Reading & Composition
HOW CAN WE KNOW? AMBIGUITY IN LITERATURE
Some texts have the ability to confound us. A hole in the plot, an unresolved ending, a word that feels wrong: these moments of ambiguity can frustrate our attempts to pin down what a text is really saying. But such riddles can also spark our curiosity and deepen our understanding of how literature works.
Each of the texts we’re reading presents an insoluble mystery. In some, we can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. Others challenge our moral intuitions. And some revel in the obscurity of a crucial word, event, or character. These texts are ideally suited for close reading and careful interpretation. The central focus of the class will be to help students write analytical essays in response to the texts.
Texts will include:
Novels:
The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Films:
Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee
Mulholland Drive by David Lynch
Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky
Drama:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Poetry by A. R. Ammons, Elizabeth Bishop, Bertolt Brecht, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, César Vallejo, and William Butler Yeats.
Short fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Andrei Sinyavsky.