Graduate Seminars
Fall 2009
Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages
CPLT 210-001 – CANONS IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
EXPANDING THE CANONS: A SINO-WESTERN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Thursday, 4:10-7:00 PM, SPR 1358
Instructor: Professor Yenna Wu
Email: yenna.wu@ucr.edu
This seminar examines a range of dynamics in the construction of literary canons from a Sino-Western or global comparative perspective. We will focus on a selection of canonic Chinese and non-Chinese fictional works, as well as relevant criticism and theoretical works. Issues to be addressed include how writers, readers, and critics engage with canons. All readings and discussion will be in English.
CPLT 214-001 – HISTORY OF CRITICISM
IRONY, UNDERSTANDING AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE AESTHETIC
Monday, 4:10-7:00 PM, SPR 2212
Instructor: Professor John Kim
Email: john.kim@ucr.edu
This course examines fundamental problems in literary criticism issuing out of the opposition between "irony" and "understanding." Literary criticism has long aimed to open texts toward an "understanding" of their "aesthetic" unity as works of literature. However, the aim of understanding remains constantly thwarted by textual "irony," or the separation between "meaning" and performative act introduced at the level of the letter. What a text says, is never in identity with what it does. In examining this tension between irony and understanding, this course simultaneously offers a close reading of texts that have become central to the "critique of the aesthetic" informing many contemporary approaches to literary studies, most notably deconstruction. Readings will be drawn from Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, F. Schlegel, Schiller, Schleiermacher, Fichte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Saussure, Benjamin, Arendt, Watsuji, and Heidegger among others.
This course fulfills a graduate course requirement in Comparative Literature. It is open to students in other departments, but priority will be given to graduate students in Comparative Literature. All readings will be in English translation. Texts in the original will be provided to those working in the pertinent languages.
CPLT 243-001 – FRANCE AND ASIA ORIENTIALISM & BEYOND
Instructor: Professor Michelle Bloom
Wednesday, 4:10-7:00 PM, SPR 1358
Email: michelle.bloom@ucr.edu
We will begin by looking at Orientalism and then consider alternative and potentially more fruitful paradigms for exploring the aesthetic and cultural dynamics between France and Asia (parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia for the purposes of this course; specifically, China, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam/Indochina) beyond Orientalism, focusing on the last decades of the twentieth century to the present. We will focus on film, with a secondary emphasis on literature, and some attention to architecture; time permitting, we will also consider fusion cuisine and fashion. We will study the following authors/filmmakers/critics: Barthes, Said, Sheldon Lu, Shih Shu-mei; we will consider literary works and films by some of the following authors and filmmakers (this list is tentative but should give you an idea): Olivier Assayas, Alain Resnais/Marguerite Duras, Dai Sijie, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Emily Tang Xiaobai, Tsai Ming-liang, Regis Wargnier,
You are invited to bring to the table (in your presentation, paper and class discussion) "Eastern" or "Western" national traditions not represented above, as per your areas of interest (eg Germany, Korea, etc etc).
Students in fields outside of CPLT are encouraged to participate in this seminar.
CPLT 301-001 – TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE AT COLLEGE LEVEL
Tuesday, 5:10-8:00 PM, HMNSS 1407
Instructor: Lecturer Kelle Truby
Email: kelle.truby@ucr.edu
Provides the practical and theoretical background essential to effective language teaching.
Through reading, discussion, observation and applied learning, the student will become well versed in the linguistic and pedagogical theory that informs current approaches to language instruction.
Graduate Seminars
Winter 2010
Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages
CPLT 210-001 – CANONS IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Instructor: Professor Perry Link
Email: perry.link@ucr.edu
This course will consider Chinese theories of literature and entertain the possibility of using them to understand literary texts that originate not only in China but in any culture, including cultures of the West. In addition to shedding light on a variety texts in new ways, one goal will be to undo the postcolonial situation whereby "theory" is invented only in the West and applied to subaltern cultures elsewhere.
CPLT 215A - CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY
Instructor: Visiting Assistant Professor, Johannes Endres
Email: Johannes.endres@ucr.edu
The course is going to focus on some of the main drifts in literary theory since the 19th century and the establishment of the so called New Hermeneutics. Concepts and methods that will be observed are as follows: Hermeneutics, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Discourse Analysis, Feminist Criticism and Gender Studies, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Semiotics, Reception Theory, System Theory. We will read and discuss core texts of these theories, available in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, and contextualize them with previous poetological and critical concepts from Plato up to Kant, and others.
CPLT 215B – GLOBAL CULTURAL STUDIES
Instructor: Professor Mariam Lam
Email: mariamb@ucr.edu
This course will introduce and trace the evolution of cultural studies from the Frankfurt school, British cultural studies and the Birmingham school, American cultural studies and the Chicago school, and through to the present manifestations of contemporary cultural studies more engaged with globalization, area studies developments, ethnic studies, and postcolonial critique. Intersections around Marxism, discourses of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism and popular culture, and global feminisms, etc. will become embedded into your current research projects on specific national literatures/cultures. (This course may be petitioned for SEATRiP MA course credit, once assignments are discussed with the professor.)
CPLT 27X – SCIENCE FICTION
Instructor: Professor Robert Latham
Email: Robert.latham@ucr.edu
This class surveys "New Wave" science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, a period of substantial literary and ideological renovation within the genre. Reacting against the formal and political conservativism of classic "hard" SF, New Wave writers evolved a more progressive ethical-political agenda and a more sophisticated aesthetic approach than had prevailed during the pulp era. Aligned with counter-cultural lifestyles and 1960s liberation movements, New Wave writers began to question the core values of "technocratic" society and the genre’s own role in relation to them. At the same time, they pushed the limits of experimental form by fusing SF with contemporary avant-garde fiction and theory. The result was to force the genre to a new self-awareness of its social "mission" in relation to technological culture.
Graduate Seminars
Spring 2010
Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages
CPLT 210 – Canons in Comparative Literature: “Western Cities”
Instructor: Professor Heidi Brevik-Zender
In this course we will examine the literary and theoretical constructions of three capital cities of the West: Paris, London and Chicago. Fictional and non-fictional readings from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, along with visual artifacts and film will inform our discussions of the following questions: What is a city? What are the relationships between urban space and modernity? Who can chronicle the city and how does genre inform an author’s portrayal of life in the metropolis? How do authors and artists both reinforce and question the urban/rural dichotomy? Works by Baudelaire, Benjamin, Zola, Pepys, Orwell, Dreiser, Sandburg, Thoreau, More, Lang.
CPLT 224 – Film Theory
Instructor: Professor Sabine Doran
This seminar focuses on concepts of time in cinema. In no other artistic medium does time play a greater role or have a greater aesthetic significance, for the temporal perspective defines both the irreducibility of the film spectator’s experience and the technique of filmmaking itself. We will examine how the two major cinematic schools, those of mis-en-sc??ne, emphasizing the long take (real time); and montage, emphasizing discontinuities (artificial time), reveal how the organization of time on the screen is perhaps cinema’s most fundamental concern. Film theories of Eisenstein, Bazin, Deleuze, Doane, Manovich and others will help us to understand how cinema is not only a time-form but also how modernity and post-modernity represent new conceptions of temporality that have been in large part influenced by the cinematic medium. Throughout the seminar we will analyze relevant films to illustrate the various theories.
Sabine Doran
CPLT 267 –
Instructor: Professor Annmarie Shimabuku
This seminar contextualizes current debates on Empire within a US-East Asia framework. Particular emphasis will be placed on Japan as one of the most sophisticated intellectual contributions to colonizing thought in the prewar/wartime period. While it is often assumed that Japanese colonialism ended with the war, we will instead trace its reconfiguration in a postwar global network of Empire which manipulates nation-state borders as it transcends them. Readings of Japan's postcolonial literatures will be complemented by theoretical texts from authors such as Foucault, Nietzsche, Esposito, Hardt/Negri, Naoki Sakai, Chalmers Johnson and Leo Ching. We will explore issues of sovereignty, subjectivity, imperial nationalism, biopower, total war, militarism, and assimilation while focusing on the problem of resistance. All readings and discussions will be in English.
CPLT 27X – SCIENCE FICTION
Instructor: Professor Robert Latham
Email: Robert.latham@ucr.edu
This class surveys “New Wave” science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, a period of substantial literary and ideological renovation within the genre. Reacting against the formal and political conservativism of classic “hard” SF, New Wave writers evolved a more progressive ethical-political agenda and a more sophisticated aesthetic approach than had prevailed during the pulp era. Aligned with counter-cultural lifestyles and 1960s liberation movements, New Wave writers began to question the core values of “technocratic” society and the genre’s own role in relation to them. At the same time, they pushed the limits of experimental form by fusing SF with contemporary avant-garde fiction and theory. The result was to force the genre to a new self-awareness of its social “mission” in relation to technological culture.