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CLTC Courses

The CLTC sponsors various courses throughout the school year. In addition to these courses, there are several courses taught in other departments across campus that deal specifically with literature, theory and culture. Below you will find a list of CLTC sponsored courses, courses of related interest, and recent courses.

Winter 2008

Comparative Literature: Graduate Seminar
Winter 2008
Instructor: Sven Spieker
Meets on: M 1:00-4:00 p.m. Arts 2622
Prerequisites: Graduate standing, Enroll: 04465

This seminar deals with the work and legacy of Marcel Duchamp and its relevance to the anatomy of modernism. Apart from in-depth discussions of Duchamp’s works and their critical reception, we will be concerned with his recalibration of the art object and its media. The Duchamp of this seminar is less a nominalist or proto-conceptualist (art is what I call it) than an active critic of a variety of 19th century scientific traditions and their lingering influence upon early 29th century art. If time permits, select aspects of the Duchamp phenomenon in contemporary art will be considered as well.

English 234: Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature: Modernism and Modernity
Winter 2008
Instructor: Maurizia Boscagli
Meets on: R 11:00 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. SH 2635
Prerequisites: Graduate standing

This course will use a cultural studies approach to the period 1900-1930’s. During this time modern culture is characterized by a pervasive presence of new technologies in every day life, massified metropolitan life and consumerism; the Taylorization of labor and of social life; the entrance of women into the public sphere, and a redefinition of gender categories; new visibility of homosexualities, and emergent discourses and practices of the body, and sexual freedom. Early twentieth century modernity also witnesses a crisis of the liberal polity and bourgeois self, and an often virulent discourse of nationalism vis-à-vis war and the disillusionment with the empire. We will study the aesthetic production of modernism (in literature, art, film and photography) as deeply ingrained in this culture of modernity, and as negotiating anxieties about the social disorder, gender definitions and class stability. What is the cultural politics of modernism and how different modernisms (from Italian Futurism to W.H. Auden, from Russian Constructivism to Pound) come to speak different languages of political commitment? How did the development of modernisms and their languages of experimentation produce the crisis realistic of representation? How does an aesthetic of obscurity and fragments, alternatively concerned with questions of tradition and order, and the dangers of the technologization and standardization of modern life (T.S. Eliot), as well as with a “machinic” art of defamiliarization, and functionalism (Brecht, the Bauhaus) contribute to the division between high and low? While studying how the relationship between modernism and modernity is articulated in the thought of cultural and social critics of the period (Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Ortega y Gassett, Le Bon), we will focus on different sites of modern culture: the New Man; the modernist femme fatale ( for instance, in Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box); the international city and the modernist between community and “homelessness”; the critique of class through sexuality (D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love); the question of the primitive( in the Imperial Exhibitions and/or Josephine Baker’s body); functionalism vs. the ornamental in art and architecture (Weimar industrial photography, or Le Corbusier vs Adolf Loos); Taylorization, gender and the family romance (Fritz Lang’s Metropolis); fashion (Gabrielle Chanel dressing the androgynous New Woman, and Paul Poiret staging modernist orientalism through his clothes). Among the readings, texts by Woolf, Barnes, Kipling, Joyce, Victor Margueritte, W.H. Auden. Criticism by Terry Eagleton, Eve Sedgwick, Raymond Williams, Peter Wollen, Allon, White, Frederic Jameson, Thomas Elsaesser.
Catalog Number: 53348

English 236: Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Literature Plus: Cross-Disciplanary Models of Literary Interpretation
Winter 2008
Instructor: Alan Liu
Meets on: R 11:00 a.m. - 1:30 p.m., SH 2509
Prerequisites: Graduate standing

Because of the recent, shared emphasis in many fields on digital methods, scholars in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences increasingly need to collaborate across disciplines. This course reflects theoretically and practically on the new, digitally-facilitated interdisciplinarity by asking students to choose a literary work and treat it according to one or more of the research paradigms prevalent in other fields of study.

German 210: Trauma, Memory, History
Winter 2008
Instructor: Susan Derwin
Meets on: R 2:00-4:50 p.m., Phelps 6309
Prerequisites: Graduate standing
Cross-Listed with Comparative Literature 200. The seminar is open to graduate students in all departments interested in questions of memory, narrative and legacies of violence. The focus of the course is primarily Holocause survival, but we will also address issues that developed in the aftermath of WWII. Readings will be in areas of testimonial literature, fiction, and critical theory, with a particular emphasis on psychoanalysis. Topics to be addressed include: witnessing, the role of narrative in the work-through of trauma, survivor guilt, rage, replacement children, and debates about the propriety of literary reconstructions of the Holocaust. Readings will include texts by Georgio Agamben, Jean Améry, Charlotte Delbo, Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Imre Kertész, Primo Levi, and Art Spiegelman.

