Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores the tendencies of globalization in the cultural realm, which while sparking cross-border communication, also tends to flatten identities into a coercive global norm. Focuses on writing in contexts of political oppression, digital communities, censorship, cultural displacement, terrorism and/or warfare. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

“The other shore” : Cultural Displacement & the Consolations of Art

Despite the ever-present human capacity to project some safer shore through art, film, & literary production, feelings of dislocation are no less likely in an era of conflict, diaspora, orientalism, and exile. Indeed, as the term cultural displacement suggests, one does not need to leave home to suffer the global condition – one can also become lost in translation or discover that one’s inherited traditions and moralities no longer reflect the possibility of forming an integrated self. At the same time, change can lead to discovery and renewal, to the promise of new life and the formation of new communities.

This interdisciplinary course looks at world cinema, images, and literature in order to examine how art can capture both the displacements and the consolations of finding oneself in a new place, even where such places exist primarily in the imagination. In short, we explore the challenges of human becoming in an era defined by replaceability and revolution as much as by one’s racial, ethnic, or sexual identities.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

• Understanding the place of exile and dislocation in literary studies.
• Continuing comprehension of terms & concepts of cultural comparison.
• Awareness of cultural displacement as an area of literary study.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: