Approved Courses

This writing-intensive course is devoted to secret communications. While it may seem paradoxical to combine communication and secrecy, in fact media history can be told as the story of secrecy - from the earliest radio transmissions and interceptions to the commercial union of military technology and entertainment in television, and from the proto-computers of Bletchley Park to data mining on the Internet. We will discuss successes and failures of secret codes, and consider portrayals of secret intelligence in fiction and film. As we think about technologies of concealment and integrity on the split screens of our divided attention, this seminar will survey the media technology of secrecy, with particular attention to often irreconcilable demands of privacy, security, trust, data integrity, freedom of speech, and human rights. The prerequisites for this course are [FLM&MDA 85A or FLM&MDA 85B or FLM&MDA 85C] and satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement.
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM

“The Frankfurt School” describes an institution: the Institute of Social Research, which began in Germany in 1924, moved into exile to New York City during the Nazi period, and was reestablished in Frankfurt after World War II.  During World War II, some of its leading figures, then in exile, came to southern California.  “The Frankfurt School” also describes the collective project of the members of this School: Critical Theory, which combines philosophy, sociology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis in order to analyze crucial problems in modern culture, from anti-Semitism to the “authoritarian personality” to the administration of erotic life.

While none of the Frankfurt School’s projects are separate from its sociological engagements, this course will focus on analyses of the place of art in modernity.  Looking closely at work by a number of central figures associated with the Frankfurt School, including Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, we will discuss questions concerning the place of art in modern culture.  What is the history of the category of the “aesthetic”?  How does mass culture change the traditional work of art?  What is “modernism”?  How can we think about the historical content of an abstract work of art?

We will focus on the exemplary status of art in works by figures in the Frankfurt School.   We will also inevitably consider broader issues, including the development of the Marxist concept of reification in Critical Theory, the rise of fascism and Critical Theory’s attempts to explain this set of events, and questions of freedom and emancipation.  We will conclude by considering the massively different positions of Adorno and Marcuse in relation to the student movements of the 1960s, when Adorno was marginalized while Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (which we will read) became influential.

“Introduction to Literary Theory” or other familiarity with the history of theory will be a useful preparation for this course, but is not required.
Days: MO WE  02:00-03:20 PM

On September 16, 2001, days after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, vice president Dick Cheney sat down for an interview with Meet the Press host Tim Russert. “We’re going to spend time in shadows in the intelligence world,” he told Russert. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.” This course will explore how writers have told the stories of these “shadows” and this covert “world.” How have journalists investigated and reported on national security in an age of heightened state secrecy? How have they rendered sometimes opaque government activities––counterterrorism, mass surveillance, cyber war––in narrative form? As a story?

Through the work of photojournalists, documentary filmmakers, and the writing of such print journalists as Jane Mayer, Glenn Greenwald, and Fred Kaplan, we will consider the growth of the United States’ national security infrastructure since the onset of the cold war and the struggle to tell (and conceal) that story in the twenty-first century. After two weeks devoted to contemporary narrative journalism that “re-reports” the cold war, we will move through three interrelated units on military prisons, state surveillance, and cyber war. From now until June, we will ask how writers, faced with the challenges of secrecy and complexity, have constructed stories out of material that may, at first glance, seem to resist storytelling.
Days: MO WE  03:00-04:20 PM

Explores how science, medicine, and law have shaped the understanding of differentiated bodies; examines shifting norms and ideals about producing, shaping, adorning, and dressing gendered bodies across diverse historical, cultural, social, economic, and spatial contexts.

Days: MO WE  02:00-03:20 PM

This course considers the philosophical and scientific intellectual history of the concept of race since the late eighteenth century. This includes 19th century Darwinism and its interlocutors, early 20th century grappling with Mendelian inheritance, including both eugenics and the evolving first post-Darwin and post-Mendelian synthesis in the biological sciences during this time, as well as certain aspects of the critique of the concept of race by way of the production of a concept of culture in anthropology and ethnology on the one hand. AND, then, on the other hand, the course engages more contemporary questions, especially the massive implications of the mapping of the human genome and the rise of a new genetics, all of which now implicate projects for the reconstruction or enhancement of the human (both bodily and cognitive forms of intelligence, the cyborg, for example). Finally, takes up the ongoing reappearance of a 'new' eugenics that has taken shape across the past 25 years, on the other. The course thus elaborates upon an investigation of the critical thought that the very idea of race is not an aberration or anachronism. It should be noted that this course will not avow the idea of race as susceptible to a legitimate critical conceptualization in the contemporary context. Rather, it will destabilize any and all epistemological grounds that might portend to enable the presupposition or affirmation of the validity of this concept. Rather, the course has three main objectives: 1) to give insight into why the idea of race is so intractable for modern thought, showing in what way it emerged as an essential idea in modern practice (in thought, philosophy, politics, and science), and not as an aberration or failure of intellectual acumen, or ethical commitment, or policy; 2) to cultivate the intellectual basis for developing some new critical ways of thinking about the status of human sameness and difference; 3) to offer some initial perspectives on problems of knowledge and politics of the idea and concept of race that have taken shape in the aftermath of the mapping of the human genome. The seminar is built around building core or fundamental lectures, especially early in the course, some reading of short selected primary texts, and contemporary films – such as Gattaca (1997) and Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement (2013) – around these topics; a weekly journal in response to this material, along with a final examination, is at the core of grade work in the seminar.
Days: TH  02:00-04:50 PM

This course will examine the shifting status of lying in politics, law, journalism, behavioral economics and psychology, literature, and film.   What are the roles of institutional norms in establishing what counts as truth and lying in various realms?  Does the operation of such norms undermine the notion of truth-telling? What’s the role of a speaker’s intention in differentiating lying from other sorts of falsehoods?  What’s are differences among fictions, lies, and confabulations?  How does the medium of documentation affect what we think we can know or not know about a given account of a situation, witness or set of facts?

