For Spring 2012, MALAS is Out to ROCK!!! Check out our THEATRE and ART offerings here...

click images to enlarge

Congratulations to our newest MALAS Graduates!

MALAS Goes Kubrick...

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. 
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. 
Dave Bowman: What's the problem? 
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. 
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL? 
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. 
Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL. 
HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. 
Dave Bowman: [feining ingorance] Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL? 
HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move. 
Dave Bowman: Alright, HAL. I'll go in through the emergency airlock. 
HAL: Without your space helmet, Dave? You're going to find that rather difficult. 
Dave Bowman: HAL, I won't argue with you anymore! Open the doors! 
HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye. 

MALAS/SDSU HONORS LECTURE ON ITALIAN AMERICAN SUBJECTIVITY AND JOHN FANTE

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New Spring 2012 MALAS Seminar | Voyeurism and Surveillance: American Panopticons

updated syllabus link

Voyeurism & Surveillance: 

American Panopticons

alternate title: American Panopticons: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and Televisual Subjectity in Literature, Film, Photography, and Art of the Americas

Spring 2012 | English 725 SEMINAR | Dr. William A. Nericcio, Professor, English & Comp Lit/Director, MALAS

In Spring 2011, my esteemed colleague, Professor Quentin Bailey, taught a memorable seminar for the English and Comparative Literature graduate program entitled "Police and Panopticons." It is in that vein, but with a decidedly different line-up of texts, that I now propose to teach a seminar on Voyeurism and Surveillance entitled "American Panopticons." Please don't tell Dr. Bailey that I stole his idea; he may set those aforementioned police on my tail. Seriously, when it comes to the dizzying mirror of the panopticon, invented by Brit polymath Jeremy Bentham in 1791, there is plenty of good material on both sides of the Atlantic, and so it is that in my first American Literature graduate seminar in ages, I turn my eye to Uncle Sam's mirror and to the cultural space of the United States with a course focused on seeing, subjectivity, television, film, art, and more.

The book, art, and film list is tentative, but should probably include Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, Robert Storr et al's Gary Panter, Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives, Oliver Mayer's The Hurt Business, yours truly's Tex[t]-Mex, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Gilbert Hernandez's Human Diastrophism, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Chris Ware's Acme Novely Library, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Hal Hartley's Flirt, John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, Klaus Honnef's Andy Warhol and Sophia Coppola's Somewhere. Photography by Diane Arbus, essays by Susan Sontag, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault, and more will supplement our main readings/screenings/sightings.

Through all of these masterworks lurks a deep and abiding curiosity about screens, representations, subjectivity, simulacra, celebrity, and mimesis. The goal of our seminar will be to give ourselves over to a kind of intellectual scopophilia, a libidinally-laced "satisfaction derived principally from looking."

update

the working logo for the class syllabus...

The MALAS Self-Study Document is Now LIVE

Faculty, Graduate Students, and Friends,

I am happy to announce that the self-study report for MALAS, the Master of Art in Liberal Arts and Sciences is now part of the public record.  Feel free to peruse it at your leisure by clicking the image opposite, but do beware: you are linking to a 74megabyte file!

MALAS and the San Diego LATINO FILM FESTIVAL | DEL AMOR Y OTROS DEMONIOS

more info...

Steve Jobs, redux, via WALT MOSSBERG

"He lived at the intersection 
of technology and liberal arts."


Walt Mossberg on Steve Jobs

MALAS--the MA in Curiosity for the "Crazy Ones" | The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Pays Tribute to Apple's STEVE JOBS

MFAC: The MALAS Faculty Advisory Cohort Formed!

Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2011 16:46:04 -0700
To: Paul Wong & Linda Holler, DEANS, CAL
From: Bill Nericcio
Subject: MALAS Faculty Advisory Cohort

Deans Wong and Holler,

With the MALAS self-study in the can and preparations
fully in the works for the visit of the external review team,
I thought it prudent to form a MALAS Faculty Advisory
Cohort (MFACS) to assist the me as we move forward
with the program--this was actually a suggestion made in
the 2003 MALAS self-study that had never been implemented,
so it seemed the perfect timing to put this team of interdisciplinary
and cross-disciplinary afficionados together.