Theater 251: Performance Studies
Winter 2008
Instructor: TBA
Meets on: T 5:00-7:50 p.m., TD 2517
Prerequisites: Graduate standing

Varies in content from year to year, but offerings may include studies of the avant-garde and performance art, sport as ritual and performance, theatre on trial, politics and war as performance.

Winter 2007

Comparative Literature 200/German 210 : Humanities and Human Rights in Times of Torture, Professor Elizabeth Weber

Given their testimony to suffering and grievances in unique, compelling, and original ways, literature and the arts offer the chance to engage innovatively and constructively with the complex issues surrounding human rights and their countless violations in today's world. In addition, philosophy and critical theory provide urgently needed tools to think about categories whose definitions have become, in the contemporary context, more and more uncertain, including the categories of "the human," "democracy," "justice," "rights."
At the core of the seminar will be our reflection on the use of torture by the most powerful democracy in the world. The seminar will address "democratic torture" and its devastating effects on the concept and practice of democracy; the consequences of state-sanctioned torture on the principles and practices of scholarship and education; the role of mass media in the increasing acceptability of the use of torture, and the relationship between torture used in US run prisons abroad, and human rights violations on American soil.

Readings will include:
Alfred McCoy, A question of torture (2006),
Micheline Ishay, The history of human rights (2004)
Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden (1994)
Edwige Danticat, The Dew Breaker (2004)
Edward Said, Covering Islam (1997)
Essays by Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Jean Améry, Hannah Arendt, and others.

ENGL 236: Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory : Avante-Garde Poetics

Professor Yunte Huang

Winter 2006

English Department

ENGL 236: Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory : Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory, Professor L. O. Aranye Fradenburg

This course provides a basic introduction to Lacan's writings. We will be reading Ecrits: A Selection; a little bit of Kristeva, who will have to bear the burden of representing "French feminism"; and some "post-Lacanian" material, including Willy Apollon's "After Lacan" and some of Tim Dean's recent work on sexuality. Seminar presentation, seminar paper.

French and Italian

French 228F: « Les Lumières »: Fiction and Philosophy-

Dr. Anne Beate Maurseth

This seminar will address what Enlightenment is in relation to the social institutions and the philosophical and religious traditions of the 18th century. We will discuss such questions as the reinvention of nature, reason, passion, sentiment and morality in philosophical essays and new literary forms, including utopia. Taught in French.

Comparative Literature

Comp Lit 200/German 210: Representation, Power, and the Future of Critical Theory: Reading Foucault

Professor Sven Spieker

The seminar will study seminal books, articles, and essays by Michel Foucault–by most accounts one of the most formative philosophers of the second half of the 20th century–, reconstruct the epistemological context for his arguments, and try to establish his position in contemporary (and future) critical theory. An important foil for our discussions of Foucault’s thinking will be Gilles Deleuze’s book on Foucault (1986).

Fall 2006

ENGL 236: Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory : Genealogies of the Postcolonial

Bishnupriya Ghosh

This course introduces students to the major genealogies of “canonical” postcolonial theory (Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhaha, Gayatri Spivak, among others), a retrospective look at a moment when there is much speculation about the future of this field. As epistemological critique, postcolonial theory has hybrid and multiple origins bringing the charge of derivativeness against its major practitioners. Pursuing a genealogical thread will enable us to confront this aspect of the “pasts” of postcolonial theory, and subsequently its critical allegiances, refusals, and negotiations. Alongside the work of the major theorists, we will read relevant explorations of the current “state of the field.” Here our focus will be on the strange temporality postcolonial studies—a field that seems to always work toward its own demise. For since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), since its “beginnings,” postcolonial scholars have regularly prophesized the passing of postcolonial times and of postcolonial thought. So as we read genealogically we will pause on a second question: is the time of the postcolonial over? Or is the postcolonial critique still salient for our ongoing investigations of new empires? If it survives what are its new domains, its new eruptions? And when we find the postcolonial everywhere, what does the term mobilize at this historical juncture?

Our readings each week will include critical essays from Padmini Mongia’s Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, supplemented by materials in a Course Reader; selections from our single literary case study, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, 1988); and relevant chapters from one account of postcolonial theory, Ania Loomba’s Colonialism/ Postcolonialism, and Robert Young’s historical overview in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Students will also be expected to view three feature length postcolonial films (Cuban, Indian, Senegalese) and two documentaries outside of class time. Each class session will comprise of a lecture, class discussion of critical and literary texts, and a student oral presentation. Students will be expected to prepare a conference package (a one-page abstract, a 20-minute presentation, and an 8-page paper) and a write a 20-page research paper on a topic approved by the instructor. I will suggest/provide presentation essays/materials as well as research topics suited to individual interest, but please let me know if you have a specific idea/project in mind or already under way.