We will read the work of political and legal philosophers including Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Harry Frankfurt, and Martin Jay; behavioral psychologists including Dan Ariely and Bella Depaulo, as well as fiction by Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, Nella Larsen and Patricia Highsmith, and analyses of journalism by Seth Mnookin and Janet Malcolm.  We will also discuss the documentary film “A Film Unfinished” as well as the recently released fictional film “The Lobster.”
Days:   12:00-12:00 AM

This course focuses on the modern history of Iran, specifically the political, social, economic, religious, and cultural developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a transforming globe. The course covers the establishment of the Qajar dynasty in 1795, the constitutional revolution of 1905-1911, the reigns of two Pahlavi shahs, the revolution of 1978/79, and the political, social, and cultural developments in the Islamic Republic since its inception in 1979 – all within a global context. Readings include secondary and primary sources by and about Iranians themselves.
Days: MO WE  09:30-10:50 AM

Literary theory from Plato on. Focus on the way that the question of "the literary"--once posed correctly--frustrates any and all attempts to theorize it. Texts by Plato, Aristotle, Longinus and their "modern" inheritors. Two exams.
Days:   12:00-12:00 AM

Indigenous feminisms assert that gendered forms of violence in Native American and Indigenous communities—including sexual violence as well as the imposition of heteronormativity and patriarchy—are key components of the structure of settler colonialism. Indigenous feminist scholars note the erasure of Indian women as significant figures in history and culture, acknowledge the ways that Indigenous communities often internalize the settler colonial ideology of heteropatriarchy, and demonstrate that gender and sexual violence are methods of American Indian genocide. Indigenous feminist theories contest the view that Indigenous sovereignty and gender justice are separate political goals and argue that gender justice must be part of any strategy or theory of decolonization.

This course engages a wide array of Indigenous feminisms drawn from various thematic and transnational contexts across the Americas, Hawai’i, Australia, and New Zealand. Students will explore the foundations of Indigenous feminist theories in Black and women of color feminist thought and consider multiple intersections of gender, race, indigeneity, patriarchy, and settler colonialism as articulated in Native American and Indigenous studies and Indigenous feminist theories of sovereignty. Course readings include creative and critical literature written by Indigenous writers whose work remaps settler colonial geographies and imagines or creates Indigenous alternatives to enduring forms of imperialistic, gendered spatial violence. Students will also learn the critical contexts of Indigenous feminisms which encompass the fields of anthropology, history, law, dance, and postcolonial studies.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

"Close reading" is a general term for a range of interpretive strategies and practices that lie at the heart of critical analysis and argument in literary scholarship. Mastery of these practices and techniques will help you in almost all the writing you do as an English major. There is no set text for this course. Our classes will focus on writing exercises in response to texts that will be provided on the class website. There will also be some short pieces of critical writing provided to you as models of excellent "close reading" which we will discuss and analyze in class. As well as frequent short writing exercises in class, you will write one 2000 word essay which will go through several stages of revision, and a final exam. The final grade will be 30% based on class participation (including in-class writing exercises), 40% on the major essay and 30% on the final exam.
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM

This course introduces students to interdisciplinary ethical analyses of science. It explores the social role of scientific knowledge, focusing on the history of the biological sciences with special attention to gender, race, class, and empire. How does science influence everyday life? How do the priorities of a society shape its approach to science? Over the past two decades, ethical and diversity issues in the practice science have grown dramatically in importance. Scholars as well as policy makers and activists have argued that the views of practicing scientists, of social scientists, and of philosophers should inform one another. Any systematic social and historical understanding of the sciences requires us to use a wide range of disciplines. We will survey the history and politics of biology, with a focus on the sciences of sexuality, race, and the body, The readings are drawn from academic studies of history, culture, and politics.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

Examines animal rights/welfare movement’s efforts to transform moral, practical, and legal standing of nonhuman animals in contemporary U.S. Explores intersection of racism, sexism, and speciesism informed by theories of race and ethnicity, including Asian American Studies.
Days: TU TH  05:00-06:20 PM

This course tracks the nearly-simultaneous rise of two arguably brand-new kinds of thought in the 18th century: “political economy,” the study of the economies of states, and the realist novel, a literary genre that remains dominant even today. In this course we’ll ask: what does literature have to do with economics, both its study and its lived realities? Do literary works like novels simply reflect the economic circumstances in which they were written or might they offer some new ways of thinking, seeing, and describing the economic and social world around them? And what about the fact that novels themselves are economic objects, sold and circulated like other goods, and that writers themselves are professionals, interested in making money from their creative output? Along the way to answering these questions, we’ll read short works in classical political economy from the period—John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus—and, of course, we’ll read a lot of marvelous novels! We’ll explore the idea of property in the spooky gothic tale The Mysteries of Udolpho; treatments of land and settlement in Defoe’s classic Robinson Crusoe; servants and poverty in the comic novel Tom Jones; domestic economy and personal debt in the sentimental satire Evelina; and finance and national debt in the satirical essays of Jonathan Swift.
Days: MO WE  11:00-11:50 AM