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Seminar: Topics in Twentieth Century LIterature and Culture

01- Memoir Culture 
This seminar will look at the cult and culture of modernist and contemporary memoir. While “life writing” (diaries, journals, essays, auto/biography) has long been a part of literature, the idea of memoir as a separate literary genre has only exploded in the last few decades. This takes us to two related concerns. First, what is the interest in reading other people’s lives, especially people who aren’t already famous? Second, how should we best understand the value of “memoir,” which lies somewhere between the “true” chronology of a person’s life (auto/biography) and the author’s “false” crafting of a meaningful story by using literary techniques (fiction). By examining a broad range of memoirs from different periods and voices, by peeking over others’ shoulders as they reexamine parts of their lives, and by writing and sharing our own mini-memoirs, we will connect the ideas of writing about life to the writing of a life.
Texts may include: Woolf, Moments of Being; McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood; Slater, Lying; Wright, Black Boy; Morris, Conundrum; Bechdel, Fun Home; Satrapi, Persepolis; Lim, Among the White Moon Faces; Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Cha, Dictee; and Roth, Patrimony.

03-William Faulkner

The seminar will explore the thematic concerns and artistic performance represented in the astounding fiction written during the midst of Faulkner’s career from 1929-1940.  Short (one-page) critical essays designed as preparations for class discussion will make up the written work during the term.  Longer independent essays of about 10 pages on earlier or later work by Faulkner not covered in class will be submitted at the end of the semester.  Reading: The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1930); Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936); The Hamlet (1940); Collected Stories of William Faulkner; One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (1998).

Attendance Policy:  Attendance is required: no more than two cuts for any reason will be allowed without reduction of the final grade.

Means of Evaluation: Preparations and Class Participation: 50%; Quizzes 15%; Final Essay 35%

04-Postcolonial Texts: Literature, History, Ethics

In Dust on the Road, a compilation of Mahasweta Devi’s journalistic writings, we come across a moment where the writer/bonded labor activist confronts a “shocking” statue of a tribal hero, depicted in chains. “Why did the artist have to be so faithful to the photograph?” she asks, decrying the aesthetics and politics of a representational strategy bound by a blind fidelity to documentary realism and the official historical record. Elsewhere in her fiction, Mahasweta Devi elaborates the object of postcolonial historiography in terms of political and ethical questions rather than historicist preoccupations. Thus, her objective is not simply the “recovery” of the lost objects of (subaltern) history through the privileging of narratives of tribal resistance movements. She also offers us ways of understanding these narratives in the context of contemporary social movements and ongoing struggles. While postcolonial literature as a genre has been criticized for being narrowly historicist and realist in scope, in this class we will focus on a body of texts which explicitly or implicitly undo the category of postcolonial (historicist) fiction. How is the idea of “History” figured in these texts which address the political contexts of contemporary India, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Botswana and South Africa? How are questions of narrative, representation, truth, and accountability explored? To what end does a critique of historicism function within such writings? How do these examples of postcolonial literature engage with dilemmas of the present such as globalization and the rise of international civil society? What do we make of the ethical turn in contemporary postcolonial studies?

Required books available at Rutgers University Bookstore

Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost

Bessie Head, A Question of Power

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

Additional required readings available on e-reserve

Stuart Hall, “When Was the Postcolonial?”

Qadri Ismail, “A Flippant Gesture Towards Sri Lanka

Radhika Coomaraswamy, “In Defense of a Humanistic Way of Knowing”

Assia Djebar, “Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound”

Dominick LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts”

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Jacqueline Rose, “On the Universality of Madness”

Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights”

Njabulo Ndebele, “Rediscovery of the Ordinary”

Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

B.R. Ambedkar, “Speech at Mahad”

Edward Said, Orientalism (selection)

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (selection)

Mahasweta Devi, “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”

Course Requirements

5 page midterm (25%)

10 page final paper (40%)

2 page prospectus for final paper (5%)

Brief (20 minute) group oral presentation on a theory text of your choice (15%)

Class Participation (15%)

Absence Policy

Engaged attendance is expected at all classes. After 4 absences, you risk failing the course.

05-The Modern Novel: Invisible Man Close Up