| Courses Taught by Fellows |
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, 2009-2010Joseph BauerkemperENGL 171AAmerican Literature, 1832 to 1865 Winter 2010 Department of English A survey of American literature from the Jacksonian era to end of the U.S. Civil War, this course also offers a sustained critical consideration of the nation-based study of literary and intellectual histories. The course will thus begin by asking and attempting to address a handful of seemingly simple questions. These include: Why does this course exist? What is American literature, anyway? (What "counts" as American literature? And who's counting?) How is American literature distinct from "non-American" literatures? What are the historical, political, social, and cultural genealogies of this distinction? What are the relationships between American literature and inter- and transnational issues and events? Are national framings (ever) appropriate for the intellectual work of literary and cultural studies? In approaching these and other questions, this course will engage with interpretations that see this period as an "American Renaissance" during which literary artists fundamentally contributed to the development, affirmation, and consolidation of an American (U.S.) national identity. Readings will include Frederick Douglass' Specialized Studies in Literature "Indigenous Literary Transnationalisms" Spring 2010 Department of English Because it places indigenous writing at its center, this course necessarily enters into a transnational terrain of peoples, histories, and ideas. In conversation with postcolonial theory, the "transnational turn" in cultural studies, and scholarly discussions of indigenous nationhood, this course centrally considers the sophisticated ways in which indigenous intellectuals imagine transnational spaces and theorize the complex cultural, political, economic, social, and discursive practices and processes unfolding in such spaces. Students in this course will think comparatively across indigenous writings of North America and the Pacific, exploring how indigenous traditions and knowledges regarding nationalisms, transnationalisms, and postnationalisms inform and arise out of contemporary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Through their engagements with indigenous writing, students will become conversant with theoretical discourses located at the intersections of transnational and indigenous studies, and they will develop a critical awareness of the pasts, presents, and futures of transnational patterns of colonization and resistance. Readings will include: Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel's "Being Indigenous," Gloria Anzaldúa's "The Homeland, Aztlán," Joanne Barker's "For Whom Sovereignty Matters," Joy Harjo's In Mad Love and War, LeAnne Howe's "Choctalking on Other Realities," Keri Hulme's The Bone People, Matthew Kaopio's Written in the Sky, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, and Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus. Jeannine Murray-RománComp Lit 190"The Hyperglossia of Oscar Wao-Caribbean history, theory, and literature." Winter 2010 Department of Comparative Literature "The Hyperglossia of Oscar Wao" uses Junot Díaz's novel as an entryway into exploring comparative Caribbean literature. In order to understand the many influences and languages that mark Junot Díaz's recent novel, we will situate the novel within theoretical and contextual approaches by reading Nietzsche's theories of repetition, Glissant on the Caribbean meta-archipelago, and historiographies of the Dominican Republic's "Trujillato" alongside The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We will then use the literary references mobilized throughout the novel to explore a multi-lingual cross-section of Caribbean literature that includes such authors as Edwidge Danticat, Derek Walcott, and Patrick Chamoiseau. As such, this course uses Díaz's novel as a point of departure for exploring the contemporary Caribbean and American literature. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, 2008-10Sze-wei Ang
Comp Lit 187 In this class, students will explore cross-cultural representations of ethical claims in ethnic US and South East Asian literatures in English. During a historical moment that grapples with what seems to be an increase in religious and ethnic violence, literature and the literary critic can offer models for how we understand violence, suffering, or the possibility of reconciliation. But this course also opens up the question of how we read different modes of the "ethical." Can literature be said to represent "justice" or claims of justice? And consequently then, how do reading practices that privilege the question of ethics help us rethink literary form, especially in literature from different cultural or national contexts? If ethics is historically conditioned, what is the process of translation? Essays on the relation between ethics, literature, and literary criticism will also form part of the class syllabus. Comp Lit M175 This seminar focuses on the intersections of race and religion in the constitution of the nation-state. Contemporary ideas about race are not only related to but are also integral to ideas of the nation and imperialism, and we will explore how race and religion affect our conceptions of national or global space. Furthermore, religious identity is becoming increasingly racialized today, and students will unpack how the different categories resonate in different cultural contexts. We will read essays on political theology, nationalism, and transnationalism in addition to literary texts. Maya BoutaghouWomen's Studies 285"Theories of Feminism in the Arab World" Spring 2009 Department of Women's Studies This course will present, in a historical perspective, different