent research on globalization, migration, and diaspora; scholarly analyses of specific films; and an overview of key concepts in film analysis.

SEMINAR WORK:  Each student will do a 15-minute presentation on one of the readings, as well as a 12-15-page film analysis.  Possible topics include queer migration; migrant domestic maids and nannies; transnational sex work; transnational adoption; forced or voluntary migration in various geopolitical locations and historical periods; cinematic forms and genres that “migrate” and take on new meanings; films that are not “about” migration but that address certain problematics thereof.  Students are strongly encouraged to choose a film or films that do not focus on migration to the US.

READER:  A required reader will be on sale at Cal Copy, located in a small shopping center on Holiday Court, across from El Torito on Villa La Jolla Drive.
BOOKS:  (To be purchased through a vendor such as Amazon.com or through the publisher) 

Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner, BFI 1997.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso 2007.

Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, Third Edition, Routledge 2006.   Students should read the following entries as soon as possible:

action movies, adaptation, agency, ambiguity, apparatus, art cinema, audience, auteur,
avant-garde, censorship, cinematographer, cinéma-vérité, class, classical Hollywood cinema, codes and conventions, colour, continuity editing, counter-cinema, crime thriller, cross-cutting, cut, deconstruction, deep focus, denotation, diegesis, director, discourse, dissolve, distanciation, documentary, dominant/mainstream cinema, editing, ellipsis, emblematic shot, enunciation, ethnographic film/gaze, European cinema, eyeline matching, fade, fantasy, film noir, flashback, foregrounding, framing, gangster films, gaze/look, gender, genre, gesturality, Hays Code, hegemony, historical films, Hollywood, horror, iconography, ideology, image, independent cinema, intertextuality, jump cut, lighting, mediation, melodrama and women’s films, mise-en-scène, modernism, motivation, music, narrative, naturalism, naturalizing, 180-degree rule, postcolonial theory, postmodernism, preferred reading, producer, queer cinema, realism, road movie, science-fiction films, scopophilia, sequencing, setting, sexuality, shot/reverse-angle shot, shots, social realism, sound, space and time, spectator, stars, stereotype, studio system, subjective camera, suture, theory, Third Cinema, Third World Cinemas, 30-degree rule, thriller, tracking shot, transparency, underground cinema, unmatched shots, vertical integration, voyeurism, war films, wipe, zoom.

NETFLIX.COM:  Students are advised to subscribe to netflix.com and order films from that company whenever possible.  Films will also be on reserve at Film and Video Reserves in the Social Science and Humanities (Geisel) Library, first floor (downstairs).

RESOURCES:  Useful sources for information about films include the following:

--Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)
--International Film Archive (FIAF, on the UCSD Libraries website)
--The British Film Institute (www.bfi.org)
--Scholarly film journals such as Screen, Sight and Sound, Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Jump Cut, Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
--Other journals such as Social Text, Cultural Critique, Diaspora

CULTURAL STUDIES 256
CULTURAL STUDIES OF TECHNOSCIENCE
Chinese Body Politics in the Age of Biotech
Instructor: Larissa Heinrich

This reading-intensive seminar will review primary and secondary materials related to the Chinese body in contemporary cultural studies, drawing connections between nineteenth century philological, historiographic, and scientific traditions and contemporary understandings of “Chineseness,” “the body,” and indeed human identity itself.  It will pay particular attention to constructions of Chinese identity and corporeality in twentieth-century scientific and medical literature, though students may choose to focus individual projects in broader contexts.  Intended to familiarize students with important considerations related to corporeality and Chinese identity in contemporary culture, the seminar will involve weekly readings, weekly seminar papers and presentations, engaged discussions, and a final research project based on original research.

LITERATURE IN ENGLISH 246
VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Literature by the Other 4/5ths: Victorian Working-Class Writing
Instructor: Margaret A. Loose

Thomas Carlyle’s epoch-making Past and Present (1843) at times gave voice to working people by speaking on their behalf, since they could only “put their huge inarticulate question[s]” in otherwise unintelligible ways.  But were people who worked for a living really inarticulate?  Despite very limited education and even less leisure, notwithstanding the prohibitive expense of literary examples and the candles to read them by, regardless of the scarcity of willing publishers and available venues for publication, Victorian laborers did write more than their shaky Xs on parish marriage registers.  They wrote autobiographies that chronicle in vivid terms their homes, workplaces, loves, and habits, at the same time as they challenge simple definitions of realist autobiography dependent on triumphant individualism.  They wrote a huge range of poetry filled with humor and pathos, formal convention and experimentation, political urgency and sublime isolation.  And in the era that witnessed the phenomenon of the novelistic juggernaut, of course they wrote fiction, sometimes of a serious, realist sort, and sometimes of a lurid melodramatic sort.  In a mere ten weeks we will delve into examples of all of these genres, simultaneously asking the theoretical questions they raise about genre, interpretation and literary judgment, gender in relation to form, the implications (psychological and political) of self-representation, and the meanings of appropriation.  We will use 2 poetry anthologies, a volume of 4 autobiographies, a novel, a collection of short stories, and possibly Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, which will be available at Groundwork Books.  Seminar participants will be asked to present (perhaps collaboratively) and lead discussion on selected secondary materials and also to write a final (10-12 page) essay.

