About Us

The research goal of COMMA, as a center for modernist and postmodern Anglophone literature at UC Santa Barbara, is to recast the reading of that literature, and the cultures that produced it, by staging its encounter with a radical new wave of materialist critique. At COMMA, our literary field of vision extends from Woolf to Irvine Welsh, from Joyce to Chimamanda Adichie. We foster theoretical, historicist and formal investigations of this literary culture in the critical theory tradition.

Projects

Mapping Mrs. Dalloway by irinapopescu

Mapping Samuel Beckett's Murphy by bretbrinkman

Urban Space and Documentary Modernism by bretbrinkman

Walter Benjamin’s THE ARCADES PROJECT: A Visual Companion—Convolute A: Arcades by bretbrinkman

Featured Courses

English 104B: British Literature from 1900-present

English 150: Anglo-Irish Literature

English 65: Urban Modernity

English 114: Women and Representation

English 122: Women and Transgression

English 187LL

English 187US: Urban Symphonies

English 165MA: Literature, Music, and Adaptation

ENGL 187SM: Stoppard and Modernism

News

Talk: 'Anarcho-Punk and the Canonization of the Right to Idleness'

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 12:02:12 -0800

You are warmly invited to the first COMMA talk this year in the 'Post-Work/Anti-Work/No Work' Series:

'Not For Me the Factory Floor:' Crass, Anarcho-Punk and the Canonization of the Right to Idleness

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COMMA Conference, May 18, 2012: Antiwork, Postwork, No Work

Sat, 19 May 2012 11:01:58 -0800

Conference: May 18, 2012, SH 2635, 11.5-5.30

Antiwork, Postwork, No Work

11.15-11.30 Prof. Maurizia Boscagli, (English, UCSB) Introduction

11:30-12:30 Christopher Walker, (English,) “Boredom, Interiority, Resistance to

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May 4th: Motion in Modern times

Sun, 06 May 2012 18:16:47 -0800

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"Folded Space--Everything Changes In the Same Way: Theo Von Doesburg, De Stijl, and Futurism"

Wed, 04 May 2011 20:28:39 -0800

Friday, May 6, South Hall 2714, 12.30 PM

Prof. Bram K. Ieven, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands

"Folded Space" explores how the dynamic folding together of space and time in Futurist painting reemerges in the work of Theo Van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian and de Stijl from 1916 onwards. The presentation will open with a survey of the De Stijl handling of space, and discusses key issues in thinking about dynamic spaces in modernist cultural practice and theory.

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CITIZEN/SUBJECT/INSURGENT Conference Program, Friday March 4, 2011

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:32:45 -0800