Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature - CSCL

Description:  How did we become who we are? How did we become "women" or "men," 'gay' or 'straight?' Where did we get our tastes in clothes, food, music, and decorative arts? And where did we get our political, religious and philosophical beliefs, our sense of what's logical, natural, and believable? Cultural Studies assumes that the world around us (our culture) means, and that its meanings are central in creating us--individually and collectively. And it assumes culture can be "read." CSCL 1001 explores cultural reading, examining the "texts" around us: music videos, television and film, some paintings and photographs, magazine ads, poetry, a graphic novel, science and science journalism, and some "practices" from everyday life: dress, manners and body decoration. The "rhetoric" of culture transmits a view of the world and our loyalty to that view. Its systems of "power" fold us and our texts into large, historical conversations and struggles over ideas and social positions. And the operations of "desire" direct who and what we love, where we find pleasure and how these pleasures figure in the process of making and reproducing culture. It's a basic course for majors and non-majors interested in making sense of their worlds.

Class Time: 60% Lecture, 40% Discussion.

Work Load: 60 pages reading per week, 9 pages writing per term, 2 exams, 2 papers.

Grade: 20% mid exam, 30% final exam, 50% reports/papers.

Exam Format: open-book; short, guided answers

Instructor:  Brown Jr,Robert L (Morse Alumni Award; Arthur Motley Exemplary Tch Aw)

Description:  The emergence of what is variously referred to as the "Information Age" and "Society of the Spectacle" has made it necessary for us to think critically about the media. Since visual media have the most pervasive influence on our everyday lives, this course will focus on how forms such as advertising, film, and television work, affect perception, and structure meaning. We will read some of the most important theoretical and historical texts that provide insight into our "ways of seeing." No prior exposure to media theory is expected, but although this is an introductory class, students will be expected to read and work through challenging material. We will read a variety of critics who have attempted to analyze cinema and media culture and we will also begin to develop a vocabulary for formal visual analysis.

Instructor:  STAFF

Description:  CSCL 1401W Reading Literature: Theory and Practice 4 credits, meets Lib Ed req of International Perspect Theme; meets Lib Ed req of Literature Core; meets Lib Ed req of Writing Intensive Instructor: STAFF Description: What is Literature? How do definitions of it differ over time and across cultures? How does literature play a role in the ways people see themselves and others? How do our histories - personal and cultural - determine how we read it? CSCL 1401W examines such questions in relation to larger patterns of culture and power. You'll emerge from the course with a solid sense of the differences among various genres, and the cultural contexts from which they arise - between an epic poem emerging from a Greek city state and a novel by a German civil servant, say. Small classes emphasize close reading, discussion, and practice in critical writing. An introductory course in every sense, it will give you a good sense of the field of Comparative Literature as well as reading and writing skills useful in many other courses and disciplines. Class Time: 40% lecture, 60% discussion

Instructor:  STAFF

Description:  Empire may seem a world away--removed in time (a relic of pre-1960s history) or removed in space (something that affects only the so-called "Third World"). But empire is, in fact, at least as close as our TV sets and computer screens, and sometimes it speaks a language very familiar to us as students: coverage of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, for example, has brought us images of U.S. army officers not just shooting on the ground but also pointing at the blackboard, "teaching" Iraqi police how to reinvent their country as an American-style democracy with freedoms of religion, conscience, and speech. In this seminar, we will try to better understand why education and empire remain so closely linked today by studying cultures, both close to home and faraway, that have experienced foreign domination as a two-faced process: a process, in the words of Senegalese novelist Cheikh Hamidou Kane, whose cannons force the body and whose schools fascinate the soul. We will discuss novels, essays, poems, and films by African, Arab, Asian, immigrant, minority, and working-class writers who use classroom scenes to represent empire and a range of responses to its power--ambivalence, assimilation, resistance, revolt. Along the way, we also will think about what we can take from our *own* educations as they take control of us. Readings may include Kane, Chahine, Ahmed, Dangarembga, Salih, Jussawalla, Narayan, Anzaldua, hooks, and others. Open to first-year majors and non-majors.

Instructor:  Tageldin,Shaden M

Description:  This is a course in film criticism and theories of ideology. Our concern will be to gain a critical perspective on the problem of ideology as it pertains to the cinema (rather than with the ideological content of films per se--though that too will be addressed). Theorizing issues of cinema and ideology requires that we have a shared understanding of (1) film form: how the technical apparatus of film functions to produce ideological understandings of the world; (2) film content: how ideology is inscribed in and through filmic narrative; and (3) film spectatorship: how (and whether) the ways that viewers are positioned to make sense of themselves and the world have implications for social relations at large (outside the cinema). Using formal, theoretical and interpretive arguments, we will attempt to formulate readings both of recurrent ideological themes in the cinema (such as: class conflict; corporate crime; political repression and conspiracy) as well as develop conceptual arguments about the nature of the cinematic image.

Instructor:  Ganguly,Keya

Description:  How does "everyday life" - that is, the mundane, quotidian realm of the "ordinary" - contribute to the formation and regulation of human consciousness? What does your decision to go on a diet or to start seeing a shrink or to put that high school graduation money from Grandma into the stock market mean in this particular culture at this particular moment in time? What rhetorical, ideological, and material structures were in place that helped bring you to those decisions, or at minimum, made those decisions not only conceivable in the first place, but possible? What do these everyday choices and practices reveal about your personal identity, perceptions, thoughts, values, and ontological understanding of the world around you, not to mention the cultural, political, and socioeconomic forces positioning you - materially and symbolically - as a particular kind of person who relates to her/himself and others in particular kinds of ways? "The Rhetoric of Everyday Life" examines how the sights, sounds, myths, and texts surrounding us contribute to the constitution of our subjectivity(ies), to our beliefs regarding what's (im)possible, "normal," and "natural," and finally, to the ways in which we (don't) see and relate to power. We will read core works in semiotics, rhetoric, and Marxist theory, as well as qualitative sociology and Neo-Marxist critique, "trying on" these theoretical glasses, and applying them to everyday life. Engaging texts as multi-varied and seemingly incongruous as vitamin ads, a Chinese blue jeans factory, Star magazine, and mainstream news coverage of politics and the economy, we'll pay particular attention to the dynamic relationship between consumer capitalism, politics, and the rhetoric, expectations, and practices of contemporary citizenship.

Class Time: 40% Lecture, 20% Film/Video, 30% Discussion, 10% Small Group Activities.

Work Load: 30-50 pages reading per week, 12 pages writing per term, 0 exams, 3 papers, 1 quizzes.

Instructor:  Hubbard,Kysa Koerner | Instructor Photo

Description:  This course should be fun! Many of the materials we will read and watch are trying to be funny, even if they do not always succeed. However, this is also a course that sets out to take comedy and laughter seriously. Students will study a mix of theater, film, and TV texts, along with scholarly works of cultural theory, in hopes of gaining a better understanding of what comedy is and how it functions in our society. We will trace the historical development of comedy from the ancient world to modern Hollywood. We will examine the mechanics of comedy. How do comedies play with our expectations and make us laugh? We will also study the cultural politics of comedy. How does comedy fit into our daily lives, our leisure activities and our political debates? If we find it funny, what makes it funny? If we find it offensive, what makes it offensive? Please be advised that some of the comedies we examine will be rude, gross and disrespectful. If you are easily offended by salty language, sex and other hilarious bodily functions, this may not be the course for you. Texts may include plays by Aristophanes and Moliere, satires by Voltaire, films by Charlie Chaplin and Judd Apatow, stand-up routines by George Carlin and Sarah Silverman, TV shows including The Daily Show and South Park, and satirical publications like The Onion.

Class Time: 60% Lecture, 15% Film/Video, 25% Discussion.

Work Load: 25-50 pages reading per week, 8-10 pages writing per term, 2 exams, 2 papers, 4 quizzes.

