This course will explore literary representations of the self and its transformations across time, situations and contexts. We will read texts that represent the development of one’s identity in relation to the experience of time, the material world, interaction with others, the thought process, and, the act of writing.  In our study of the formation and transformation of one’s identity, we will encounter physical, psychological and allegorical changes of the self.

The countries that border the Mediterranean Sea span multiple continents and are home to distinct cultures, languages, and politics. But this shared geographic plane has been a site of contact for centuries.  In this course, we will read literature from countries bordering the Mediterranean in an attempt to explore and define the literary, social, linguistic, and political exchanges that took place across the Mediterranean basin.

The experience of confinement has historically lent itself to literary expression, yet it has many different forms. Here we will examine three particular types of confinement as they have been voiced in literature in an East/West comparative context: captivity, prison (specifically, the experience of political imprisonment), and the more recent phenomenon of mass incarceration associated with the modern prison industrial complex. The oldest literary texts that address the loss of freedom implicit in imprisonment are captivity narratives, widespread in the early modern period.

The experience of confinement has historically lent itself to literary expression, yet it has many different forms. Here we will examine three particular types of confinement as they have been voiced in literature in an East/West comparative context: captivity, prison (specifically, the experience of political imprisonment), and the more recent phenomenon of mass incarceration associated with the modern prison industrial complex. The oldest literary texts that address the loss of freedom implicit in imprisonment are captivity narratives, widespread in the early modern period.

Fiction is full of characters who exert a pull on their readers: those in whom we see versions of ourselves, those for whom we sense an immediate bond of friendship or feel an intense enmity, those we hate to love or love to hate, and those who remain forever inscrutable no matter how hard we try to get inside their thoughts and feelings.

Once considered primarily a form of education and/ or propaganda, the documentary film is enjoying a resurgence in popularity in the 21st century as a form of entertainment and art. In an age crazed with reality television and celebrity biographies, the documentary genre throws into relief a number of questions that have long vexed and animated literature, photography, and film: What does it mean to show a life “as it really is”, to tell a story “as it really happened”? How can authenticity be measured and proven, and what responsibility does a storyteller have to do so?

We tend to view fact and fiction as polar opposites, opposites that shape our concept of knowledge, truth, and morality. Yet when we speak of “actual fact” in contrast to “mere fiction,” we often take for granted or simply ignore the basis for differentiating them from one another. In this course, we will endeavor to define the precepts—cultural, philosophical, and psychological—that govern this distinction.

In this course, we will investigate the question of narrative reliability and whether an objective, ‘reliable’ representation of reality is really possible.  We will look at the complexities of narration in fiction and film by first asking how we define the nature of truth and reality.  Is truth an objective viewpoint on our world or a set of subjective interpretations?  What role does ‘lying’ play in society, and how would the perspective of a biased or deceptive narrator problematize our interpretation of a text or film?  How do issues of perspective affect our perception of truth and rea

This above all: to thine own self be true
And it doth follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
—Polonius, Hamlet

‘Found’ poems, quilts, and sculptures made out of trash. Narratives preoccupied with how to recover and retell a lost story. Museum installations that assemble and remake remnants of a past. Anthropologists obsessed with documenting threatened cultures before they presumably disappear. What do these imply about questions of rescue, recovery, and reuse? What is at stake in projects—literary, anthropological, cultural, and historical—driven by the intent to salvage?