“Sexuality brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings; these are like n sexes, an entire war machine through which love passes.”

– A Thousand Plateaus.

In this course we explore theories and practices of gender and race through physical performances in interdisciplinary art works, which include theatre, dance, performance art, film, animation, and music in live and mediated forms. We will focus on how race and gender stereotypes shift, resist, and radicalize in art works, which travel outside national borders and encounter “other” bodies. Whose body is this in these aesthetic and popular representations? Who is making up the rules for our bodies? Whose body dares disrupt an authoritarian national image?

This course will examine a selection of travel narratives within the context of contemporary postcolonial theory and “mobility studies.”  Throughout the course, we will be acquainting ourselves with recent theoretical work on travel, Orientalism, and tourism.  Readings of primary texts will begin with a glance backward to Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account of his travels to the East and Columbus’s account of what he thought was his voyage to the East, as well the early modern accounts of the voyages of discovery by Bartolome de Las Casas and Jean de Léry.

[Note: Students enrolling in this seminar will be assumed to have experience with the close reading and analysis of poetic form, content, and context, and to be at least somewhat familiar with  the main lines or moments in American poetry’s 19th-20thC. development, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, through the modernism  of  Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Hughes, Brooks, et al, the postmodernism of the Plath, Lowell, Sexton, the Beats, etc. ]

This course examines certain aspects of the relationship between fascism and Greek fiction. From the 1930’s to the 1970’s, Greece experienced three different repressive fascist regimes: The dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, the (Nazi) Occupation, and the military dictatorship of 1967. Fiction writers, dealing with that period, use prose fiction, particularly the novel, in order to make sense of the violent historical events and changes in political and social thought during those years.

The representation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas is one of the central issues of the literature of the hemisphere. From the need to justify and rationalize the genocide and displacement of native peoples, to the persistence of an ambivalent fascination with Indians, to the aesthetic experimentation with native epistemologies, and, finally, to the contemporary reassessment of Native social and literary history, the broad geographic and historical distribution of the contested representations of indigeneity is crucial for understanding the literature of the Americas.

Also listed as Italian Studies 117 (4 units) 

Discussion Sections:

Sec 1, F 1-2:00,  206 Dwinelle
Sec 2, F 1-2:00 109 Wheeler
Sec 3, F 2-3:00 2221 Wheeler

Course is also listed as Classics 161. Comp Lit Students can take this course to satisfy either the Historical Period Requirement or the Classical Literature for the major (but not both).  If possible Comp Lit Students should  enroll in discussion section 1, F 1-2:00 in 206 Dwinelle, but if this is not possible enroll in any discussion section for the course.

This course examines forms of Modern Greek writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.

Prerequisites: Comparative Literature 112A or consent of the instructor.

A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

What does it imply to ‘say I’ in a literary work? In this course we will study the construction of the self in Western literature (Ancient to Modern) across a variety of epochs, genres, and authors, ranging from the earliest texts in which protagonists tell about themselves (Homer, Odyssey) via foundational autobiographical texts as Augustine (Confessions), Rousseau (Confessions), or Nabokov (Speak Memory) to more complex constructions where author and character are identical, but situated in a clearly fictional realm.