The exercise of authoring the self-study has convinced me of the
value of MALAS to the College of Arts and Letters and I am
very much looking forward to the findings of Professors
Djlal Kadir (Penn State) and Maribel Alvarez (Arizona),
in addition to those of Lei Guang (Director, Asian Studies),
who is also on the review team, when they visit Thursday
and Friday, October 20th and 21st.

The members of the MALAS Faculty Advisory Cohort
include the following members of the CAL faculty:

Huma Ahmed-Ghosh
Professor and Chair, Women's Studies

Stuart C. Aitken
Professor and Chair, Geography

James Gerber
Professor and Director, International Business

Seth Mallios
Professor and Chair, Anthropology

Harry Polkinhorn
Professor, English and Comparative Literature
Director, SDSU Press

David Kamper
Associate Professor and Chair, American Indian Studies

Ghada Osman
Associate Professor and Chair, Linguistics

Dr. Joseph Andrew Smith
Associate Professor, Classics and Humanities

Edward J. Blum
Associate Professor, History

Peter Atterton
Associate Professor, Philosophy

Roberto D. Hernández
Assistant Professor, Chicana/o Studies

Yetta Howard
Assistant Professor, English & Comparative Literature

Recent developments in the humanities, best evidenced
in the work of the American Studies Association, the
American Comparative Literature Association, the Modern
Language Association, and the Cultural Studies Association,
convince me that interdisciplinary studies and cultural
studies are dynamic, contemporary fields and that
MALAS should continue to evolve as part of this trend.


Yours,

Dr. William A. Nericcio
Director, MALAS

Music and the Sciences! MALASheads! Spread the Word! "Sync or Swarm - The Complex Dynamics of Improvisation and Influence" The Bronowski Art & Science Forum

MALAS IS SPREADING THE WORD ABOUT COOL UCSD LIT DOINGS: Raúl Zurita | Friday, September 30, 2011 5:00 p.m.

MALAS! Co-sponsor of a cutting-edge mini-conference focused on Latina/o Cultural Studies | September 8, 2011 | Gustavo Arellano, Bill Nericcio, Josh Kun, and Los Hollywood

Colleagues, Friends, Former and Future Students!

I hope your new semester is off to a bang!
I am writing to invite you and to invite you to....

CHICANOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
a latina/o cultural studies event at the
CENTRO CULTURAL DE LA RAZA, Balboa Park
this coming Thursday night...

...the details in plaintext appear below,
links for the cyberdigirati are here and here...

CHICANOHOLICS
ANONYMOUS
featuring Gustavo Arellano,
Josh Kun, Los Hollywood
y mucho mas MORE!

Thursday, September 8, 2011 @ 8pm
This party/gala/fiesta celebrates
"Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins
Prowling the American Unconscious" showing at the Centro
Cultural de la Raza, Balboa Park, September 1st through the 10nth.

There will be readings, performances, book-signings,
live-music, and more, more, more:

GUSTAVO ARELLANO, of ASK A MEXICAN fame!

JOSH KUN, author of AUDIOTOPIA and Communications profe from USC

BILL NERICCIO, author of Tex[t]-Mex and infamous
San Diego Chicanoholic 12-step Mextasy addict

& providing live music... LOS HOLLYWOOD!!!! 

more info:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=102723999824760

https://bitly.com/chicanoholics_anonymous


Chicanoholics Anonymous is an part of
the MALAS Program's Arts Outreach Initiative--
tying together SDSU with the great San Diego
community. It is hosted by the one and only
Centro Cultural de la Raza and co-sponsored
by San Diego State University Press, pacificREVIEW:
a West Coast Arts Review Annual; Hyperbole Books;
the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS@ SDSU),
and the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences, "The
MA in Curiosity @ SDSU"



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