Literature - Spring 1999

Time: MWF 2-3:10PM
Location: Kresge 319

Facilitator: Jordan Stein
E-Mail: nadroj@ucsc.edu

This course will examine nineteenth-century American transcendentalism, from its nascence in European Romanticism to its progressive social impact in American history and letters.

Students will discuss and attempt to arrive at a definition of transcendentalism as it evolved during the 1830s through the Civil War. In the process, a variety of types of writing from the period will be examined, including the essay, journalism, the novel, satire, nature writing, and poetry, as well as a variety of possible interpretations of these writings with attention both to implicit conventions of style, rhetoric, and argument strategy, and the explicit contexts of utopia, gender, slavery, Nature, and an emerging American nationalism.

Due to the seminar format, classes will be structured around group discussions of the readings. Two short papers, a midterm, and a final paper will be assigned.

Readings in Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Whitman, plus some secondary material and selected pieces by other nineteenth-century authors, including Melville, Douglass, and Alcott.

For more detailed information about the class, visit

http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/nadroj

Instructor: Matthew Riddle

Primarily this course will read "violent" texts, including films, as a means of entry into discourses of mortality, body, attempts to locate the "self", sexuality, and gender. We will use psychoanalytic and semiotic theory as a means of generating and locating discourse, especially Freud's theory of drives and Barthes's configuration of sign systems.

Issues will include: spectatorship, mimesis and "copy cat" crimes, media "effects", deviance, and self-destruction.

Texts will include:

Atrocity Exhibition - J.G. Ballard

The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry

Only the End of the World Again - Neil Gaiman

Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture - Mark Seltzer

Youth, Murder, Spectacle: the Cultural Politics of "Youth in Crisis" -

Charles Acland

The films may include:

Badlands, (Terrence Malick)

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer , (John McNaughton)

Man Bites Dog, ( Remy Belvaux & Andre Bonzel)

Videodrome, (David Cronenberg)

This course is limited to 15, so I encourage you to enquire early so you can assure your entrance. Please contact me with any questions at astrum@ucsc.edu.

http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/gweltaz/biblelit/index.html

At http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/gweltaz (my page), I have a list of all the French courses I teach, all linked.

Gildas Hamel, Cowell

Professor: Sharon Kinoshita
Office: Oakes College
E-Mail: sharon_kinoshita@macmail

Introduction to various theories and practices of Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourses. Topics include Orientalism and After; Nationalism, Decolonization; Diaspora and Hybridity; New World Studies; Globalization and Travel. Attention throughout to issues of gender and of the material production of knowledge.

Readings from Aijaz Ahmad, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Aimé Césaire, James Clifford, Frantz Fanon, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Paul Gilroy, David Harvey, Peter Hulme, Fredric Jameson, Chandra Talpady Mohanty, Walter Mignolo, Masao Miyoshi, Mary Louise Pratt, Edward Said, Jenny Sharpe and others.

Revised 8/3/04.