Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Intermediate seminar on selected literary texts in relation to their social, historical, cultural, or theoretical contexts.

COURSE DETAILS:

THE RHYTHM OF THE CITY:
The Global Performance of Urban Literature   

While we begin with one of the first cities on the planet, and end with the chaotic modernity of today’s Shanghai and New York, the core of the course concerns efforts to read the rhythms of urban existence and everyday space as found in contemporary world fiction.  Combining recent fictions of velocity and transformation with theorizations of the city as an “ecology of flows”, our investigations will treat the urban experience as central to human societies and cultures in modernity.  In brief, via stories and short novels that set the city in motion along with the sometimes feverish imaginings of his its inhabitants, the metropolitan scene will be analyzed as an arena that acts upon its human inhabitants.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

LEARNING OUTCOMES:           

• Understanding Urban & Human Geography in relation to Literature.                                                 
• Continuing comprehension of terms & concepts of cultural criticism. 
• Awareness of the urban scene as a literary domain. 
• Comprehension of literary and cultural performativity.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

TEXTS: [SFU BOOKSTORE]                        
Virginia Woolf            Mrs. Dalloway                                    Penguin Mod Classics 0141182490
Don DeLillo                Cosmopolis                                       Scribner 0743244257
J-P Toussaint             Running Away (novella)                     Dalkey Arichive Press 156478567X
Murzban Shroff          Breathless in Bombay (stories)           St. Martin's Griffin 0312372701
Murong Xuecun          Leave me alone: Chengdu                  Make Do Publishing  9881841933      

Class materials will include excerpts from: The Epic of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh [trans. D. Ferry] FSG 978-0374523831 / Georg Simmel / Henri Lefebvre / Konstantin Cavafy / Lawrence Durrell / Siegfried Kracauer / Italo Calvino / Mongane Wally Serote / Gilles Deleuze / Michel de Certeau / Joe Moran / Kawabata Yasunari