Course Description: Arguments about citizenship, occupation of land, dispossession and exclusion of others often rely on ideologies of fictive kinship. These go back, in the Western tradition, to Athens and Jerusalem--- ancient Athenian politics, based on autochthony, the myth of birth from the land itself, requiring exclusion of others, and often their enslavement, and the historical narrative of a promised land in the Hebrew Bible . We will read some of these texts concerning myths of ancient belonging, narratives of creation from the earth itself, or of divine gifts to ancient peoples. Readings of the first part of the course will  including Greek tragedy. selections from the Hebrew Bible, selections from the Aeneid, and the Popul Vuh. The second half of the course will consist of readings and presentations by students focusing on more recent and current struggles looking back to these myths, concerning manifest destiny, nativism, white supremacy, theocracy, indigeneity, etc. in the Americas, Africa and Palestine, the Pacific Islands, and elsewhere. 

LTCO 287

In our moment of “cascading crises,” what role, what methodologies, should cultural criticism take on in relation to the objects of its inquiries? Current and ongoing socio-economic and ecological emergencies have generated a new energy and urgency for our ethical practice as cultural critics.  With that ethical exigency in mind, seminar participants will read, theorize, interpret, historicize, critique, and seek to understand and enliven specific texts from past and present.  The first portion of the seminar will focus on the intersection between two modes of cultural analysis: cultural materialism and "the new materialism," tracing some of the tensions and compatibilities between Marxist and Eco-Critical approaches to literature and culture. Using this theoretical lens, we will look at how ecocidal, capitalist forces have engendered ideological repercussions and provoked cultural resistances. Theoretical readings to be discussed will include texts by Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, John Bellamy Foster, Barbara Foley, Timothy Clark, and others. We will then bring these materialist theories into play as we discuss and analyze a series of texts—including examples of fiction, film, poetry, and visual art.  Each seminar participant will apply the materialist methods and concepts that they find useful and compelling in a research project of their choice, culminating in an oral presentation and a final paper. 

This course will examine contemporary conversations in queer theory around ideas of history, community, and memory. We will be looking at a variety of literary texts from the 20th century to explore how the literary has offered a lens through which categories of identity such as sexuality, race, and gender are established and contested. We will also be thinking about the impulse to claim historical figures and texts as "queer," delving into what the archives we choose tell us about the contours of the identity today.

This graduate seminar will focus on important literary, cultural, and political debates in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries that pertain to Latin American societies and literary cultures. Though the readings, we will foreground questions of Indigeneity, mestizaje, nation, region, and the circulation of knowledge. Students will read a variety of novels, poetry, and essays. 

This is the third in the three-part introductory theory sequence for PhD students in the UCSD Literature department. This segment will focus on contemporary conversations in literary and critical theory on method, field-formation, the university, and the labor of knowledge-production.

In our work together, we will not only become familiar with these contemporary theoretical conversations, but also learn how to approach methodological questions that cut across the intellectual and practical for new scholars in literary study: what is a field? How do we read scholarship with attention to the critical conversation in which it intervenes? How do we place ourselves and our scholarship in relation to a field or fields, especially when our work is interdisciplinary? How does the material, institutional, social, and intellectual architecture of field-formation both enable and constrain our intellectual and pedagogical work? What happens when new fields institutionalize, and when old fields face challenges to their foundational institutional and epistemological structures?

In addition to readings in contemporary theory and method, students will also choose a field relevant to their own anticipated specialization and gain familiarity with that field’s history, primary texts, contemporary debates, journals, and conferences through a series of practical assignments. This course thus aims to not only orient students in some major conversations in contemporary literary/critical theory, but also equip students to undertake the practical matter of literary scholarship: proposing papers to and presenting at conferences, writing publishable articles targeted at particular journals, teaching literary and theoretical texts effectively, and building a generative writing/revision practice.