Instructor:  Opitz,Andrew Michael

Description:  That the impact of television on our daily life, political views, and social habits is stronger than ever before is perhaps unarguably correct. Television, consumer society, and the culture of commercialism, as Benjamin would argue replaced the real world by representations of the real. Sustained with the rapid reproduction and replication of auditory and visual images, embedded messages, and manipulative advertising strategies, these simulations serve to validate ideas about culture, behavior, gender, race, class, and social interaction, while promoting commercial values. Hence, the purpose of this course is to use a variety of critical approaches to study mass media and address analytical questions such as: who owns the media? Who are the architects behind certain programs? What are their intentions? Has television been transformed into an elitist instrument of hegemony? And how does it manage to shape consciously or subconsciously our beliefs, attitudes, and understanding of abstract concepts such as beauty. Answers to these questions will help us understand how the role of television developed over time. Through the study of different formats of production, theories of spectatorship, and the alliance between television and the state we uncover certain how propagandist ideas are transmitted to legitimize discipline, obedience, and conformity and place them among the highest values in society. Readings: 50-100 pages Assignments: 3 Essays, 1 presentation, a final 8-page paper

Instructor:  Labidi,Imed

Description:  What do we talk about when we talk about culture? That is, how has the concept of culture ? by now, a main component in a number of academic disciplines such as anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, literature, history, media studies, and area studies, just to name a few ? come to be such a critical means to explain, criticize, and/or legitimate the complexities and conflicts of everyday life? This course focuses on a number of key thinkers such as Simone DeBeauvoir, W.E.B. DuBois, Franz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx whose contributions have had ? and continue to have ? some lasting effects on the way in which we struggle over the field of culture. Additionally, we will also consider a number of texts that engage changing realities of the American university ? which is, after all, the setting in which we will be thinking about all of this in the first place. Be ready for tough texts, tough questions, and tough debates around such ideas as class, race, gender, ideology, history, colonialism, and the university.

Class Time: 40% Lecture, 30% Discussion, 30% Student Presentation.

Work Load: 50-100 pages reading per week, 20-25 pages writing per term, 2 papers, 1 presentations.

Instructor:  Conley,John E

Description:  Anchored in Postcolonial, psychoanalysis, and feminist theories, this course engages the dialectics of sexuality and power and the way cultural forms as texts and images represent, express, and capture the constructions of sexuality. Concepts such as biopolitics, masculinity, femininity, gender, and sexual difference are central topics in the course's debate. Moving between political discourse, theoretical texts, and media essentialist notions, we interrogate the (in)visible cultural structures that dictate popular understanding of sexual roles and contest the amorphous conceptualization of race and sexuality. In particular, our discussion places extraordinary emphasis on the political intersection of race, sexuality, and violence. What does it mean to mark some people with excessive sexual appetite and stigmatize others as sexual predators that must be contained? When politicized, how does sexualizing/de-sexualizing facilitate the marginalization of "Others"? Can sexuality serve the purposes of domination? And how does sexual violence become an interrogation technique? We seek to answer these questions through the careful study of influential thinkers such as Bell Hooks, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Sigmund Freud among others. Readings 50-75 pages a week Assignments: 3 essays, 1 presentation, 1 final 8 page paper Attendance is a must

Instructor:  Labidi,Imed

Description:  How do bodies mean? Fat. Thin. Rich. Poor. Can we trace - at least in part - the (Western) historical trajectory of these meanings? Body. Soul. Truth. Error. In what representational forms have these ascriptions been made manifest over culture and time in the West, and how do they continue to shape and inform the ways in which we are bodies and the ways in which we perceive/interpret/understand/regulate them? As feminist philosopher Susan Bordo writes, "The body is not merely flesh and bone, but a surface of inscription, a locus of control, a malleable, intelligible embodiment of material culture and ideology"(1993). Following this, how do issues of gender, race, sexuality, and class figure in here? Can representations of the body ever be innocent? Good. Evil. Dirty. Clean. In this course, we will investigate the various (and nefarious) ways in which past and present Western cultures have codified the human body into socially-constructed, politically-loaded categories that work to both defer and delimit opportunities for and access to power. A history of philosophies of the body will provide a foundation for these inquiries, while sociological, semiotic, and critical theories will help us understand the complex relationships between our perceptions and presentations of the body, and the concrete, habituated ways we come to "embody" them. In short, over the course of fifteen weeks, we will: [1] study visual and textual representations and discourses of the body - historical and contemporary; [2] examine and theorize historical processes, materials, ideological and economic structures and systems that have gone into the (re)making of disciplined, "civilized," "habitualized" bodies; [3] explore philosophical and theoretical concepts that have shaped past and present thinking about the body itself, as well as in representation and practice; [4] engage issues of gender, race, sexuality and class as they have historically intersected and continue to intersect with ideas about and the regulation of marginalized bodies and their representation

Class Time: 40% Lecture, 20% Film/Video, 30% Discussion, 10% Small Group Activities.