Fall 2006

Comparative Literature / German

Comp Lit 200/Germ 210- "On Wit and Jokes"

Visiting Prof. Bettina Menke

Menke's"On Wit" deals with the rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics of wit (as well as puns and jokes). It also touches on the pragmatics of joking, the Freudian 'economy of the joke' and the social aspects of jokes. Both literary and theoretical texts from the 18th to the 20th century will be read (all required readings are available in English). Writings by German Romantic Jean Paul and by Sigmund Freud mark the temporal parameters for the seminar. This is the period when wit which in Renaissance concettismo and mannerism (ingenio) had been defined as the "margin of rhetoric" or as a "para rhetoric" --, drops out of the field of poetics. It ended up either being subsumed under the aesthetic of the "genius", or it was completely excluded from the new discipline of aesthetics that emerged during the second half of the 18th century. During this period, a change occurs in the meaning of wit. If previously wit had designated a faculty, it now came to suggest a certain use of language and the specific form of that use. Freud summarized this development as a change from the kind of wit you can have to the joke that you make (in German, the same word is used for both wit and joke: Witz). The Freudian theory of jokes represents the anachronistic focal point for the analysis of the phenomenon of wit around 1800. Freud displaced the theory of wit from semantics to pragmatics. He also established an intermediary space for the gift between the teller and the listener of the joke. Class discussions in English.

English

Eng 236 "Materiality, Materialism and Culture"
Maurizia Boscagli

This seminar studies how modern and contemporary discourses or materiality have shaped cultural studies and cultural materialism. In Western rationalism and in the philosophy of idealism, materiality (and what occupies its place: the object and objects, the body, nature, technology), stands as the terrain upon whose domination and exclusion the self, the spirit, and reason are founded. As such, materiality has been confined to the passivity of an instrumental role, without agency. Starting with Marx's concept of praxis, we will examine materialist theories that reject and revise this particular understanding of materiality, and the relationship of subject and object - including Husserl, Heidegger, Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, and Gramsci. With the last three thinkers we will move into the discourse of cultural studies, to show how the theories of materiality we encountered in the first part of the course crucially intervene in the analysis of culture from the 1950s to today. We will concentrate on issues of reification, commodity fetishism, hegemony, alterity, identity, and pleasure by reading the work of Lefebvre, Debord, and Baudrilllard in France, and Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha in Britain. We will conclude with readings from Antonio Negri, Slavoj Zizek, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler.

English 265 - New Approaches to Media History and Criticism: "Editing the Wandering Jew's Chronicle"

Giles Bergel

This course combines the study of early-modern cheap printed media with modern digital textual scholarship. The Wandering Jew's Chronicle is a song-ballad of the monarchy of England, printed forms of which survive in eleven broadside and other cheap versions dating from 1630 to 1830. Each version relates the succession of the throne of England, starting in 1066 and cumulative to each time of publication. The versions are often illustrated with woodcuts and are characteristic of the period's typographical development. One broadside version has previously been digitized by the UCSB Pepys Ballad Archive; this course will complement ongoing, interdisciplinary research into Early-Modern ballads at UCSB and extend it chronologically and thematically.

French and Italian/ Dramatic Arts

French 227C: "Medieval Theater and Theatricality: Medieval Performance Theory", Jody Enders

Recent work in history, performance studies, and French studies has stressed the importance of Jacques Le Goff's foundational insight that medieval society "plays itself out" in accordance with a panoply of rituals that "scripted" the literary genre of drama as well as social life in general. Designed for graduate students in French, Dramatic Art, Medieval Studies, English, and Comparative Literature, this seminar explores the key theoretical documents of medieval performance with a special focus on the interplay of medieval literary theory with both dramatic literature and a wide array of ritual and performance practices. Each week, we read a play or group of plays in the context of a particular kind of medieval theatricality such as the following: religious and mystical performance, legal trial and punishment, classroom ritual and testing, political performance, sports and tournament, and the three highly influential arts developed in the Middle Ages of poetry, preaching, and letter-writing. Taught in English.

Dramatic Arts

Dramatic Arts 232- "Caribbean Re-Possessions: Intercultural and Post-Colonial Performances", Leo Cabranes-Grant

The purpose of this seminar is to understand Caribbean plays (Césaire, Walcott, Lovelace, Scott, Rhone, Schwarz-Bart) and performances (carnival, calypso) in their own terms, while fostering a dialogue with recent developments in intercultural and post-colonial studies (Lamming, Benítez Rojo, Ortiz, Glissant, Said, Mbembe, Spivak, Bhabha). Distinctions between orature and writing will be particularly showcased.

French and Italian / Art History

Art History 265- "Architecture and Printing, c.1530-1850", Richard Wittman

The expansion of printing, from Renaissance publications to the 19th-century penny press, has long been recognized as foundational to the modern world. Drawing on critical theory, historical scholarship, and primary sources, this seminar explores how printed texts and images, as well as the larger social transformations wrought by printing, have affected architectural thought and practice. The primary focus will be on Italian and French contexts, especially the introduction of printed treatises during the Italian Renaisance and the rapid expansion of public debate on architecture that occurred with the transformation of the French public sphere between c.1680 and 1830.