Graduate Courses: Academic Year 2025-2026
SPRING 2026
CPLT 221—Film and Literature
CPLT 277—Seminar in Comparative Literature
WINTER 2026
CPLT 215a—Contemporary Critical Theory: Palestine in Critical Theory
What is the place or non-place of Palestine in Critical Theory? What is at stake in thinking about Critical Theory today in a time of ongoing genocide in Gaza, and against all Palestinian persons, and in a time of persisting colonial, settler, and genocidal violences against Black and Indigenous peoples in globality? To think about these questions we’ll read closely, and very slowly, across a number of texts in European philosophy and critical thought (for example, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno), which we’ll study in relation to work in Black Study (including Cedric Robinson, Fred Moten, Denise Ferreira da Silva) as well as Palestinian poetics, thought, and cinema (Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Adania Shibli, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Elia Suleiman, Hussein Barghouthi, Edward W. Said, and others). As we try to think about Palestine in Critical Theory, we’ll engage in a collective practice of study, which, in its excessively slow, non-self-determined readings, in its utterly dependent and anaccumulative manner of doing language together, may give to us something wholly other than the sense of life—and of being and language—privileged in critique.
CPLT 210—Canons in Comparative Literature: Queer Receptions of Greco-Roman Antiquity
What do we owe the past, if anything? How do the answers to that question shift when the past takes the shape of a literary canon? Given that canonicity is often associated with tradition, authority, and stasis, is a queer canon possible or even desirable? How do queer of color temporalities of hauntedness, transition, imagining otherwise, and intergenerational trauma affect what a canon is and does? In this seminar, we will investigate these questions via contemporary texts by queer of color authors that interface with the Classical Greco-Roman canon, in conversation with queer theory and reception theory. These works will include From the Founding of the Country by Cristina Pérez Díaz (2025), On Hell by Johanna Hedva (2018), Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong (2016), The Renuniciations by Donika Kelly (2021), and Dream of the Divided Field by Yanyi (2022). Seminar participants will be encouraged (but not required) to create and analyze their own works of queer reception.
CPLT 224—Film Theory
Prof. Ken Shima
This seminar focuses on writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers who actively or obliquely engage in social and political struggle, negotiating life/survival in the postwar spread of globalism through a creative practice orbiting between speculative fiction and avant-garde arts prac5ces. This ten-week graduate seminar will study how works produced within the tensions of Imperialism->Cold War, from Japan, Russia, China, and others, speculated about a techno-authoritarian future(s). And how in our current moment, these stories and theories hold new capacities to critically examine power and its operation through possible, adjacent, and oncoming fic5onal spaces.
Structured into three units, 1) metamorphosis of a nation address national myth-making, hygiene, imperial bodies, and how SF, comedy, and anima5on discursively used new medias of print and cinema. 2) apocalyptic horizons— ‘thinking the unthinkable’ and the struggle of Cold-War artistic practices. 3) techno-orientalism—in the face neofascist/post-fascist regimes encouraging na5onal rebirth while projecting anxieties onto cultural others, this unit reads pan-asian sci-fi against critical texts.
FALL 2025
CPLT 212—Introduction to Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature: Speech Genres of Academic Work
“Speech genre” is theorist Mikhael Bakhtin’s term for describing the way that different modes and “dialects” of writing collide, morph and otherwise find their way into modern prose fiction. It also describes the different modes and tendencies, forms and concepts, of the kinds of writing we do as academics from expository writing, to advocacy, to phenomenological conveyance, to presentations, to blipping out email correspondences. This seminar covers recent writing on the meta-methods of research and writing in literary studies in the age of AI, public- and outreaching intellectual forms, the attention economy, and the revamped culture wars. We start with the assumption that we are always-already researching and writing, given life experience, ongoing work projects and other obsessions—but that the speech genres, and writing genres, required of us in academia are not intuitive but are learned forms that, like any other genres, can be taken up, detourned or used as templates. These genres, and toggling among them, also makes for a powerful motor in spaces outside of academia where research and writing are done, with perhaps different or unspoken norms that nonetheless have similar assumptions, goals and methods. We look at some of the new scholarship on close reading, the industries of print culture and their turns, research/creation hybrids, and case studies of how students (like you) bring experience in life to experience in writing to advocate and communicate as well as express the cultural forms of research in forms that may iterate or “version” from time to time and context to context. We also cover research methods in the library and virtual worlds, and concretize the readings by creatively engaging with the genres of research and writing (summary, structural analysis, politics of citationality, etc.) that you will parlay into your exams, come Year 3.
CPLT 277—Seminar in Comparative Literature: Architecture, Space, Modernity
Discourses of modernity since the nineteenth century have been concerned with issues of spatiality. Questions arising include: Where does modernity occur? does urban space and the built environment necessarily define the modern? how do human and other bodies operate in, through, and outside of these spaces? what alternatives exist? This graduate seminar will examine architecture and space broadly conceived, from their work as literary metaphors to the representations of physical locations, their functions, and their symbolic meanings in texts and films. Critical texts by thinkers such as Augé, Certeau, Colomina, Foucault, Grosz, Lefebvre, and others will be studied alongside works of fiction and film. Students are encouraged to develop their own fields of research in dialogue with course materials.
Graduate Courses: Academic Year 2024-2025
SPRING 2025
CPLT 277, Graduate Seminar in Comparative Literature: The Postclassical Maghreb
TR 5:00 – 7:50 pm, HMNSS 2408
This graduate seminar explores a number of classical receptions in order to see how Maghreb was ideologically constructed as a postclassical entity. We will examine a selection of British, American, French, Arabic, and Francophone Maghrebi works of literature, art, critical theory, cinema, scholarship, journalism, and graphic novel (with all required non-English texts translated). Although the full range spans, on the Classical side, from the 8th century – including a few earlier works from the Medieval world – our focus will generally be on the long “Global 19th Century” through the present day. That is, from the perspective of “canonical historical events,” the course prioritizes the period of the Barbary Wars and the French conquest of Algeria (including the protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco), the ensuing colonial period through WWII, the Algerian War of Independence, and its legacies (including the Algerian Civil War and the consequences of Fundamentalist rule).
CPLT 214: History of Criticism
M 12:30 – 3:20 pm, HMNSS 2502
This is a survey course on criticism. We will mainly focus on literary criticism, but it will be soon evident as we contextualize it in history that the areas of important criticism cover more than one’s traditional notion of literature. The goals of the course are: to familiarize ourselves with some of the major trends of criticism from its ‘beginning’ to recent years, understand them in their proper context of intellectual history, and finally, utilize or adapt them for your own research interests, areas, and periods of specialization.
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.
CPLT 215B: Issues in Contemporary Theory
W 5:00 – 7:50 pm, Gordon Watkins Hall 1117
The United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” establishes the normative imperative of “nationality” in asserting that, “Everyone has the right to a nationality” and “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality” (Article 15, UDHR). But, what does this mean? What is “nationality” and why is it assumed to be a basic “human right”? What are the implications, both theoretical and material, of being deprived of “nationality” and being rendered “stateless?” This seminar examines these social and political questions from a philosophical perspective grounded in post-colonial theory but also critical of post-colonial theory’s tenuous relation to the nation-state system. Readings/screenings include works by Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt Etienne Balibar, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Soni Kum, Edward Said, Naoki Sakai, Gayatri Spivak, Michèle Stephonson, among others.
Graduate Courses: Academic Year 2021-2022
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’.