Work Load: 30-50 pages reading per week, 12 pages writing per term, 0 exams, 3 papers, 1 quizzes.

Instructor:  Hubbard,Kysa Koerner | Instructor Photo

Description:  Aliens. This is a word that we use to designate both people from other countries and beings from other worlds. Indeed, a currently popular television program, "Aliens in America," relies on this linguistic association. The English language is not unique in this respect, but in this seminar we will resist the temptation to reduce this fact to mere word play. More specifically, instead of debating the currently irresolvable question of whether there is extra-terrestrial life, we will explore whether our actual interactions with people from other countries (direct or indirect; benign or hostile) affect our interest in, anxiety about, fear of, desire to encounter, etc. beings from other worlds. In effect, for us the overriding concern will not be, what are "they" trying to do to us, but rather, what are we using "them" to do either to or for ourselves. The Western idea that there are "multiple worlds" is very old. One finds discussion of this in Plato, for example. After a brief backward glance at Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds we will pick up the story at the end of the 19th century when Percival Lowell and others not only thought life on Mars had been discovered, but began a line of speculation that led to proposing radio as a way to communicate with it. Contact was finally "made" on Halloween in 1938 when the Mercury Theater Company broadcast the panic inducing "War of the Worlds" radio program. Not surprisingly, Germans were thought to be animating the Martian war ships. As this example suggests, the role of media as the network or channel through which we encounter "them" will figure prominently in the seminar. Thus, we will consider objects such as novels, radio broadcasts, films etc, but--as is characteristic of the field of cultural studies--we will approach these objects from an interdisciplinary vantage point that includes the concerns of sociology, philosophy, psychology/psychoanalysis, literary criticism and history. Even if the truth is "out there," the question remains: the truth about what?

Instructor:  Mowitt,John W (Grad and Profl Teaching Award)

Description:  When we hear the word "literature," most of us assume that we know what it means. The word seems to imply something inherently worthwhile, something full of culture, something that holds so-called universal truths about humankind. This course begins by illustrating that far from having a stable or universal identity, the concept of literature is created through--and highly motivated by--various social, historical, and political forces. We will begin this course then by looking at literature itself as a concept before we move on to examine some of the basic concepts of its study. Many of these concepts will sound familiar, such as narrative, genre, author, text, reading, and interpretation. We will take these familiar terms and fundamentally rethink each of them. Other concepts, like the dialectic, intertextuality, and ideology may be less familiar, and we will acquaint ourselves with them in order to investigate their import in literary study. While we will read a number of essays throughout the course, we will also read a range of literary texts not only to see how these concepts operate within literature, but also to interpret literature through them. As we examine critical concepts and analyze literary texts, we will encounter a number of theoretical approaches to literature. By the end of this course, you will have a solid grasp of some of the fundamental concepts of literary study which will not only enable you to read literature very differently, but will also enable you to think more critically about how language works to shape our worlds. While the point of the course is to introduce you to practices of reading and ways of approaching literary texts, it will also provide you with an opportunity to emerge as more careful and thoughtful analysts in all aspects of life, academic and otherwise.

Instructor:  Singh,Julietta Christine

Description:  A debate between Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson frames this course: whether some of us are by our very nature born to be slaves, as Aristotle claimed; or whether we are all born equal as Jefferson says in the Declaration of Independence. The course asks, then, about these claims about nature and about our nature, what is a person in law and in practice, and why we find ourselves in a plural world bouncing between Aristotle and Jefferson over issues of culture and race. Why there have been periodic flares of racism in America - about once per generation - is analyzed in an essay by Lipset: the recent "haves" vs. those who want to "make it" next in a fluid society. How have we justified war against natives, using Aristotle's arguments (yet again), as alternatives to altruism and brotherly love? Who am I, and who are you, and we and they? - asks a lovely essay called Passing, in which we begin to understand that we all move through the world more or less clearly seen and defined to be who we are; some of us very visible, others not; contexts, social reality. What happens when social inequality becomes law, as in the Nazi era, is elucidated as actual history in a tape to which we listen. The course is taught as a dialogue, a reading packet serves as the basis for the course. Two essays/projects are required.

