ENGL 197: |
Upper-Division Seminar
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Contemporary Literature & Geopolitics |
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| Winter 2007 |
| Instructor: Rita Raley |
| Meets on: TR 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM SH 2635 |
| Prerequisites: Writing 2, 50, or 109; English 10; or upper-division standing |
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| This course cannot be repeated and is limited to upper-division English majors only. |
At first glance a study of the “economy of prestige,” with a syllabus that includes recent Nobel and Booker prize winners, this seminar in fact has a different objective: to examine a representative selection of novels and films that are explicitly concerned with the cultural and economic dynamics of our historical moment. Themes and issues that resonate in these novels include the encounter between east and west, secularism and fundamentalism, modernity, migrancy, labor, and global capitalism. As we read, we will endeavor to understand the relations between these large and fairly abstract subjects and the narrative and aesthetic strategies used to represent them. For example, how can we account for the division of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas into intricately intertwined spatio-temporal frames, ‘beginning’ with a scene of 19th century colonial exploration in the Polynesian islands and ‘culminating’ in post-apocalyptic Hawaii? Or the structure of Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, in which stranded airline passengers share fantastic tales that gesture toward, but never quite achieve, a synthesis? Margaret Atwood has said that Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is “essential reading for our times” – what aspects of our historical moment will we be able to trace through or behind this text? What does it have to tell us about the exilic condition, secularism, and the cultural functions of literature? Overall, we will think about the tension between the attempts to represent the complexities of our historical moment and the inability to represent the same in terms of the “geopolitical aesthetic.” Theoretical reading will include Fredric Jameson and others. Films will include Head-On/Gegen die Wand, Three Times and others.
Texts:
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea
Rana Dasgupta, Tokyo Cancelled
Orhan Pamuk, Snow |
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