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An unpaid ad for the undergrad Humanities dept. at UC-Irvine. The nerd in me, which is a whole lot of me, always look forward to the upcoming quarter's goodies. Here are some of the interesting course offerings. You kids in Irvine should be so lucky. (Course descriptions from UCI Humanities website.)

"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 100A: Film and Literature by Iranian Women (RAHIMIEH, N)
This course introduces students to the intersections of film and literature in modern Iranian women’s cultural production. We will begin with a focus on Forough Farrakohzad, the prominent modernist poet whose 1960s documentary, The House is Black (video available below) , is credited as one of the most important sources for the New Iranian Cinema. Farrkhozad’s interweaving of poetry and cinema laid the groundwork for a post-revolutionary cinematic mode of representation that can be discerned in the work of prominent Iranian women filmmakers such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Tahmineh Milani, and Samira Makhmalbaf. We will also grapple with questions about the women’s use of the cinematic gaze against the backdrop of the Islamic Republic’s injunctions about representations of women on the screen."

The House is Black (d. Forough Farrakohzad)
(Iran,19630




"ENGLISH 101W: Materialist Models (GODDEN, R)
Departing from a Marxist assumption that materiality is socially produced, under changeable conditions that its producers neither wholly control nor wholly understand, the course seeks to explore elements of those methodologies which may best allow for the reading of literature as part of that wider materiality. We shall beg the question, aphoristically put, “If nature (the materiality) is always human nature (or human materials), how best might that stuff be understood as it reflects and is modified by literary expression?” The materiality of literature will be explored as produced in relation to a number of interwoven forms of work; that is by and within political economy, language, historical explanation, and even by and within the forgetting of that on-going and diverse production.

Since literary materiality is made from words, and since words are social instruments, we shall depart from materialist accounts of language (Volosinov, Bakhtin, Williams). Since literary words frequently take narrative forms, we will address historiography as it seeks to apprehend the real (Benjamin, White, Greenblatt). Since written stories are made as much from what is forgotten as from what is remembered, we will consider “forgetting”, or the unconscious, as made from that which we have learned to find unthinkable (Abraham and Torok, Freud).

These three areas, language, narrative and the structural unconscious, since they are to be read as part of a wider pattern of material making (or an economy), needs must be linked to a specific accumulative regime (Marx, Jameson, Harvey).

The purpose of the course is at all times to explore and enable the processes of reading: methodologies are more limited than the complex literary and historical objects which they address, and should neither be complete nor glass machines. Each week the seminar will consider extracts from theoretical writings in relation to a particular short story. The stories chosen will be drawn from a single historical period ( U.S., post 1973, variously referred to as “postmodern”, “post industrial”, “flexible Fordist” or “post Fordist”), and will be found in a readily available anthology (The Scribner’s Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty North American Stories Since 1970). The theoretical extracts will be held in the library on reserve. Requirements include papers totaling 4000 words, and regular seminar attendance. The required prerequisite for this course is Criticism 100A or English 100."

"ENGLISH 101W: Postmodern Sublime (AMIRAN, E)
Since European antiquity, the concept of the 'sublime' in literature and philosophy has designated the experience of the highest and most noble sensations, or else the experience of overpowering energies that confront humanity with its smallness in the universe and, by the same measure (or lack thereof), with the huge raw powers that move the world (together with the sense that humanity can experience these things—isn’t there always a little self-congratulation in self-abnegation?). Sublime art has to transcend ordinary measures, to be extreme by definition, and to transport us from our bounded selves, if only for a moment. In the contemporary postmodern world, on the other hand, the world “after Auschwitz,” as the German philosopher Adorno has put it, the distinctions between base and grand emotions, inspired and pedestrian thought, the transcendent and the transient, the human and the non-human—in short, the distinctions that make the traditional sublime possible—have been questioned, deconstructed, or rejected. Is it then not possible in the postmodern world, the world of the Berlin wall and of Walmart, of Hamburger Helper and of J-Lo, to experience the sublime? What about sex and drugs, formerly seen as debasing experiences that lower rather than raise consciousness? Or is there a new postmodern sublime that survives or perhaps even depends on the loss and rejection of the traditional sublime? Perhaps even a qualified experience can transport contemporary people to a sublime plane of existence. This course will study these questions as a way to understand postmodernism and to read contemporary literature, film, and culture. We’ll round up such post-WWII suspects as Darren Aronofsky, Samuel Beckett, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, David Lynch, Toni Morrison, Mamoru Oshii, and Andy Warhol, and relate them to modern theoretical work on the sublime to find out. Requirements include three essays and a final exam. The required prerequisite for this course is Criticism 100A or English 100."

I think this is sublime...
Kustom Kar Kommandos (d. Kenneth Anger)
(US,1965)


I think this is fun...
What's a Girl To Do? (Bat for Lashes)
Fur & Gold (Caroline,2007)



"ENGLISH 105: Harlem Renaissance Sophiatown (MASILELA, N)
One of the extraordinary events of the twentieth century has been the emergence of black modernities across the oceanic divide. These modernities took on particular historical forms as well as singular cultural configurations. Invariably, in their formation, realization, and actualization, whether on African or in the African Diaspora, they constituted themselves as historical discourse, usually across the Atlantic, about cultural identities, historical survivals, invention of traditions and the formation of new nationalities. At the center of these reciprocal exchanges and interactions in the black world has been the New Negro modernity in the United States. It was largely the New Negro modernity that orchestrated the deeper strains of cultural splay of black historical avant-gardes globally. The course will investigate and analyze some of these seminal United States cultural and literary influences on South Africa. On the cultural plane, of essential importance will be an understanding of how the concepts of the New Negro and New African were formulated and came into being, as well as the 'construction' of the literary periods of the Harlem Renaissance and the Sophiatown Renaissance. Within each literary period, the complexly different intersection and combination of literary modernity and literary modernism will be theorized. Each literary period had a peculiarly differential structure of generic forms. Despite this, several parallels between writers will be discussed: say, between Zora Neale Hurston and Bessie Head, W.E.B. Du Bois and H.I.E. Dhlomo, Langston Hughes and Rive Rive and Ezekiel Mphahlele, Rudolph Fisher and Arthur Maimane, George Schuyler and Casey Motsisi, and etc. Of the six assigned books, five are anthologies. Fredric Jameson has recently observed: "The eclipse of avant-gardes (including political ones) has often been taken to be more than accidental characteristic of the postmodern turn; less often remarked is the concomitant substitution---for the great avant-garde manifestos and indeed for the very conception of the great individual master text or statement---of the anthology, the collective symposium, as the generic expression of the emergence of new concerns and new fields or objects of study." Clearly, the relation between United States and South African concerning modernity and modernism is an emergent new concern of intellectual endeavor. (Same as AfAm 118 and HumArts 101.)"

"HISTORY 183: Climate History: Past as Analogue for the Future (DAVIS, M)
The course, divided into three modules, looks at the future of the American West through the lenses of climate history, memoir and archaeology. After a brief introduction to climate history as an intersection of science and historical imagination, we examine the famous case of the Anasazi, the mystery people of the Colorado Plateau, whose disappearance coincided with a 'mega-drought' throughout the West and, indeed, much of the Western Hemisphere. Next, we will explore the social and scientific histories of the 'Dust Bowl' drought of the 1930s. The final segment will involve students in original research on the 1998-2003 drought in the western USA and Mexico: we will focus particularly on possible interactions between global warming, over-allocated water, super-urbanization and immigration."

(Mike Davis)