Class Time: 60% Lecture, 40% Discussion.

Work Load: 30 pages reading per week, VARIES pages writing per term, 2 papers.

Grade: 10% class participation, 90% other evaluation. Essays or Projects-to be discussed in class

Exam Format: NONE

Instructor:  Sarles,Harvey B (Arthur Motley Exemplary Tch Aw)

Description:  The novel, argued Mikhail Bakhtin, is "the only developing genre," the only one "as yet uncompleted." Georg Lukacs similarly characterized the novel as "something in process of becoming." If both Bakhtin and Lukacs provocatively imagined the novel as an open future, they less productively fixed its "real" birth in the eighteenth century and its birthplace in Europe. Embedded not just in novels, then, but in the very idea of the novel is a potent ideology of history, often Eurocentric. Gamal al-Ghitani, for one, would issue the novel a different birth certificate. The Egyptian novelist maintains that the Arabic novel is in fact 1,600 years old--as old as the recorded history of Arabic literature. Indeed, the novel might be less "novel" than we think, old as the history of human literature: it turns up in ancient Greece (as even Bakhtin is forced to acknowledge), in eleventh-century Japan, and in eighteenth-century China. This course will explore the novel both as genre and as idea: as a story of origins--a type of fiction that tells us how a person, place, or time comes into being and becomes--and an origin story of modernity and progress (not just literary but also social, economic, and technological). Taking a broadly comparative worldview of the genre, we will try to imagine a more novel history and definition of the novel. What makes a novel a "novel"? Why are so many cultures so eager to claim it? In what language do and "must" novels speak? What kinds of subjectivity do and "must" novels represent, and how? How does the novel relate the fictional to the real and to the historical? How is the rise of the novel linked to the rise of corporate capitalism, the nation-state, mass production, and mass literacy and reading publics--and must it always be predicated on these social facts? Is the novel as "democratic" a genre, linguistically and politically, as it is sometimes held to be? What is the novel's relationship to other genres (epic, lyric, other forms) and to other media (newspaper, photography, film)? Was Bakhtin right to say that the novel is a composite of all other literary genres--and kills off whatever it swallows? Are other genres really dead at the hands of the novel? Is the novel itself getting old? Will it ever die? Readings will be chosen from Heliodorus, Murasaki, The Arabian Nights, Defoe, Cao, Montesquieu, Balzac, Scott, Bronte, Dickens, Chatterjee, al-Muwaylihi, Anand, Ali, Camus, Yacine, Mahfouz, Aidoo, wa Thiong'o, Ramadan, and Rushdie, as well as a broad range of theoretical, critical, and literary-historical texts.

Class Time: 30% Lecture, 50% Discussion, 20% Student Presentation.

Work Load: 100-150 pages reading per week, 20 pages writing per term, 1-2 papers, 1 presentations. Graduate students will write one formal 20-page seminar paper; undergraduates will write two formal 10-page papers. Each student will give a presentation.

Grade: 60% reports/papers, 10% attendance, 20% in-class presentation, 10% class participation.

Instructor:  Tageldin,Shaden M

Description:  This course is a review of the issues surrounding translation, including theories of representation, ideological work, as well as actual practice. The course is structured around a series of readings and discussion of both historical and contemporary writing on translation; these readings and discussions. While most of the readings center on the theory and particulars of literary translation, students will be encouraged to explore other manifestations of translation as a historical, cultural or aesthetic issue. Along with those interested in languages and literature, students in disciplines such as creative writing, performance, and the plastic arts are also welcomed. You should be native or near-native speaker of English, as well as an advanced speaker/reader of at least one other language, either classical or vernacular.

Instructor:  Allen,Joseph R