moments of feminist theory in the Arab world. The beginnings of modern feminism in the Arab world are perhaps the main revolution accomplished by the Nahda (a 19th century modernization movement). We shall thus discuss the link between the modern birth of feminism and some essays on the Muslim education of women such as Rafi Rifaa al-Tahtawi's inaugural work The Emancipation of Muslim Woman. Most male writers of this period sought to emancipate women in order to make the Arab community stronger by providing better education to its members. Some years after this first educational movement, that has its equivalent in India at the same period, we can witness the emergence of assertive female writers, such as Mayy Ziyadah. With her the education of women induces new paradigms and the birth of a real feminist movement which denounces the narrowness of the male voices of the Nahda. Later on historical events such as the Algerian war afforded personalities like Assia Djebar an opportunity to leave the harem and become committed feminist writers. Finally we shall analyze a famous essay by Nawal El-Saaadawi, The Hidden face of Eve, in which the author examines the link between sexuality and feminism in a revolutionary manner. Throughout the long period beginning in the 20th century, the Arab woman fights for her freedom. The aim of this course is to shed some light on the complexity of feminist issues in the Arab world and show that women who proceed from a Muslim culture can also become free. Like democracy the idea of women's freedom is a constant struggle. Consequently, as manifestos, the different texts studied are used as weapons to reaffirm the need of fighting day after day to improve the condition of women in the Arab world. Women's Studies CM 170 "But all the older forms of literature were hardened and set by the time she [the woman] became a writer. The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands-another reason, perhaps, why she wrote novels. [...] No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has the free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her." A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf, [1929], A Harvest Book, Orlando, 1989, p. 77. With theses few words by Virginia Woolf, I would like to introduce the course on "Women and the Novel", reminding us about this particular link between creative writing and the field of Women's Studies. The novel as a genre, especially the modern novel, as Erich Auerbach showed it in Mimesis, deals with reality in one way or another, and the novelistic writings of women tried to do this in their own special way. Through some representative novels, from several parts of the world (Francophone, with Assia Djebar and Monique Wittig ; Indian, with Anita Desai, Arab with Nawal Al Sadaoui), and in a transcultural perspective, we shall try to give meaning to the "and" in the phrase "women and the novel." Of course we will go step by step, reading some proposed excerpts between the lines, using feminist critical theory, and following well defined pathways : we will first confront autobiography to history. Women were, for a long time, deleted from History as a discourse, the autobiographical form was one way to reveal their own view of History (Assia Djebar, Anita Desai). Secondly, we will analyze the link between writing and the body trying to understand how writing (écriture) can translate (embody) the feeling of being a woman and give a strong form to fragile voices (Monique Witting, Nawal al Sadaoui).
Greg CohenSpanish 290"Minor Cinemas, the Transnational, and Spatial Thought in Latin America" Spring 2009 Department of Spanish and Portuguese This graduate seminar takes Latin American independent cinema of the 1960s and 70s as a point of departure for exploring what has been called the "spatial turn" in critical theory. Broadly construed as a major shift in focus and trajectory first materializing around the turn of the sixties and intensifying after the upheavals of 1968, the spatial turn describes a move away from questions of time and history towards those of space and geography. Somewhat in the manner of a workshop, we will aim to develop a broadly de-centered version of the spatial turn by revisiting some of its foundational texts through the prism of Latin American films. Parings might include Pino Solanas and Octavio Getino's film The Hour of the Furnaces with the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationists; Brazilian director Andrea Tonacci's Bang Bang! with Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life; Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna's film Iracema with Frederic Jameson's The Geopolitical Aesthetic; or Miguel Littín's film The Jackal of Nahueltoro with Michel Foucault's essays "Of Other Spaces" and "Questions of Geography." Spanish 191A, Portuguese 191 The aim of this course is twofold. First, it shall provide undergraduate students with a foundation in cinema studies by introducing them to various of the central themes and debates of the discipline, both historical and theoretical, meanwhile furnishing them with the tools of critical film analysis. Second, the course will offer a unique introduction to the study of Latin American film by examining the evolution of its more idiosyncratic tendencies. As we shall see, these aspects not only culminated in the great innovations of the 1960s and 1970s in Latin American cinema, but can and should be situated in relation to the transformations in film aesthetics and critical discourse taking place on an international scale during the period. Films by Fernando Birri, Humberto Solás, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Miguel Littín, to name just a few, will form the basis of our approach to "new wave" aesthetics, the transnational elements of Latin American film