This is a course about absent presences, or entities that refuse to remain hidden in the shadows of history. Straddling the porous border between here and there, past and present, death and life, the undead, or not-quite dead, figures that populate our readings challenge us to rethink the linear unfolding of time. Ghosts, vampires, and zombies: these are the supernatural forces that we’ll encounter this semester.

How does a book, a text, a poem, an essay, a film show us its insights? How do we get them to show us what they know? Why is it that we get nothing from reading a book one year and get a whole world from reading the same book another year? Why it is that sometimes we find a work (of literature, of poetry, of film, of art) at exactly the right moment in our lives when we are most receptive to it? On the contrary, why do some works of art never speak to us, or arrive untimely, before or after we need them? Who do we trust to help us see what a work of art offers? How do we decide this?

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?

How do contemporary authors and filmmakers create an aesthetic of the “archaic” that is characterized at once by irrevocable loss and an excess of presence? What “archaic” styles of living are possible under contemporary regimes of labor and production? What “archaic” desires are embedded in “contemporary” modes of expression? How do “contemporary” bodies, desires, and anxieties interact with “archaic” matter? Rather than asking after the fate of the ancients, the works we will analyze beg us to ask a different question: what is the fate of the contemporary?

The questions that we’d like to take up in this R1B course are: can literature give us knowledge about other people, especially people of a different class or race? And how does literature signal its own capacities and limitations in providing this kind of knowledge?

How does language convey meaning? Does it provide us with a comprehensive knowledge of the real? Or, does it solely rely on limited, man-made concepts and terms, which fail to fully express and define the fluidity and materiality in the world? In other words, is language always already ideological? And if so, are there other ways to convey meaning which break free from the limitations of language?

This course is about the demarcation, blurring, and erasure of cultural borders in literature. In the texts we read, cross-cultural encounters resound in different historical, linguistic and literary registers. The texts at once dramatize and participate in identity formations during a variety of periods, including colonial Mexico and interwar Poland. We examine principles of “translation” and the reciprocal relationship between language and culture. What are the special capabilities and limitations of literature in meaning transfer across cultures?

Even as economic pressures and modern technology lead young people to move further and further from the places they grew up, we remain attached to the myth of the family home. The home, we are told, is the nurturing and comfortable space to which we can always return. Even (or especially) when we’ve left it, the family hearth continues to promise a refuge from the wider world. Yet literature and film are replete with another sort of home: isolated but never totally private, familiar but never completely safe.

South and North America share a similar history of conquest, slavery, nation-building, and migration. The works and authors we will read in this course help us think about the ways this history is transmitted, codified and remembered. They ask us, as readers of these texts, to reexamine the history we think we know. Storytelling in the Americas thus acts as a means of rewriting history, thereby opening up the spaces for previously unheard voices to appear and exist.

This course will revolve around the following questions:

Every family has its secrets. In this class, we’ll look at fiction, film, and poetry that reveal what happens when a family’s metaphorical skeletons emerge from the closet. Does the revelation lead to crisis? Chaos? Resolution? With some of our stories, the reader alone learns a character’s secret, while the story’s other characters remain in the dark. What kind of “revelation” is this? How does the possession of this secret knowledge affect a reader’s attitude toward the character and the story’s events? How do these secrets alter or contradict our notions of family?