Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Focuses on literary responses to political oppression, censorship, displacement, terrorism or warfare. Thematic interests may include human rights, gender inequality, racism or class exploitation. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

We live in an era in which human rights are trumpeted everywhere, and everywhere abused. The current global migrant crisis is only one of several areas of concern alongside instances of ethnic purification, gender equality, or the effects of environmental degradation. This course investigates instances in which the boundaries between humans and the moral entitlements they claim for themselves have become blurred or effaced, and so call for a different kind of activism. What debates over rights can be dramatized through literary explorations of the human other?

We begin with de Duras’s novella of racial discrimination in post-revolutionary France before turning to the modernist era with Kafka’s satire of immigrant survival in America. We then read Camus’s existentialist-inflected short stories of the ethical fallouts of human outlooks, and close with a short novella and a play: Touch concerns the world of a young Palestinian girl, and Puig’s prison fantasy looks at the theatre of imagination linking a political prisoner to a gay fellow inmate. As a means of joining human rights issues to minority rights, queer theory, and society’s others, we will watch three celebrated films: “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Zhang Yimou’s “Red Sorghum,” and “Ex Machina.”

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: