Fall 2024 Course Schedule
fall 2024 Course Schedule
*The Fall 2024 course schedule is subject to change. Please check CAESAR for all up to date course information, including day/times, course descriptions, and mode of instruction.
fall 2024 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2024
COMP_LIT 202-0-1 Icons, Legends, and Myths in BrazilRepresentations in graphic materials, documentaries, film, theater, folklore, narrative fiction, and popular music of historical, literary, and popular figures in the national imagination. Includes English or Portuguese discussion sections. Prerequisite for Portuguese discussion section
COMP_LIT 205-0-20 Reading Difference: Colonial Korean Literature and Culture
Why is the Korean-Japanese relationship so strained to this day? How might we think about the colonial period (1910-1945) on the Korean peninsula from our present, and about intra-Asian colonialism?
This introductory course offers students some snapshots of colonial era Korean literature and culture and tackles difficult but rewarding questions about this period. We will read short fictions from prominent authors of the time and discuss visual cultures (illustrations, art, films) surrounding New Woman, Indigeneity, race, and wartime mobilization. The course also invites students to consider the often-forgotten Korean diaspora and migrations created under the vast Japanese empire that exceed the limits of the peninsula: what does it mean to be "Korean" in the shifting identities of the colonized in these different places around the empire? Finally, the course examines more contemporary representations of the colonial period to think about how the colonial period haunts the present as we desire and consume the colonial.
No prior knowledge of Korean language or culture is necessary to take this course. Course assignments include a deconstructed paper (short writing exercises), a group presentation, and a final creative group project. Participation in class discussion and peer collaboration are important aspects of this course.
COMP_LIT 270-0-1 Interpreting Culture: Kafka-Nietzsche
“The superhuman,” “the will to power,” “the eternal return of the same”—these words and phrases are often, and quite rightly, associated with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. For the first part of this class, we will read the principal book in which Nietzsche seeks to develop and communicate how these terms are to be both understood and productively misunderstood, namely Thus Spake Zarathustra. In the second part of the class, we will examine a variety of Kafka’s so-called animal stories, guided by the premise that the “animals” in his stories—an ape who learns to talk, a dog who begins to question where dogdom gets its food, etc.—are related to what Nietzsche envisioned under the heading of “the superhuman.” This class has been designated for Ethical and Evaluative Thinking Foundational Discipline as well as Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline. Readings and discussion in English.
COMP_LIT 270-0-10 Interpreting Culture: We’re Here, We’re Queer: Queer Narratives in Hebrew Literature and Culture
The corpus of Hebrew prose works and cultural representations that focus on LGBT characters and queer life stories is on the rise. Such texts and films are no longer inherently considered completely marginal, despite not yet being a major part of the literary canon. This course presents a broad examination of LGBT/queer Hebrew literature and culture - from the new wave of gay and lesbian literature in the 1990s up to some more contemporary works. What stories and questions do Hebrew queer literary texts and films present? Is queerness in the Israeli context being celebrated or is it still fighting for acceptance and tolerance? Throughout the course, we will explore Israeli prose works and films that engage with LGBT/queer identities and topics, and examine questions and themes, such as "coming out of the closet," "queer identity," "the lesbian continuum," "heteronormativity/ homonormativity," and the queer notion of "no future." The literary and cultural texts will be accompanied by theoretical texts from Adrienne Rich, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, J. Halberstam, and more. No previous knowledge of Hebrew is required! All the Hebrew texts will be read in translation, and all the films will be accompanied by English subtitles.
COMP_LIT 270-0-20 Interpreting Culture: Yiddish, Our Setting Sun: Yiddish Literature and Culture in the 20th Century
Yiddish, which was developed in the Middle Ages as a Judeo-German language, became the language which most Jews had spoken in East and West Europe until the Second World War. We will begin the class with learning about the origins of Yiddish and its development into becoming the most widespread Jewish language in Europe. We will then fast forward to the 18th and 19th centuries and the era of secularization among Jewish communities, where Western European Jews saw Yiddish as degraded language while among Eastern European Jews Yiddish became a language of bursting literary expression and flourishing literature. Persecution, poverty, the dissolution of becoming part of intellectual Europe, and Zionist ideology were all reasons for many young Jewish people to immigrate to the US and Palestine in the first decades of 20th century. While Jewish immigrants in the United States sought connections to Yiddish and clanged to it as a remnant of their old world, Yiddish was rejected in Palestine (and later in Israel) as representing the "old and weak Jew" and threatening the status of Hebrew. We will examine the texts of main Yiddish writers from the beginning of the 20th century in the literary centers of Yiddish at the time; Eastern Europe, United States, and Palestine. An important part in our class will be the geographical move of Yiddish from its "natural" habitat of Eastern Europe to the US and Palestine, and the element of loss and grief which was strongly present in the writing of Yiddish poets and authors, during the upheavals in Europe in the two World Wars, and especially after the Holocaust. Class materials will be comprised of articles and book chapters to provide the historical, cultural, and political context of the eras we will discuss, and of essays, short stories, and poems translated from Yiddish to English. No previous knowledge of Yiddish or of Yiddish culture or history is required. All course materials will be in English, as well as the lectures and class discussions.
COMP_LIT 302-0-1 Reading Across Differences: Intersections between Literature and Mathematics
Literature and mathematics—though often seen as at opposite ends of the “liberal arts”— have over the course of millennia each enriched the other in a variety of ways. This class is designed for students to explore the connection between these two forms of writing, thinking, and analyzing the world—whether the world be the “real” one or one discovered through the exercise of imagination and logical reasoning working in tandem. The principal requirement for the class is a final project that students propose and develop in consultation with
the professor. After an introductory discussion of the idea of “mathematicity” (Roland Barthes) and the “mathematical person” (Robert Musil), the class is divided into three distinct modules. The first considers certain poetic genres and individual poems whose mathematical dimensions are an essential element of their meaning. In the second, we read several stories by a single author, Jorge Luis Borges, whose (short) “fictions” have served as an auspicious meeting-place for reflection on the intersection of literature with mathematics. And in the final module, we examine three portraits of the mathematician: Robert Musil’s presentation of a “man without qualities” (in the opening chapters of the like-named novel); Leonard Michaels’ stories about a fictional mathematician (“The Nachman Stories”); and Alice Munro’s luminous portrait of a real mathematician, Sophia Kovalevsky (“Too Much Happiness”). The course is taught in English; those who know German and/or Spanish are encouraged to read the stories in the original.
COMP_LIT 383-0-20 Special Topics in Theory: Foucault
The course begins with a foundational competency in main concepts from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, including discipline and biopower, the productivity and plurality of power; normalization and its dependence on "abnormality;" the conditions under which freedom is also a form of subjection; disciplinary and punitive societies, the historical a priori. We review many of the aspects of Foucault's work that have strongly impacted inquiry in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Turning, in the course's second section, to the work of French Martinian philosopher and decolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, we will critically compare Foucault's and Fanon's approaches to power, psychiatric medicine, families, biopolitics, self-surveillance, knowledge, selfhood, alterity, and colonization. Challenging both thinkers we will ask how these approaches both reinforce each other and, at times, call each other into question. Students will have the opportunity to write on each of the two French philosophers jointly or separately.
The course is reading intensive. It will include weekly contributions to class debate including online postings. your critical responses to the readings, and to each other are encouraged. The course is open to both undergraduates and graduates and includes a lecture component and separate discussion sections at the undergraduate and graduate level.
COMP_LIT 398-0-20 Senior Seminar
This seminar guides CLS majors through the process of writing a substantial research essay (The Senior Essay, 12-15pp) in the field of Comparative Literature. What does it mean to do “comparative” work? This question will animate discussion throughout the quarter, but the essay students produce for this course will be narrowly focused on a research topic in literary studies determined in collaboration with their advisors. We will read selectively about the shared enterprise of Comp Lit (its history as a discipline, its changing shape as a field of study), but the class is largely shaped by student research projects, and class time will include writing workshops. Assignments are designed to create a communal sense of professional identity, as well as develop the skills, work habits, and materials indispensable for researching and writing scholarly essays: students will produce short written texts, prepare and analyze outside readings, and do in-class exercises. The Seminar will culminate with the presentation of their research at the Senior CLS Colloquium held at the end of Fall Quarter, for a public composed of a community of peers, graduate students, advisors, and other faculty. (N.B.: The structure, components, and language of this syllabus have been adapted freely from existing syllabi for CLS 398 and ENG 398.)
COMP_LIT 410-0-20 Theories of Literature: Worlds of Literature
"World literature" has been one of the most influential and controversial ideas in literary studies in recent decades. Some champion it as a liberation from the provincialism of national and/or Euro-centric canons and methods. Others critique it as the cultural analog of imperialism and capitalist globalization, leveling diverse and incompatible oral and textual traditions into something recognizable as "literature" in a few "major" languages.
In this seminar we will read about a variety of ways of conceiving the "world" of world literature. After considering some of the most influential and canonical models in recent literary studies (Damrosch, Casanova), we will study a variety of alternative forms of literary world-building, such as Soviet internationalism, transnational Black solidarity movements of the early twentieth century, and script-worlds (such as the Sinosphere). Our readings will range from classic theoretical texts by Herder, Kant, and Marx to publications from the past two or three years (Nergis Ertürk, Madhumita Lahiri, Musab Younis), by way of such major contemporary critics and theorists as Emily Apter, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pheng Cheah, Fredric Jameson, Lydia Liu Amir Mufti, and Roberto Schwarz.
COMP_LIT 481-0-1 Studies in Literary Theory: German Literature, Critical Thought, and New Media since 1945
What is "affect theory"? What is "the history of emotions"? This course charts seminal theoretical approaches to literary and cultural analysis through the lens of emotion and affect theory. Beginning with post-Freudian psychoanalysis, the class considers how subjectivity and attachment are staged in theory, literature, and film. Is affect merely an expression of contained, individual inner states? How do emotions form and mediate the subject's relationship to the world? How can we read for emotion in aesthetic form? In response to questions such as these, the class will consider together connections between emotion, aesthetics and ethics also by examining the ways in which this relationship is staged in different media from the scene of the "talking cure" to the "transmission of affect" through literature.
COMP_LIT 486-0-20 Studies in Literature and the Disciplines: Human/Non-Human/Posthuman
This seminar considers the legacy of the idea of "the human" and the ideology of humanism as it originates in early modern European thought and through its encounter with other places, other people, and other forms of matter. It offers students a concentrated introduction to key texts and trends in humanist thought, animal studies, posthumanism, new materialism, and other fields. It also considers these theoretical texts in light of "non-European" literary and cultural sources, particularly from Sinophone contexts.
COMP_LIT 487-0-1 Studies in Literature and the Arts: Music Historiography
Music historiography will introduce you to various ways of writing about music both in and as history. We will explore a range of approaches drawn from musicology and beyond including general historiography, performance studies, anthropology, the history of the senses, and microhistory among others.
COMP_LIT 488-0-1 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Indigeneity and Textuality
This course explores the notion of indigeneity and its attendant textual manifestations and representations in literary and cultural production in Latin America. First, we will consider some definitions of the term, ranging from the implicit in colonial-era texts, to the explicit in 19th and 20th century narratival and essayistic production. Secondly, we will dive into the large, diverse scholarship—much of it contemporary and ranging in origin from social sciences such as anthropology and archaeology to humanities such as history and literary studies—that has attempted to articulate indigeneity in connection to the demands of, alternately, nationalisms, vindicatory movements, social revolution, identitarian politics, and other political and cultural formations in the continent. Key amongst our considerations will be understanding not simply the shapes that indigeneity takes within these disciplinary, cultural and political contexts, but also the mechanisms that allow it to move and transform between them. We will pay special attention to the place of writing and will seek to account for the generation of indigeneity from lettered and cultural objects and their historical moments. Readings will be selected from a range of primary and secondary texts and may include Guaman Poma de Ayala, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Popol Vuh, el Manuscrito de Huarochirí, Manuel Gamio, José Carlos Mariátegui, Fausto Reinaga, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, José María Arguedas, Gamaliel Churata, Alison Spedding, Blanca Wiethüchter, César Calvo, Rigoberta Menchú, Marisol de la Cadena, Gonzalo Lamana, Mary Louise Pratt, Joanne Rappaport, Tom Cummins, Bruce Mannheim, Martin Lienhard, el Taller de Historia Oral Andina, and others. Course will be taught in English and/or Spanish, depending on the Spanish proficiency of the students enrolled. Course will be taught in English and/or Spanish, depending on the Spanish proficiency of the students enrolled.
COMP_LIT 488-0-20 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Errancy, Writing, and Francophone African Fiction
The Moroccan scholar, Abdellah Kaaouas has dedicated a book to "errance," one of the "corner stones" of Abdelkebir Khatibi's work. Indeed, through the motif of "errancy," Khatibi converses with multiple traditions of literary and philosophical writings, as well as across time. Figures such as the translator, the voyager, the mystic, the knight, the artist lie at the core of his literary work as well as his writings on ethics and politics. In this course, we will both read Khatibi through this lens and expand our scope by turning to the corpus of Francophone African literature broadly to trace and reflect on the modalities of this dynamic's inscriptions and its association with "error" and "going stray," given its derivation from the Latin "errare." As a point of departure, we will explore one of the most errant works of world literature, A Thousand and One Nights to understand its history, modality of narration, and influences on contemporary works.