Graduate Courses: Academic Year 2024-2025
WINTER 2025
CPLT 301, Teaching of Foreign Language at the College Level:
M 5:00 – 7:50 pm, Sproul Hall 2364
This seminar explores language acquisition theories and how models of second language learning can inform teaching in the foreign language classroom. Additionally, this seminar will provide practical methods for various aspects of language teaching, such as pronunciation, vocabulary, and discourse.
CPLT 205, Literature of Southeast Asia: FILIPINX ENVIRONMENTS
T 5:00 – 7:50 pm, HMNSS 1407
How do writers, artists, and critical theorists engage with the environment? How have histories of extractive mining, fishing, and farming transformed the way we document, write about, or theorize environmental futures? In this graduate theory seminar, we will consider the ways in which land, water, and air spaces of the Philippine archipelago have shaped key texts in Critical Filipinx studies. We will read recent critical texts with an eye towards how they engage with the archipelago’s environmental history (e.g., mining in the Cordilleras, deforestation, disaster typhoon responses, military waste, industrial banana farming, and dams). We will watch films and read poetry by Filipinx/o artists who grapple with these histories in their works.
Major assignments include 1) a precis & literature review, 2) leading a conversation over a critical text, and 3) a 16-20 page ecocritical paper on the seminar participant’s individual research topic. The class will focus on texts of Critical Filipinx Studies, but it welcomes those who work in Southeast Asian Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Asian American Studies, and Critical Ethnic Studies.
SPRING 2022
CPLT 277. Seminar in Comparative Literature: Postnational Literature
Prof. Paul McQuade
5:00 – 7:50 pm, HMNSS 1407
We live in an age of global circulation, yet our idea of literature remains entrenched within the domain of a text’s language or the geographic specificity of its production. What, then, to make of literature created by the effects of diaspora, migration, and exile? How to read literature written beyond the mother tongue or in a state of translation? This course is designed to introduce students to literary texts which bear a strained relation to the nation-state as well as key theoretical texts in the thinking of modern literature and nationality. Students will develop skills in frameworks that expand the traditional area and literary studies through close attention to issues of language and gender, as well as colonial contexts, the history of comparative literature, and the disciplinary status of ‘area’.
WINTER 2022
CPLT 200 / ANTH 202 / SEAS 200: Topics in Southeast Asian Studies
Professor Weihsan Gui
This seminar is an introduction to the study of Southeast Asia and its diasporas. While not aiming for exhaustive coverage, our readings will include some essays regarding the past, present, and future of Southeast Asian Studies as an interdisciplinary and intellectual field. We will also read some comics and graphic novels and speculative/science fiction (sf) in English from Southeast Asia as primary texts. Finally, we will have faculty guests from UCR’s Southeast Asian Studies program (SEATRIP) who will talk about their current research with us. For a list of primary texts, please contact Professor Gui (weihsing@ucr.edu) after December 13.
FALL 2021
CPLT 210. Film and Literature: Bodies and Sexualities across Genres, Media and Cultures
Prof. Michelle Bloom
W 5:00 – 7:50
We will explore the relationships between film and literature, including adaptation, translation, intertextuality, cinécriture, and “literary film” as well as “cinematic literature.” We will study world film, considering national and transnational cinemas (including and crossing boundaries between China, England, France, Iran, Japan, Korea and the US). Our focus will lie in the concept of the body and in sexualities, with particular attention to “female” and other non-cis males, non-white bodies. Theoretical and critical works will inform our work on literary and film texts. The course will also consider the teaching of literature and cinema.
CPLT 270. Modern African Literature
Prof. Anthonia Kalu
M 5:00 – 7:50pm
This course examines selected central works from contemporary written African literature. All assigned works are written originally in English or translated from African or other European languages into English. We shall examine how African literature portrays colonialism, post-colonialism, and independence and how those representations inform, enable or disrupt our understandings of questions about space, gender, individual and communal consciousness, development, and national identities in contemporary Africa. We will also explore how writers from different African countries agree with, differ from and/or respond to each other in their uses of literature to examine these and other questions significant to the histories and politics of individual nations and the continent.
CPLT 277. Seminar in Comparative Literature: Postnational Literature
Prof. Paul McQuade
T 5:00 – 7:50pm
We live in an age of global circulation, yet our idea of literature remains entrenched within the domain of a text’s language or the geographic specificity of its production. What, then, to make of literatures created by the effects of diaspora, migration, and exile? How to read literature written beyond the mother tongue or in a state of translation? This course is designed to introduce students to literary texts which bear a strained relation to the nation-state as well as key theoretical texts in the thinking of modern literature and nationality. Students will develop skills in frameworks that expand the traditional area and literary studies through close attention to issues of language and gender, as well as colonial contexts, the history of comparative literature, and the disciplinary status of ‘area’.