LTCO 201 - Theories and Methods of Literary Analysis

Transpacific Turns: Literary T

This course extends inquiry into the relationship between critical theory, area studies, and the project of transpacific studies. Centering the transpacific analytic outside EuroAmerican paradigms, we will explore how major currents in critical theory from the late twentieth century (psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, postcolonialism) have been incorporated into, elaborated, and contested to dismantle the national and area-based models of literary studies regarding Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific. Class discussions and readings will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis and knowledge of approaches within intersectional feminism, gender studies, critical race theories, translation studies, media studies, and critical area studies.

LTCO 282 - Literature and Philosophy

Postmodern Films and Theories

Alain J.-J. Cohen

The seminar will underscore the use of contemporary postmodern theories the better to analyze a few actual and/or virtual postmodern films — with in-depth study of clips from auteur-filmmakers such as Alejandro González Iñárritu (e.g. Babel, Birdman), J.-L. Godard (e.g. Contempt,) M. Nichols (Closer,) Quentin Tarantino (e.g. Reservoir Dogs, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,) Peter Greenaway (e.g. The Pillow Book,) Chris Nolan (e.g. Memento,) Tarkowski (e.g Solaris,) and several others, depending upon the members of the seminar.

Postmodern theory during the last part of the XXth century has come to be defined as a second Renaissance or a second Enlightenment which includes well-known texts of “French theory” by Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lacan, –with references as well to Deleuze/Guattari, Barthes, Metz, Kristeva, et al. Key texts by these authors will help focus upon issues in modernism and post-modernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic cultural critiques, narratology and text semiotics, art theory and film theory, and cutting-edge theories about simulation and hypertext, as our films will be studied during the seminar sessions. At the end of this seminar, students will learn to focus upon and to problematise:

1. The various systems (or lack thereof) conveyed by “micropolitics of power”, “technologies of the self”, “deconstruction”, “simulacra theory”, “the Unconscious is the discourse of the Øther”, “language-models”, et al., proposed therein whenever applied to film studies

2. The intermesh of “French theory” with the Frankfurt school (in particular Benjamin and Marcuse), leading to language-based models and sex and gender studies, politics, and tech/global/virtual studies as “Postmodernism” evolved in synergy with its reception, interpretation and transposition in the digital age.

LTEN 259 - Transnational Literary Studies

Erin Suzuki

Ecological Aesthetics in Asian American and Pacific Islander Literatures

This class will address the way that place-making and place-based thinking in literatures from Pacific Islands and Asian diasporas have shaped their trajectories in and across the Pacific. This class will look at work that foregrounds the relationship between decolonial thought and environmental activism, assigning work that attends to the ways that environments engage alternative epistemological frameworks that unsettle dominant aesthetic, economic, and political regimes.

LTSP 272 - Literature and Society Studies

Gloria Chacon

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTTH 210A - Proseminar on Literary Scholarship

Sarah Nicolazzo

Please contact instructor for course description.