This course explores the relationship between the plotting of narratives and the plotting of conspiracies. We will read and view texts from a wide range of time periods, world regions, and genres—from Greek tragedy to French Harlequin comedy to Japanese whodunit to Congolese dystopian novel—paying attention to the ways in which the intrigue in the storylines thematizes not only the construction of the narratives themselves, but also the acts of reading and interpretation.

“The power of debt is described as if it were exercised neither through repression nor through ideology. The debtor is “free,” but his actions, his behavior, are confined to the limits defined by the debt he has entered into.”

       – Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man

What does it mean to think of performance as narrative? How can we read a spectacle as though it were literature? In this course, we will explore how narrative inhabits dance, oral traditions, audio forms, and theatrical performance from antiquity to the present. Along the way, we will encounter performances that are adaptations of literary texts and ask if these can function as an interpretive tool or a form of criticism.

“There are many understandings.” – Jeffrey Dolven

Translation is everywhere.  But what is it, exactly?  The term is often used to indicate anything transferred, adapted, communicated, displaced or interpreted. What does it mean to be “lost in translation”?  What is the difference between a translator and an author?  In this class we will examine translation as a creative process that bears meaning from one language to another, and think about the wide variety of metaphors implied by the term.

In this class we will read books centering on human rights issues, history and storytelling, primarily focused on the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries.  Ghosts, and other metaphysical beings, appear throughout all of the works we will be reading, as the past finds its way inside the present, reminding us of the historical atrocities which continue to shape our present and future.

As Benedict Anderson reminds us in Imagined Communities, “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communication.” How do we construct this image of our fellow community members?  What are the consequences of imagining them rather than meeting them? What happens to individuals that the community as a whole would prefer not to imagine? Is there a way to overcome the limits of such a community?

Memory is essential for personal and cultural identity; and memory is, for the most part, constructed as a narrative. Our sense of who we are – as individuals and as members of groups – depends upon the stories we tell about ourselves: stories that establish continuities over time, assign meanings to certain experiences, and create values.  Individual or cultural amnesia signifies a loss of identity, and a dangerous condition of disorientation in the world. But the intimate relationship between memory and narrative raises several pressing epistemological questions.

Tales of travelers questing across the globe have been a cornerstone of popular culture from Homer’s Odyssey to Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet, while these adventure narratives continue to seduce large audiences, we must also consider the political and social ramifications of such texts. What ethical problems might authors face in trying to represent foreignness and “the exotic”?  How does the notion of “adventure” become part of imperialist and nationalist projects from the eighteenth century to now? Is adventure a gendered enterprise?

What role should literature play in our lives? Does reading and discussing literature make us better people, better thinkers, better citizens? Or is attempting to extract some sort of use for literature a mistake, a misapprehension of something that has no purpose but that is good or pleasure in and of itself? Even more fundamentally, what counts as literature? Is there a class of truly “literary” works that can be isolated from the larger field of textual production? Is verse more literary than prose? Is fiction more literary than nonfiction writing?