Sections offered FALL 2021:

CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; IUB GenEd A&H credit

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

Accidents and catastrophes are dramatic and always possible events that challenge individual and collective life. They break the protective shields that ward off the threats surrounding us. Their traumatic impact calls upon psychological and cultural coping mechanisms and forces us to reconfigure our lives that will never be the same. How have cultures dealt with the unexpected breakdown of order and normality? This course imparts a critical knowledge about the models according to which narrations about these events are formed and asks how literature and film can help to cope with disasters. The stories we tell ourselves help integrate and make sense of what has previously mutilated us. They also anticipate possible future accidents and enable us to cope with them. Narratives therefore can have an immunological function. In Modernity, accident and catastrophe – both previously interpreted as destiny – change their meaning. They stand for contingency and represent a risk inherent in our way of life. Urban spaces, modern working environments, and new means of transportation such as trains and the automobile make accidents more probable and ubiquitous. The course will examine how filmic and narrative representations integrate the disintegration and violence inherent in our world. Accidents are sources for artistic productivity. We will read short texts from Thucydides and Heinrich von Kleist to Franz Kafka and Cortázar, and discuss films from Buster Keaton to Brian de Palma and Almodovar. The course is therefore also an introduction to major texts of the literary and filmic tradition.

Required texts:

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Oxford World’s Classics)

All other texts, paintings, photos, and materials will be provided.

Sections offered FALL 2021:

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

What do we mean when we say that an event is “tragic”? Is a death more tragic if it is the result of a murder than if it happened by accident or from natural causes? Do we say it is “tragic” in order to make sense of it or as a way of saying that we give up explaining it? Is it an expression of absence of meaning or pointing toward a logic of a different order? Is tragedy linked to a sense of justice or does it respond to the lack of justice? What role do religion, politics and chance play in our perception of life’s misery? And why has tragedy always been so central to popular culture, from the public performances of ancient Greece to the rise and fall of present-day celebrities? Indeed, how can we explain the pleasure we get from regarding the pain of others? In this course, we will address questions like these, as a way to explore tragedy in its relation to life, art, death and hope.

Material studied will include world famous literary works from the Bible, Greek and neoclassical tragedy (Sophocles and Racine), 20th-century tragedy (Miller and Beckett), examples from film and TV series (including the 1995 film by Mathieu Kassovitz, Hate; episodes from The Wire and Scandal), as well as critical texts related to the questions above, from Aristotle and Nietzsche to contemporary thinkers like Susan Sontag and Simon Critchley. Special emphasis will be put on the idea of tragedy in the 21st century, at once in our own lives, in critical writing and in artistic production (and pursued by the students in final research projects).

Sections offered FALL 2021:

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

In this course, we will read seven 21st-century American novels. The novels we read vary in style and content, just as the authors vary in their race, ethnicity, gender, regional, and national background. All are concerned with the power of circumstance, however, and with the role difference, of, for example, class, gender, race, color and sexuality, plays in shaping a person’s life. The first book we will read is part of the transnational turn that is a key trend in 21st-century American fiction. That book, Americanah, is as much concerned with the country in which its author was born, Nigeria, as it is with the United States. After Adichie, we will read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied Sing. Part road novel, part prison narrative, part family tale, Ward’s novel offers a sometimes mythic account of African-American life. Our next read is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, which focuses on a bit part actor struggling against Asian and Asian-American stereotypes. Tommy Orange’s There There is a novel which culminates at a powwow in Oakland, but which also seeks to capture the complex nature of Native American identity. Next up is Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer Prize winning Less, a satirical account of a gay male writer, about to turn 50, who is traveling the world from one minor literary event to another. He meets with much humiliation, and finally love, along the way. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is a sprawling work of science fiction which focuses on, and provides a solution for, climate change. We will end the class with a novel about the white working class, Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, a family novel full of love, loyalty, crack, violence, and death. Range of method and content is one key to the class, then. I want us to think, too, however, about the connections between the books we read, our ability to connect, or otherwise, to the characters they portray, the different ways in which the novels explore their characters’ attempts to connect, and the connection between characters and the worlds in which they, and you, live. If you read the books in the way I want you to read them, you will put yourself in the heads of the writers you read, and the people you read about, however different they may be from you.

WRITING REQUIREMENTS

Two essays that are at least 1500 words long. 65% of the final grade. Seven blog posts. Either three or four of your responses will comment on a book we are reading, while the other three or four will respond to two comments made by other students in the class. I will grade three of your comments. You will receive a checkmark for each of your other contributions to the Blog.  The lowest grade you receive for a graded Blog assignment will not count towards your final grade. 35% of your final grade will be based on your Blog responses, and on your participation in class.

READING

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah.

Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown.

Tommy Orange, There There.

Andrew Sean Greer, Less.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future.

Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone.

NOTE: Please buy physical copies of the books. No e-books allowed.