LITERATURE IN ENGLISH 252
STUDIES IN MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Unreal Cities: Urbanism and the Modernist Uncanny
Instructor: Michael Davidson

Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves...From Baudelaire's Haussmanized Paris to Eliot's spectral London, from the Citta Nuova of Sant'Elia or the futuristic metropoles of the Constructivists to the hyperreal landscapes of cyberpunk and Blade Runner, from the libidinal arteries of Biely's St. Petersburg to Kafka's labyrinthine Prague, from Benjamin's arcades to the commodity spectacles of the Situationists, from the haunted landscapes of Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the slack spaces of postmodern "edge" cities--the city in modernism has been unreal, even as its material reality has been synonymous with modernity itself. Beginning with the premise that urbanism represents both a material change in the organization of individuals in the modern period as well as a discourse about those changes, this seminar will study the representation (and irreality) of modern urban spaces.

To introduce some of the problems of the modern city we will read several classic modern works--Poe's "Man of the Crowd," Baudelaire's "Painter of Everyday Life," Freud’s “The Uncanny,” Henry James, “The Jolly Corner,” Eliot's The Waste Land, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  Although the emphasis will be on U.S. works, we will necessarily be looking at equivalent formations in Europe as well.  At the same time, we will study essays in urbanism and architecture by Walter Benjamin, Corbusier,  Georg Simmel, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Rem Koolhaus, Manfred Tafuri, Mike Davis, David Harvey, Kevin Lynch and others. Obviously a ten week course cannot possibly provide a comprehensive overview of modern urbanism, but it can suggest intersections between cultural production, city planning, design theory and architecture that will provide background on urbanist themes and problems for further research.

LITERATURE IN SPANISH 272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Instructor: Luis Martín-Cabrera

El fenómeno de la inmigración en España es relativamente nuevo. De hecho, hasta principios de los años noventa la cuestión de la inmigración no entra en los debates públicos. Sin embargo, desde el siglo XIX España se constituye como una nación de inmigrantes. En este curso, discutiremos las distintas dinámicas migratorias que atraviesan la Península Ibérica interna y externamente y relacionaremos estos desplazamientos con el mundo del trabajo y la explotación. Este marco teórico implica, por ejemplo, interrogar los modos en que la literatura representa la inmigración del sur de España a Cataluña, las narraciones testimoniales de trabajadores españoles en Europa en los años setenta o la reciente producción fílmica que trata la transformación de España en un país receptor de inmigrantes.

Además de trazar esta genealogía de la inmigración en España, discutiremos la emergencia de discursos neo-racistas, la representación de los inmigrantes y los conflictos laborales, la relación entre los discursos de la inmigración y el pasado colonial español, la representación de los inmigrantes en relación a las categorías de sexualidad y género, la relación entre la inmigración y la construcción de políticas supranacionales en Europa etc. Algunos de los libros y películas que discutiremos son: La mina de Armando López Salinas, Últimas Tardes con Teresa de Juan Marsé, Surcos  deFlores de otro mundo de Iciar Bollaín, Cosmofobia de Lucía Etxebarría

LITERATURE IN THEORY 200B
PROBLEMS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY
Feminism, Gender, Queer Theory
Instructor: Stephanie Jed

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. 

LITERATURE WRITING 282
WRITING STATES
Poetry and Public Space
Instructor: Rae Armantrout

Poetry is too often seen as the art (and reification) of the private psyche. This course will emphasize the relationship between contemporary poetry and the culture at large. We will read and write poems in response to public space(s). Where are the poems about malls, comic books, movies, billboards, popular songs, and the internet?  It turns out, they are everywhere. We will read such poetry by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Lisa Robertson, Ron Silliman, Claudia Rankine,  Nathaniel Mackey, Juliana Spahr, Katie Degentesh, etc. as well as relevant critical essays by Guy Debord and Frederic Jameson. Students will be asked to create a portfolio of poems or creative prose pieces in dialogue with various forms of mass culture or public space. The course will include peer critique sessions and a final poetry reading in which each student will present a serious introduction to another student’s work.