Intro to Comparative Literature

Intro to Comparative Literature

Dreams and Interpretations
Course Number: 
100.002
Course Catalog Number: 
32348
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Ramsey McGlazer
Days: 
Tu/Th
Time: 
9:30-11:00 am
Semester: 
Location: 
245 Hearst Gym

It is famously not that interesting to listen to someone else describe a dream. But dreams have always recurred in literature, and they continue to inspire poets, artists, and filmmakers, taking a fascinating range of cultural forms. Dreams have been seen as mere illusions, as visitations from the beyond, and as disclosing secret desires. They’ve been “read” for what they reveal about individual wishes, fantasies, and traumas, but they’ve also been understood as scenes of collective struggle and aspiration, as laboratories for the formation of other waking worlds.

In this course, we’ll read across genres (drama, poetry, fiction, and film) and across historical periods (from ancient Rome to the present), studying how dreams have been rendered and interpreted, recounted and analyzed, in a range of contexts. In the process, we will ask a series of related questions meant to prepare students for future coursework in comparative literature: What is an interpretation, and what makes for a convincing one? How can an interpretation honor, rather than domesticate, the unruliness of a dream or a work of literature? How can we become better interpreters ourselves, writing with precision, clarity, curiosity, and confidence even when we’re responding to complex texts, elusive dream sequences, or enigmatic dreams?

We’ll study some of the following, among other texts and films: Calderón, Life Is a Dream; Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Sor Juana, First Dream; Head, A Question of Power; Keats, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream; Lucretius, De rerum natura (selections); Pasolini, A Dream of Something; Spark, Reality and Dreams; Tarkovsky, Solaris; Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void. Our frameworks for critical (and dream) interpretation will be drawn from four key texts: Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; and Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.