2013-2014
COL 1000H/F The Basis for Comparison
Professor Victor Li
Mondays, 10:00–12:30
Office: Room 828, Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George
Office hours: Mondays 2:30-4:00 p.m. or by appointment
Office phone: 416-946-0824
Evaluation
Class Participation …………………………………………………………………10%
(includes attendance)
Weekly response papers………………………………………………………….40%
(one double-spaced page every week; submitted every week but then 10 of them resubmitted as a file at the end)
Essay……………….……………………………………………………………………50%
(3000 words, due December 16, 2013 )
The paper should address either an issue involving comparison that came up during the course or the comparative implications of the student’s own research project.
The second half of each class will, in most cases, involve the participation of Comparative Literature faculty.
SCHEDULE:
Sept 9 Comparative Literature: A History
Natalie Melas, “Grounds for Comparison,” Chapter One of All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), 1-43.
Eric Cazdyn
Masao Miyoshi, “A Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality” (Lecture to the International Culture Society of Korea, Seoul 2000), 1-11.
…
Sept 16 Grounds for Comparison: Textuality and Orality
Ruth Finnegan, “What is Orality–if Anything?” Byzantine and
Modern Greek Studies 14 (1990), 130-49.
Some examples of oral or spoken word performance on YouTube: Linton Kwesi Johnson performing “Inglan is a Bitch” and El Jones performing “The Zoo”
Uzoma Esonwanne
Brian Rotman, “Introduction” and “The Alphabetic Body” Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham: Duke UP, 2008), 1-32.
…
Sept 23 Grounds for Comparison: The System of Nation-States
Pascale Casanova “Literature, Nation, and Politics”
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari “Minor Nationalisms”
Veronika Ambros
Capek “RUR”
…
Sept 30 Grounds for Comparison: History
Ranajit Guha, “History at the Limit of World-History”
Ann Komaromi
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1984). From Chapter 4. 55-63, 73-82.
Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?” The Duchamp Effect, eds. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). From the article, 10-20.
…
Oct 7 Comparison: East and West/North and South
Rey Chow, “Visuality, Modernity, and Primitive Passions” and “Film as Ethnography; or, translation Between Cultures in the Postcolonial World.” In Primitive Passions (NY: Columbia UP, 1995), 1-23 and 173-202.
Thomas Lahusen
James Clifford, “Notes on Travel and Theory”:
http://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/clifford.html
…
Oct 21 Comparison in Practice: Language and Subjectivity in the Feminine Past and Present
“Philomena and Procne” in Three Ovidian Tales of Love. Ed. Raymond Cormier (NY: Garland, 1986), 184-277.
E. Jane Burns, Sarah Kay, Roberta Krueger, and Helen Sloterer. “Feminism and the discipline of Old French Studies.” In Medievalism and the Modernist Temper. Ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nicholls (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 225-66.
Barbara Havercroft
Susan J. Brison, “The Uses of Narrative in the Aftermath of Violence.” In On Feminist Ethics and Politics. Ed. Claudia Card (Lawrenceville: UP of Kentucky, 1999), 200-25.
Roger Luckhurst, “Introduction.” In The Trauma Question (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1-15.
…
Oct 28 Incommensurability: Of Revolutions, Slavery and Genocides
Michael Rothberg, “Introduction,” Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 1-29.
Mary Nyquist
Mary Nyquist, “Locke’s ‘On Slavery,’ Despotical Power and Tyranny.”
…
Nov 4 Incommensurability : Apples and Oranges
Alain Badiou, “A Poetic Dialectic” in Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscana (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 46-56.
Atsuko Sakaki
Thomas LaMarre, “The Multisensible Figure: Ashide Shita-e Wakanrōeishō,” in Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), 116-139.
…
Nov 11 The Grounds for Comparison: The Globe
Chapters 1 and 2 of Paul Jay’s Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010), 15-52.
Ruoyun Bai
Shu-Mei Shih, “A Feminist Transnationality“.
…
Nov 18 The Grounds of Comparison: Narrative
Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291-322
Eva-Lynn Jagoe
Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories”
Jacques Rancière, “Prologue: A Thwarted Fable,” in Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006).
…
Nov 25 Comparison Across Media
W.J.T. Mitchell “Ekphrasis and the Other”
http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/medusa/mitchell.html
Pia Kleber
Robert Lepage, Far Side of the Moon. DVDs of stage and film version (to be shown; date to be determined). Film version is available in the Media Commons, Robarts Library.
The Multiple Crossings to The Far Side of the Moon: transformative mise-en-scène.Aleksander Dundjerovic
…
Dec 2 Dialectic
Rebecca Comay
“Hegel’s Contemporary Critics” (Chapter 3). In Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2010).
“Persistencies of the Dialectic: Three Sites” (Chapter 11). In In Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2010)
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updated August 27, 2015
