Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores influential works of literature with a particular emphasis on how they exist across temporal and/or spatial divides, how they alternately bridge and reinforce differences of time, culture, and place. May be repeated for credit once if different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

Untrue Norths, Undead Souths
Much of settler-colonial North America, like much of the globe, still defines itself via a peculiar vertical space symbolism, a heavenly or true North associated with reason, morality, progress, and the intellect versus a libidinal southern hellscape associated with passion, injustice, backwardness, and the loins: Trudeau’s Canada versus Trump’s U.S.; the putatively antiracist U.S. North versus the racist U.S. South; the U.S. South embracing a wall against Mexico.  These "Souths," however, always refuse to accept our fantasies of their temporal and spatial exile, and much great literature has been written about the inevitable return of the North American repressed across borders and generations.  This course focuses on that theme in Caribbean, U.S., and Canadian fiction (those divisions may themselves be symptoms of the problem) chiefly as expressed through three overlapping genres: the Gothic, magical realism, and Afro-surrealism.  Why, in the 20th and 21st centuries, do the supernatural, the unnatural, and the uncanny still seem a good way to figure these inevitable disruptions of “our” northern complacencies?

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Students will read and write better.
Students will become familiar with the hemispheric approach to North American literatures that has emerged over the past two decades; its major principles and critical texts; its emergence under NAFTA and possible diminishing relevance in our seemingly more nationalistic age; and Canada's eccentric position within the hemispheric approach, both in terms of many non-Canadian hemispheric scholars' neglect and many Canadian scholars' resistance.
Students will know widely accepted definitions of the Gothic, magical realism, and Afro-surrealism, while also understanding the imprecision of such terms and the overlaps among them.
Students will begin to identify the range of affects produced by this sort of literature.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: