Comparative Literature Undergraduate Course Descriptions
Fall Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| COM LIT (F24) | 9 IMMIGRATION | GAMBER, J. |
| The United States imagines itself to be a “nation of immigrants,” a phrase that abounds in mainstream and political discourses. The reality of this nation is more complicated, of course. This class examines contemporary narratives of immigration, relocation, and diaspora by Indigenous authors and authors of color as well as the legal and political contexts that inform those narratives. Texts will come from an array of genres by Native American, Asian American, African American, and Latinx authors. We will examine the ways these texts construct modes of belonging in place, of establishing or reestablishing that belonging in the face of chosen, coerced, and forced relocations. How do we maintain, reconstruct, or reinvent community when we move (or flee) from nation to nation? | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 10 REFUGEES& DETENTION | MOR, L. |
| Refugees and Detention The present moment is characterized, once again, by the displacement of large populations from their land and by their internment on the frontier. War, violence, poverty, and extreme weather events are driving millions to migrate across borders, sometimes at great risk, in search of futures elsewhere. Bereft of state protections in a world neatly organized into nation states, such displaced individuals are often known as “refugees.” Engaging a wide array of texts—memoirs, films, novels, visual art, legal and academic writing—this course explores the 20th century formation of the figure of the refugee, its construction as a problem, and the solution that Europe offered to this problem: the camp. What does the legal term “refugee” imply and what might it conceal? What spatial, temporal, social and economic conditions are produced by the camp? How is encampment related to race and colonialism, and why might “refugee camps” prove such a source of anxiety for settler colonial states? What might we learn about the figure of the refugee if we reorient our gaze and look at it from outside this European tradition, from the point of view of the camp? Finally, what are the effects of the 21st century shift to an explicitly carceral attitude toward refugees, now held in “detention centers,” often outside and before the border? This interdisciplinary course explores these issues in various contexts, from the US-Mexico border to the Middle East. It emphasizes close readings of written and visual texts, as well as collaborative thinking on urgent contemporary matters. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 60A WORLD LITERATURE | NEWMAN, J. |
| CL60A (FALL, 2024): WORLD LITERATURES IN DIALOGUE (on-line course) Course description: People call movies like Avatar (dir. James Cameron) (2009) “epics.” Do post-modern movies like Avatar mimic the ancient Greek poet Homer’s pre-modern epic, the Odyssey? What can we learn about any nation’s interests and concerns today from its engagement with the masterpieces of either its own tradition or with other traditions from a different time and place? How do the world’s literatures circulate around the globe? In Comparative Literature 60A, we read some of the greatest texts of World Literature – from the ancient Greek, Argentine, English, French-Caribbean, German, Irish, Nigerian, Persian, and U.S. traditions – in dialogue with one another as a way of addressing these questions. Texts include the poems of the 14th century Persian poet and mystic Hafiz in various translations and as they were read by the 19th century German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; the Persian poet Firdowsi’s 10th century epic, the Shahnameh, and its afterlife in miniature illustrations, oral recitations in coffee houses in Iran, and re-significations as Iran’s national epic; the British medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales as they have been taken up by the contemporary British-Nigerian rapper and performance artist Patience Agbabi (b. 1965); the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles’ Antigone (442 b.c.e.) as it is retold in Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa play (1986); Sophocles’ Philoctetes (409 b.c.e.) as it dialogues with Irish playwright Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990 /1991) and the U.S poet Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty One Love Poems” (1974-76); Euripides’ Bacchae (405 b.c.e.) in conversation with Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973), and Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611) in dialogue with French Caribbean writer Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969) and as it was performed by inmates at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in La Grange, Kentucky, in 2005. - These dialogues will help us understand the many ways that the traditions we study can have multiple afterlives across traditions and around the world. Comparative Literature 60A is the first quarter of the “World Literature” track in the Comp. Lit. major, but the course is open to all students. It fulfills the GE IV and VIII campus-wide requirements. Requirements for this course include: Doing the assigned readings, watching the lecture videos, watching two movies and short film clips, quizzes, Discussion Board posts on the readings and how they dialogue with contemporary events, and Workshop Exercises on the readings. There is no midterm or final in this course. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 131 PSYCHOANALYSIS | AMIRAN, E. |
| Fall 2024: CL 131 Psychoanalysis An advanced discussion of psychoanalysis as a theory of culture. Psychoanalytic concepts like castration, the death drive, mourning, repetition, symbolic order, transference, and the uncanny reflect personal experience less than they do the ways particular cultures think. We’ll read theory by Georges Bataille, Leo Bersani, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Jean Laplanche, Melanie Klein, Eve Sedgwick, Donald Winnicott, and Slavoj Zizek, together with literary texts such as Un chien andalou (the film by Dali and Bunuel), Leonora’s Carrington’s Down Below, Isabelle Eberhardt’s diaries, and Winnie the Pooh to develop ways of reading culture psychoanalytically. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 140 NATIVE AMER SCI-FI | GAMBER, J. |
| Native American Speculative Fiction Examining contemporary Speculative Fiction (which encompasses Science Fiction, dystopian/utopian literature, fantasy, and more) from Native American authors. How do these writers participate in, reclaim, and alter these literary modes? How do these texts complicate ideas of humanness and/or personhood? How do they define what is natural, monstrous, divine, and beyond? | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 143 ESTRANGEMENT | HARRIES, M. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | ABBAS, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | VAN DEN ABBEEL, G. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | AMIRAN, E. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | GOLDBERG, D. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | JARRATT, S. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | JOHNSON, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | NEWMAN, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | RAHIMIEH, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | SCHLICHTER, A. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | VAN DEN ABBEEL, B. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | SCHWAB, G. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | TERADA, R. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| COM LIT (F24) | 199 INDPT STDY COMP LIT | THIONG'O, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
