12026

LIT 3019      Nabokov:Conclusive Writing

Olga Voronina

M  W    1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLIN 309

LA

ELIT

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

This course will focus on Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories as well as his memoir Conclusive Evidence and the novel Pnin, both of which first appeared in story-length installments in The New Yorker.  We will read “Details of a Sunset,” “Christmas,” “A Guide to Berlin,” “A Nursery Tale,” “The Visit to the Museum,” “The Circle,” “Spring in Fialta,” “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” “Ultima Thule,” “Solus Rex,” “Signs and Symbols,” and “The Vane Sisters.” Keeping our eyes open for the elusive, but meaningful, textual details and discussing the writer’s narrative strategies, we will also trace the metaphysical streak that runs through the entire Nabokov oeuvre. A discussion of all matters editorial will be our priority. We will study Nabokov’s correspondence with Katharine White and William Maxwell, his editors at The New Yorker, and look at the drafts of his stories, now part of the Berg Collection in the NYPL. Our endeavor to understand the Nabokovian process of composition and revision will go hand-in-hand with the work on our own writing.  This course is a literature junior seminar.  

Class size: 15

 

12496

LIT 348      Black Skin, White Masks: Decolonization through Fanon

Alys Moody

T         1:30 pm-3:50 pm

RKC 200

LA D+J

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; French Studies; Human Rights

Contemporary political activism often calls on us to “decolonize” our lives, our curricula, and our minds. Where does the concept of decolonization come from? What can we learn by reading the history of decolonial thought as a simultaneously literary, political, and philosophical project? This course approaches these questions through a sustained reading of the work of Frantz Fanon, a Martinican writer, intellectual, psychiatrist, and anti-colonial revolutionary, who became one of the leading thinkers of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. We will read Fanon’s key texts—including Black Skin, White Masks, his analysis of the psychopathologies produced by colonial racism, and The Wretched of the Earth, his controversial defense of anticolonial violence—in their larger literary, philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic contexts. Our goal is to see how Fanon’s distinctively literary writing allows him to make important advances in thought, and to see how he draws on literary and other sources to develop his account of racism and colonization—as well as to see a way beyond them. Placing Fanon into dialogue with poets and novelists like Aimé Césaire, Richard Wright, and Léopold Senghor, philosophers like Hegel and Sartre, psychologists such as Freud and Alfred Adler, and the political discourse and debates of his day, we will ask: how does colonization produce the colonized and the colonizers? What are the psychological and social results of this process? And what would true decolonization require? This course is a junior seminar and will train students in the reading of theory in its historical, literary, and philosophical contexts. Students will work towards a sustained research essay as part of the course. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar and part of the World Literature offering course.

Class size: 15

 

12499

LIT 356      Playing in the Dark: Toni Morrison’s Literary Imagination

Peter L'Official

W       1:30 pm-3:50 pm

HEG 200

LA

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; American Studies

“How is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be “universal” or race free?” This course takes Toni Morrison’s book-length 1992 essay, Playing in the Dark, (the above quotes are drawn from its Preface) as inspiration for an exploration of not only Morrison’s own fiction, non-fiction, and work as a literary editor, but also how to read—and read critically--within the fields of American and African American literature. We will read Morrison’s work (and that of her contemporaries, predecessors, critics, and scholars) in order to examine issues of race and ethnicity, gender, language, identity, and technique, and we will attempt to ask and answer versions of these very same opening questions that Morrison herself leveled at American fiction. This is a Literature Junior Seminar, and as such we will devote substantial time to methods of research, writing, and revision. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar and fulfills the American Studies Junior Seminar requirement.

Class size: 15