history, the cinematic re-configuration of cultural identities and national imaginaries, and the dynamic matrix of modern discourse, revolutionary politics, and the global circulation of film styles from the dawn of cinema to the eve of postmodernity. Marcela Fuentes"Transnational Performance in Theory and Practice"Spring 2009 Department of Theater In an age of transnational media and capital, theories of social process invite us to trace the way in which social actors, artists, and activists also work transnationally, creating communities of empathy and networks of alliance and antagonism that cannot be contained within the logic of the nation-state. This course examines performances in transnational context to explore how they produce the materialization of places and bodies in the time-space of the global. What forms of citizenship and alternative community are enacted in live performances that gesture at larger sites of action? How do performances work within and outside the channels opened up by transnational institutions? In what way do theories and performance practices offer new ways of thinking about locality and timing under new spatiotemporal configurations? Investigating processes of transnational cultural production, we seek to redefine the ways in which performance is thought of as a local event. Theater 108 This course puts into dialogue theories and practices of theater and performance in the Americas. We will look at the way in which theater challenges national borders providing a space for transnational communities to come together. How do performers in the Americas address issues of freedom, defiance, solidarity, and belonging? How do artists confront the state in fighting for their space of performance? How do they mock and defy stereotypes? We will study plays and performances from Canada, the US, Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Argentina that address issues of indigeneity, colonialism, gender and sexuality, and migration. We will read manifestos, performance texts, and critical essays that will help us map out the Americas as a vast land of interrelated performance practices. Travis WorkmanAsian M206, Comp Lit M226"Empire and the Human Sciences" Spring 2009 Department of Asian Languages & Cultures, Department of Comparative Literature This course will consider the positing of "man" as subject and object of philosophical discourse and literary representation, and as economic and political species. With the rise of anthropocentric and humanist world-views in modernity, how is "man" figured as the thinker and creator of modern society? Furthermore, how is this universality of the human rendered compatible or incompatible with the division of the species into races, cultures, genders, classes, and nations? In order to approach the historical aspect of these questions, we will examine humanist and cosmopolitan ideas as they operated in processes of nation-state formation and modes of colonial governmentality. Our main concern will be how philosophical and literary representations of humanity have converged with political power, and to what degree criticisms of humanism have been able to overcome the uses and abuses of species logic in the formation of imperial polities. Although the methodology of the course is informed by colonial discourse analysis in the post-colonial vein, we will also delve more broadly into the intellectual history of anthropological thought. Our main historical context will be 20th century East Asia, but we will draw comparisons with humanist discursive formations in other contexts. Those with expertise in the history of other colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial contexts will be encouraged to contribute actively to the comparative aspect of the course. Asian 130 "Ideas of Culture in East Asian Studies" Winter 2009 Department of Asian Language & Cultures Ideas of culture are often called upon in order to interpret differences of opinion, to explain the effects of inherited traditions, or to analyze interactions between groups. Despite this explanatory power given to the word "culture," the term has had a long and variegated etymological history in the European, American, and East Asian contexts, and its precise meaning remains a topic of considerable uncertainty and debate. Is culture universal, because all people belong to one or another version of "it"? Is culture particular, because no two cultures are completely alike? Does the idea of culture effectively reconcile the particular with the universal? Is culture inherently a mixture of elements? Does culture refer to an objective material process, or is it an idea toward which human beings strive? In order to build a vocabulary and background for the discussion of these kinds of questions concerning culture, we will read primary and secondary materials in the field of East Asian Studies, as well as some texts from European thought. Although this course is concerned with the broader question of culture, we will deal mainly with the literature and intellectual discourse of modern Japan and Korea (particularly, 1910-1945). In Japan and Korea in the first half of the 20th century, the notion of "culture" was often deployed to explain the logic of historical events, the causes of social behaviors, and the meaning of works of art and literature (particularly in trans-national interactions). Because of the dramatic explanatory power given to "culture," its study came to affect the broader political and social milieu of the Japanese empire (e.g., in the Japanese government's formulation of the policy of Cultural Rule in Korea, 1919-1937). In this course, we will interpret the significance of culture in this period, and consider what it has to teach us about the possibilities and limitations of cultural knowledge in the present day.
