Reading & Composition

This is a course about people who fall short, plans that go bust, and stories that don’t turn out like you thought they would. Not that you’ll be spending the summer suffering through a series of tragic disappointments. For as we explore the making and unmaking of lofty ambitions, romantic aspirations, prophecies, and personal and collective ideals, we will also be questioning whether they’re all they’re cracked up to be, or even worth pursuing in the first place. Where do these enthralling, often crushing expectations come from? In what way do they shape our attitudes towards the past, the present, and the future? How are they framed within artistic works? With what preconceptions do we approach these works, and how might they respond to those preconceptions? Whether as characters, narratives, or readers, could going halfway, amiss, in the opposite direction, or nowhere at all towards fulfilling expectations—going somewhere completely unexpected—bring its own rewards?

Please purchase the following texts in the editions specified:

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Grove; ISBN 978-0802130341)
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (New Directions; ISBN 978-0811218221)

Shorter written texts, films, songs, and visual art may include:

Katherine Mansfield, “The Baron”
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle”
James Joyce, “Araby”
Roberto Bolaño, “Gómez Palacio”
Elizabeth Bishop, from Questions of Travel
Franco Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto
Vladimir Mayakovsky, “At the Top of My Voice”
Leonard Cohen, “Waiting for the Miracle” and “The Future”
Hieronymus Bosch, The Last Judgment
Gregory Crewdson, Beneath the Roses
Tex Avery, selected cartoons
Lars von Trier, Melancholia
John Huston, The Maltese Falcon
Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker
Fritz Lang, Metropolis
Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man