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Human Rights Narratives
Instructor: Marie Krüger
Area: Transnational Literature and Postcolonial Studies
Period: 20th and 21st Century Literature
In the Western media the African continent has become synonymous with human rights violations. Troubling images of genocidal violence in Rwanda and Darfur, reports of political instability and electoral fraud in the Congo tend to dominate US-American and European media representations. While this course will also be concerned with literary and cinematic portrayals of armed conflict in specific African countries, our main focus will be on issues easily forgotten in current human rights discourses: the struggle to secure basic human needs for food and shelter, access to education and salaried employment, and attempts to protect the special needs of orphans. In our discussion of these topics in African literature and film we will devote particular attention to the situation of African women and children.
How do African authors and directors talk about human rights? Which issues do they identify as crucial in their discussion of social justice and political democracy, of gender equality and children’s rights? What historical and cultural explanations do they offer for human rights violations? How do they implicate Western nations in creating conditions under which life for many Africans becomes intolerable? Which representational strategies do they employ to narrate ‘undesirable’ or even ‘unbearable living conditions’ without, necessarily, resorting to the sensationalist language that often turns human suffering into a voyeuristic spectacle? Can acts of violence and conditions of dispossession be represented without violating the victim’s right to dignity? Is the label ‘victim’ already a patronizing gesture denying agency and individuality to human beings? And finally, after having read human rights narratives from African perspectives, how do we relate to the images of the African continent we consume daily as Western readers and viewers of contemporary news culture?
Readings are likely to include Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe), Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child (Kenya), Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy (Cameroon), Farida Karodia’s A Shattering of Silence (Mozambique), Calixthe Beyala’s Your Name Shall be Tanga (Cameroon), F.M. Genga-Idowu’s Lady in Chains (Kenya), as well as short stories by Sindiwe Magona (South Africa). In addition, we will discuss African films on these topics, including Dole (Gabon), Hollow City (Angola), The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (Senegal), and Zulu Love Letter (South Africa), and engage a number of relevant theoretical writings.
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The Sixties
Instructor: Loren Glass
Area: American Literature
Period: 20th and 21st Century Literature
We are surrounded by stereotypes of the sixties, but rarely do we read what was actually written during that turbulent decade. In this course, we will return to the key documents from the sixties that effected and reflected the cultural and political transformations that have profoundly shaped our contemporary world. The course will be divided into units, each of which focuses on a key area of activism and change: Civil Rights, the New Left, Black Nationalism and Ethnic Consciousness, Vietnam and the Anti-War Movement, The Counterculture, the Women’s Movement, and the rise of Neo-conservatism. All of the texts we will read represent immediate interventions in urgent political and social issues, and most of them were written by young people. The materials for this course, then, will provide invaluable insight into the power of the younger generation to achieve social justice and the relationship between revolutionary rhetoric and political activism.
Each student will be required to deliver an oral presentation on a key figure or event within one of the above units. This presentation will then be the basis of a 10-12 page research project, due at the end of the semester. Students will also be required to participate in regular online discussion and text-sharing using ICON to develop an understanding of the methodological issues and bibliographic protocols of research. In addition, there will be seven short writing assignments that will require you to identify and think about how to intervene in contemporary issues that relate to the subject of each unit, as well as quizzes upon the completion of each unit. Participation and attendance are required.
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Victorian Lives
Instructor: Florence Boos
Area: Modern British Literature and Culture
Period: 18th and 19th Century Literature
In this course we will read essays on the interpretation of life-writing as well as autobiographical poems, novels and memoirs by a wide range of nineteenth-century writers, and explore the boundaries of history, memory, lived experience and imaginative recreation in their works.
Readings will include a dramatic essay by Florence Nightingale (Cassandra); poems by Alfred Tennyson (“In Memoriam”) and Oscar Wilde (“The Ballad of Reading Gaol”); memoirs by the working-class writers Elizabeth Campbell and Ellen Johnston; autobiographies by Mary Seacole and John Stuart Mill; and novels by George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss), Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm), and Israel Zangwill (Children of the Ghetto).