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, 2007-09Fatima El-TayebComp Lit 191/290"Queer of Color Critique: Queer Activism and Social Justice" Fall 2008 Department of Comparative Literature Queer theory was born out of the interaction, and tension, between activism and theory, its groundbreaking deconstruction of naturalized understandings of (sexual) identity inspired as much by French poststructuralist and feminist theories as by black power, gay liberation, and women of color feminism. With the academic implementation of queer studies however, these activist roots have moved further and further to the background. In this class, we will retrace the links of queer theory to social justice movements and explore the consequences of the increased distance to these origins as well as attempts to reconnect to them. Subjects will include: queers of color and the gay mainstream, gender and postcolonial theory, feminism, gay marriage, and the war on terror. Comp Lit 160 Literature and Visual Arts "Race, Visual Culture, and the Postmodern West" Fall 2008 Department of Comparative Literature In this course, we will analyze the multiple ways in which ethnicity and race are both naturalized and potentially deconstructed through visual culture. Among the media we will look at are film, comics, videos, and photography. While visual culture is our topic, we will also do a lot of old-fashioned reading, exploring various theoretical approaches to ethnicity and its interrelations with categories such as gender, nation, class, and sexuality. Readings will include texts by a variety of (visual) culture theorists, such as Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, and Susan Bordo.
LGBTS 187 Selected Topics in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
European Studies 191 This course will focus on contemporary continental Europe and the ways in which race, class, religion, gender, and sexuality intersect in debates on immigration and identity. The conflation of these concepts in the creation of "foreignness" is certainly not restricted to Europe, but it affects the continent in particular ways. In this class, we will approach these configurations through a focus on three groups: Muslim minorities, Eastern European Roma, and undocumented African migrants. While we will explore dominant discourses on migration across the continent, we will pay special attention to self-representations of these communities and cultural productions by "2nd generation" artists and activists and their strategies of undermining dominant perceptions of what it means to be European. Readings will also include theoretical texts by Etienne Balibar, David Theo Goldberg, Stuart Hall, Saskia Sassen, and others. Kris ManjapraHistory 191N"South Asian Intellectual History in Comparative Perspective" Spring 2008 Department of History A survey of major themes in South Asian intellectual history from the Mughal Period to Independence using a variety of cultural and literary sources: visual, audio and written. Emphasis will be placed on translocal networks of thought and political activity in which Indian thinkers were embedded, including connections with South East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the United States of America, Britain and Central Europe.
History 191N/201K What were the expressions of cosmopolitan thought and life in the age of colonialism? How was cosmopolitanism lived differently, and to different ends, by groups in Europe and in the colonial world. This course offers a comparative and connective study of the intellectual and cultural production, and the social networks, associated with the Pan-Africa, Greater India, Pan-Europe and Communist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the internationalist organizations that developed during those years. We will encounter the often conflicting cosmopolitan visions among colonial intellectuals and European thinkers, and investigate what they tell us about nationalism and imperialism in the era before decolonization. Students will also critically engage with current-day theoretical work on cosmopolitanism, and will discuss how notions of cosmopolitanism have shifted in our own time. Sonali Pahwa"Transnational Performance in Theory and Practice"Spring 2009 Department of Theater In an age of transnational media and capital, theories of social process invite us to trace the way in which social actors, artists, and activists also work transnationally, creating communities of empathy and networks of alliance and antagonism that cannot be contained within the logic of the nation-state. This course examines performances in transnational context to explore how they produce the materialization of places and bodies in the time-space of the global. What forms of citizenship and alternative community are enacted in live performances that gesture at larger sites of action? How do performances work within and outside the channels opened up by transnational institutions? In what way do theories and performance practices offer new ways of thinking about locality and timing under new spatiotemporal configurations? Investigating processes of transnational cultural production, we seek to redefine the ways in which performance is thought of as a local event. Theater 220 Graduate Forum Winter 2009 Department of Theater Theatre 210 "Ethnography of Performance" Spring 2008 Department of Theater This seminar explores anthropological literatures on ritual performance, speech acts and habitual practice, and links them with performance studies to examine embodiment and performativity in contemporary contexts. Revisiting the boundedness of place in classic ethnography, we will situate performance in a world of mass mediation and ask how it incorporates global knowledge in concrete language and practice.
