Sections offered FALL 2021:
#45916 |
EYAL PERETZ |
MW 7:00-8:15pm |
BH 143 |
Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
Who is the foreigner? This seems to be a question at the heart of every culture. Is the foreigner an exciting and promising arrival, bringing unheard of novelties, opening one to the wider world beyond one’s habitation? or is the foreigner a danger announcing a culture’s possible destitution, the threat of being taken away, or deprived, from one’s familiar and customary home? But what at all is at the source of this double quality of the foreigner which each culture, – in its desire, on the one hand, to open beyond itself, to the world, and, on the other hand, in its anxious closing in upon itself – seems to waver around? What precisely is the nature of the foreigner’s exciting promise, and why at all would the foreigner be seen as posing such a dangerous threat? The thesis of this class is that the most fruitful place from which to answer these questions are works of literature and art which can be defined as the places in culture where the foreigner, and the foreign, that which is beyond each culture, truly come to speak. And when it speaks, what does the foreign say? in order to be able to answer this question we will be looking at many works of art – in literature, film, theater, painting, music, etc – from numerous cultures, from Europe to Japan, from India to America.