This seminar explores an analysis of the history and legacies of the Japanese empire in literature, theater, cinema, and intellectual production from the late Tokugawa period (1600-1868) to the 21^st century. In this course we will discuss specific topics relating to translation the reception of classics philosophy and modernity gender and race in the context of empire, colonialism, and nation-building postcoloniality in East Asia and comparative approaches to the study of East Asia in post-World War II politics of knowledge.

LTCS 225

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This course engages current figurations of the field of literatures of the Americas, also conceptualized as "comparative inter-American studies," "hemispheric American studies," and "transnational Southern literature." Focusing on several contact zones of the nineteenth century, we discuss the ways in which novels, short stories, essays, and newspapers knit the extended Americas together in complex narratives of interdependence.  We pay close attention to the material dimensions of print culture, multi-lingual publications (English, Spanish, French, German for example) and how competing claims of regional, national, ethnic and racial self-identification were actively theorized over two centuries ago. Readings will be complemented with examinations of several digital humanities projects. Particular attention is paid to tensions between colonial loyalties and burgeoning nationalist movements, migration, the legacy of slavery in the region, the U.S. Civil War, forced Native American dispossession, and growing U.S. continental expansion and regional imperialism. Our reading list will include texts by authors such as Martin Delaney, Maria Ruiz de Burton, Ludwig Von Reizenstein, José Martí, William Faulkner and Maryse Condé and secondary readings by authors including Edouard Glissant, Anna Brickhouse, Raul Coronado and Kirsten Silva Gruesz.

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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 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.

Please contact instructor for course description.