Anthropology 157/2 - 297/8 This seminar investigates the imagination of an “Arab world” by examining the historical role of the Arabic language in linking distant peoples, its dialogue with vernacular culture, and the ways in which mass media have created new transnational cultural forms in Arabic. Beginning with a look at traditional speech genres for poetry, religious discourse and performance, we then consider how programs for cultural and linguistic reform in modern Arab nations created new dialectics between textual and popular culture. Our primary focus is on the use of media in disseminating national culture, circulating minority voices, and reshaping circuits of cultural and religious authority through transnational authorship and reception.
Sarah ValentineRussian 293"Second World Postcolonialism and the Poetics of Identity: New Approaches to Russian Literature" Spring 2009 Department of Slavic Languages In this course we will examine contemporary Russian poets as writers of a defunct Second World and explore how that plays into issues of aesthetics, poetics and concepts of identity both for themselves and their poetic personae. Theoretical perspectives include transnationalism, postcolonialism, post-socialism, and gender theory. Russian 191 "Looking Back on the Soviet Union through Film" Winter 2009 Department of Slavic Languages We will examine films by contemporary Eastern European directors that focus on critical moments of the Soviet period. Russian film and scholarship will also play a key role in the course and serve as a point of comparison. Our discussions will explore issues such as the meaning of "national" cinema/tradition in the Soviet/post-Soviet context, film and ethics, and questions of interpreting historical events vs. artistic license. Russian 32 "Russia and Asia: Cultural Dialogues" Spring 2008 Department of Slavic Languages Since end of Soviet Union, cultural and political flux within non-Christian lands neighboring Russia has increased dramatically. Given radical rejection of Russian heritage in most former Soviet territories, key distinctions in humanities have become unclear, including fundamental confusion between limits of Slavic and Near Eastern studies. Examination of relation of Russia's culture to its borders: Caucasus, Central Asia, China, and Japan.
Russian 30 Examination of Russian literary masterpieces and their screen adaptations in various national cinematic traditions, with focus on problems of perception and misperception arising when literature is translated into cinema, and one national culture is viewed through the eyes of another. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, 2006-08Elsa ChenChinese 156"Social Interventions and Contemporary Art in Taiwan" Spring 2007 Department of Asian Languages and Cultures In the past 400 years, Taiwan has faced rapid and complex political, economic, social and cultural changes. These changes together constitute Taiwan's unique and intriguing historical and cultural specificity, which would shed light on polemics that concern many people outside Taiwan. This course will explore how visual art and cultures made by contemporary Taiwanese artists engage with selected social, political and cultural issues in Taiwan, or, for overseas Taiwanese artists, in and from the places where they migrated to and live in. Art History 150D Late twentieth century has witnessed the rise of contemporary art industry. This course aims to look at how flourishing Asian contemporary art has been produced, reproduced and disseminated in the world contemporary art system. This course will try to understand how one of the biggest contemporary art industries, namely the biennale industry, works, and investigate how Asian contemporary art has been situated and circulated within this system. This will be done by exploring selected biennales held in different parts of the world and under similar or different persuasions and also by analyzing some specific work by a few internationally renowned artists of Asian descents who move inside and/or beyond the system. Alessandra Di Maio
Comp Lit 191 Many scholars and artists from different regions of the planet locate in the Atlantic Ocean, with its slave trade routes, the foundations of the modern, capitalistic world. However, during the last decades, the Mediterranean Basin has become one of the fulcra of a mass-migration movement that engages a great number of nations. Many of the people involved in these migratory patterns are of African descent. Their diaspora has fundamentally contributed to the development of the global discourse on race and ethnicity. By comparing an array of literary and cultural texts from both the so-called Black Atlantic and the Mediterranean, this course analyzes the polyphonic narration of the African diaspora, while exploring in a comparative perspective issues such as race, class, color, minority, transnationalism, nomadism, hybridity, multiculturalism, sexuality and gender construction. The class meets once a week. Screenings of the films Besieged (B. Bertolucci), Jungle Fever (Spike Lee) and La Haine (Kassovitz) will be scheduled.