Students will be required to post responses to the class’s website, lead a class discussion of one of our texts, and write a carefully researched paper on a topic related to the course.
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Spring 2009
The Image and the Word
Instructor: Eric Gidal
Area: Literary Theory and Interdisciplinary Studies
Period: 20th and 21st Century Literature
Our direct experience of visual art resides beyond language, yet the encounter with painting, sculpture, and architecture has produced an abundance of figurative attempts to represent in words the impact and pleasure of that experience. This course undertakes a study of those attempts by surveying the representation of the visual arts in literature from classical times to the present day, with an emphasis on the modern era. We will read poems, essays, and novels that respond to the visual arts while viewing the works of painting, sculpture, and photography that they describe, evoke, and contain. Topics include theories of mimesis, the discourse of aesthetics, the poetics of ekphrasis, and the culture of museums. Underlying all discussions are the formal and cultural implications of verbal and visual conflation, from Homeric epic to the World Wide Web.
Readings will include:
John Hollander, The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art
Martin Gayford and Karen Wright (eds.), The Grove Book of Art Writing
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Don DeLillo, Mao II
Courespack of theoretical essays by Hazard Adams, Barbara Benedict, Carol Duncan, Murray Krieger, J. Hillis Miller, W.J.T. Mitchell, Peter Schwenger, Susan Stewart and others.
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Bodies of Evidence
Instructor: Stephen Kuusisto
Area: Nonfiction and Creative Writing
Period: 20th and 21st Century Literature
“It is offensive for a Man to speak much of himself; ... My Subject, however, will be my Apology; and I am sure it will draw no envy upon me. Bodily Deformity is visible to every eye; but the effects of it are known to very few; intimately known to none, but those who feel them; and they are generally not inclined to reveal them. As therefore I am
furnished with the necessary materials, I will treat this uncommon Subject at large.”
--William Hay: “Deformity: An Essay” 1754
This is a creative writing course. We will focus on creative nonfiction about the human body by looking at disability and its compound representations in several important works of contemporary autobiography, memoir, and creative non-fiction. While the primary focus will be on creative nonfiction writing, this course examines core concepts and issues in disability studies, including the social-political models of disability that foreground disability as a historical and cultural concept. Additionally we will examine cross-disciplinary critiques; spectacle; myth; disability experience; aesthetic foundations; and sub cultural perspectives.
Course Objectives:
- Explore how the “disability memoir” or “personal essay” can reflect and develop the theoretical concerns raised by leading scholars in Disability Studies. Learn key definitions, categories, critiques, and controversies that comprise current research and scholarship in disability studies.
- Become versed in the specifics of identity, from cultural and individual perspectives.
- Distinguish the methodological differences between literary theory, memoir, autobiography, and the personal essay as modes of representation.
- Workshop the theoretical and/or creative writing by members of the class.
Course Method:
This honors course is intended for both literary memoirists and literary theorists; for students who wish to practice memoir-writing or other modes of creative non-fiction, and for students who wish to theorize the role of personal narratives in the field of disability studies by writing academic criticism. The theory/practice rift is, of course, an illusory one: my hope is that the course's emphasis on "creative writing" will not deter students who do not self-define as "creative writers" from taking it. So, too, the creative writers enrolled in the course will not, under the banner of that title, find themselves exempt from theorizing. Ideally, the course will strike an on-going dialogue between "theorists" and "practitioners”. The course will be run workshop-style on designated days when our class discussion will be devoted to workshopping a piece of writing (memoir, literary criticism, literary theory) by a member of the class. Such workshopping will enable us to access the reading for that week from a different position at the same time that we each put our writing to certain valuable tests.
Required Texts:
Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie. (1996) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability
Course packet containing essays and chapter seledctions by Nancy Mairs, Kenny Fries, Brenda Brueggemann, Lennar Davis, William Styron,Lucy Grealey, Anne Finger, and other contemporary writers.
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