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350:393 Issues and Problems in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture |
01 TTH4 CAC 66489 WALKOWITZ MU-301
02 TF2 CAC 69743 JURECIC MU-204
03 TH7, 8 CAC 70897 MORAN SC-205
01- Violence and Creativity: Introduction to the Contemporary British Novel
This course explores the relationship between violence and creativity in twentieth-century British fiction. Some writers argue that creativity is stifled by violence; some argue that creativity resists violence; some argue that violence spurs creativity, that creativity requires violence, or that violence is one of the forms that creativity can take. We will examine all of these positions and others as they are developed by twentieth-century writers from James Joyce to Salman Rushdie. Related themes we will consider are: the centrality of travel and transience in the twentieth-century novel; the critique of euphemism and conventional morality; memory, trauma, and psychoanalysis; nationalism and language; imperialism and immigration; the effects of film, television, and pop music on contemporary writing; and the globalization of popular culture. Assessment will be based on two short papers, a midterm, a final exam, and occasional short assignments in lecture.
02- Literature and Medicine
Disease may appear to be a natural event, beyond the need for interpretation. Similarly, the doctor and patient may seem to have been transported by scientific medicine into the clean, well-lighted place of fact and biology. And yet, experiences of disease and medical treatment take place in culture, where they are complicated by language, history, economics, and politics. Literature about medicine explores this meeting place of nature and culture, along with shifting understandings of patient and healer, health and illness, and the reach and responsibility of medicine. In this course, we begin by reading from the literary genre of fictional illness narratives, and then turn to texts where illness works as a metaphor, asking whether new metaphors for disease can generate innovative stories and modes of expression. Next, we explore narratives and neurology, attending to the relationship between our understanding of the brain and our sense of the self. Later we examine cultural and neurological difference in the clinical setting, asking both: How should we evaluate ethics in cases of cross-cultural misunderstanding? And how can we comprehend neurological differences so profound that they draw into question our assumptions about what it means to be human? We will conclude the course with writing by physicians and examine how they compose their professional roles.
Readings include Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic; Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Margaret Edson’s W;t; Anne Fadiman’s The
Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night; Ian McEwan’s Saturday; Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diaries and essays by Susan Sontag, Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande.
03-The Grotesque
“The grotesque” is a slippery term that has as many definitions as there are potential definers; the word originally meant “of a cave” and referred to the fantastic and exaggerated art found in ancient grottos. Although the term became pejorative during the Enlightenment, the grotesque is back in style. For our purposes, “the grotesque” will connote exaggerated and frightening characters who engage in freakish behavior, are subjected to(or cause) outbreaks of violence and who face (to quote Sophocles), “the encounter of man with more than man.” (This is not a course for the faint of heart.) We will examine works by a number of authors, all of whom have employed some elements of the grotesque in their work—and we will examine them not because they employ the grotesque but because they use it to better explore the human condition. Ezra Pound famously remarked, “Literature is news that STAYS news”—and our goal will be to read a number of works which employ the grotesque tosee how they are still “newsworthy.” Likely readings will be arranged chronologically, and while we will begin with a look at the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the remaining writers will be twentieth century: Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Berger, Tom Stoppard, Franz Kafka, Patrick Suskind and Joyce Carol Oates. All students must also read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Attendance, reading quizzes and papers are course requirements. (Note: we will be using the whole class time on the first day and all the days that follow.)
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