Italian 221D Traditionally a country of emigration, during the last decades Italy has become a hub for immigration for people from various regions of the world, who have arrived by the millions. The arrival of the newcomers has sparked controversy, igniting a heated debate on immigration in Italy and throughout Europe, while urging Italians to re-assess their already composite national identity. Eulàlia MolesSpanish 281"Contemporary Issues of Chicanas" Winter 2007, Winter 2008 Department of Spanish and Portuguese This seminar introduces students to key concepts related to the theoretical framework of globalization with a special emphasis on how it impacts Chicanas/Latinas. We will discuss how globalization and neoliberalist policies have a profound effect on the "new world border," the femicide on the border, and (trans)national migration and its feminization in the 1990s in the rise of the global economic shifts. We will also carefully examine how transnational feminist decolonizing practices engage with different human rights frameworks in their pursuit of social justice in order to denounce and counteract both personal and structural violence. Different theories informing the emerging field of transnational studies will be explored in the light of the formation of transnational alliances based on the historical and contemporary geopolitical links in the Americas. Spanish 191 A/Chicana/o Studies 188 "Contemporary Issues of Chicanas" Winter 2007 Department of Spanish and Portuguese This course introduces students to several topics directly impacting Chicanas/ Latinas in the present historical framework of globalization. We will specifically focus on the theme of violence to discuss the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, (trans)national migration, labor, the femicide on the border, health, and Chicana cultural practices. An integral part of the course will be devoted to examining the many different processes that transnational feminist decolonizing practices adopt to denounce, and counteract both personal and structural violence. Babli SinhaEnglish 118"Film and Literature" Spring 2008 Department of English In this course we will be examining visual culture in literature and film. How has the cinema relied on literary conventions, from subtitles to literary adaptations? How does the pace of editing in the cinema manifest itself in some post-modern literary works? Is the cinema more commodified and corrupted than literature? How do literature and film differ in terms of narration? Does film dull our senses or invigorate our perception of the world? Can cinema render an "inner speech"? We will address these topics by studying a range of literature, film adaptations, and critical texts as well as texts of various media that are preoccupied with both the literary and the visual. Literature will be by Conrad, Maugham, Chandler, Nabokov, and Rushdie, and we will be watching films by Frears, Chaplin, Hawks, and Kubrik. In addition, critical texts by Schlovsky, Eisenstein, Mitchell, Genette, and Bluestone will be assigned.
English 169 The term magical realism is used to refer to literature that combines elements of the fantastic with realism. It has been suggested that magical realism is a trope for narrating the nation, for imagining utopias, and for resisting restrictive aspects of society. This course will examine the genre, interrogate its relationship to other genres of fantasy, and consider the relationship between the aesthetic patterns of the genre and its potential for social advocacy. We will examine the techniques of magical realism in fiction by Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Angela Carter, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, and Borges, such as the use of cyclical rather than linear time and the inversion of social hierarchies. We do this in order to understand the ways in which the genre blurs the boundaries of nation, region, race, gender, and class as it challenges our understanding of historical events as being easily defined with logical causes. In addition to poetry, novels, and short stories, we will also be reading secondary texts, including works by Bakhtin, Jameson, Appiah, and Bhabha.
English 169 This course will investigate some of the central issues of narrative in the English modernist novel. Among the questions we will consider are the following: How did modernist novelists transform conventions of narrative form? How did these diverse writers posit new and “modern” representations of the self, challenge linear notions of history, boundaries of masculinity and femininity, of self and other? We will answer these questions through a study of literature and essays from the period, including works by Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Ford, and Woolf.
English 118 This course will simultaneously think about how these texts were received by their readers and viewers around the world. As these texts and films were disseminated, they prompted adaptations and the creation of new narratives about modernity. What did these readers find inspiring or offensive about these stories? How did they express their reactions? How did the story of imperialism and modernity change as a result of these responses? How did these stories affect the way in which we understand history and identity? Literature and film critiquing the imperial romance will also date from the 1890s to the 1940s. They will be accompanied by historical and theoretical readings. Texts include works by Anand, Kipling, Forster, Haggard, Plaatje, and Schreiner along with three films, King Solomon’s Mines, Gunga Din, and The Rains Came. |