Reading & Composition

In this class we will study works of fiction that revolve around rogues, tricksters, and outlaws, whether comic or tragic, sympathetic or monstrous. We will start with folktales, cartoons and picaresque stories, move on to novels, plays, films, and other narrative critiques of social mores, and also examine relevant theory and criticism that raise larger questions about rogue discourses. Particular attention will be paid to the period of economic boom and bust in the first half of the twentieth century and its implications for more current concerns. Topics for discussion will include narrative discourse, irony and point-of-view; social inequality and mobility; power, ideology, and tactics of resistance; cynicism and false consciousness; criminality and the law; and the ethics and politics of recognition and redistribution.

Through regular written assignments and in-class discussion, we will also work on developing skills for writing and revising argumentative, analytical essays. Requirements will include prompt attendance and participation, short writing responses on bSpace, a midterm essay analyzing course materials closely, and a longer research paper or independent project.

Books

Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux)

Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes and Francisco de Quevedo, The Swindler (Penguin)

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Norton Critical Edition)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Scribner)

Bertolt Brecht, “The Threepenny Opera” (Penguin)

Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal (Grove)

Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey (Vintage)

Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star (New Directions)

J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (or another text to be decided by students)

Films

City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)

Selected clips to be decided

Course reader (to be purchased at Metro Publishing, 2440 Bancroft Way)

• Franz Kafka, “A Report To An Academy” in Stanley Corngold, ed. and tr., Kafka’s Selected Stories (New York: Norton, 2007)

• Diane Macdonell, Theories of Discourse: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)

• Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Knowledge, tr. A.M. Shedidan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972)

• Carl Jung, “The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, tr. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)

• Jacques Derrida, “License and Freedom: The Roué,” “The Rogue That I Am,” and “(No) More Rogue States” in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, tr. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005)

• Robert Alter, Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 1-11, 35-58, 106-109

• Stuart Miller, The Picaresque Novel (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve, 1967), selections

• Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 146-161, 226-262

• Miguel de Cervantes, “Rinconete and Cortadillo” in Exemplary Stories, ed. and trans. Lesley Lispon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

• Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, tr. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 29-39, 56-69

• Georg Lukács, “Class Consciousness” in History and Class Consciousness(Cambrdige: MIT Press, 1972)

• Bertolt Brecht, “The Literarization of the Theatre” in Brecht on Theatre, tr. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964)

• Walter Benjamin, “On Epic Theater” in Selected Writings: Vol. 4, 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)

• Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 15-42

• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “From A Theory of the Criminal” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002)

• Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense” and selection from On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 57-96

• Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, tr. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. xxvi-xxxix, 3-9

• Gerald Vizenor, “Tricksters and Transvaluations” in The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)

• Wu Ch’eng-en, Monkey, tr. Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1943)