Reading & Composition
Who Remembers the Sea? Waves of Memory and Mourning
Taking its title from the surreal-science-fiction novella Qui se souvient de la mer (1962, Mohammed Dib), this course will explore questions of loss, memory, and violence. As a guiding motif, we will look towards the sea from a multiplicity of positions (the shore, the port, the voyaging ship, the island, and the underwater depths) as well as various linguistic traditions (Francophone, Anglophone, and Persian) to reflect on notions of non-linear time, non-territorial visions of the world, and deep histories of violence and mourning. Immersing ourselves in texts and films that grapple with histories of slavery and colonialism, we will consider the ways the sea offers alternative narrative structures of the literary, visual, and historical. We will reflect on the paradoxical rhythms of the sea as both generative and violent force, critically examining varied gendered notions of the oceanic space. In this guise, our course is invested in the poetic, sensorial, and intellectual possibilities that emerge from a seascape epistemology. How do land-based notions of law transform at sea? What forms of life emerge in the spaces of encounter between sea and land? And, in particular, how does life at the maritime boundary (or port-city) affect language and ethnic identities (créolite, etc)? What lines of relation are opened through the sea? What are the connections between the sea and the unconscious, and how does the oceanic relate to the images of our dreams? What horizons of possibility (mythic, political, emancipatory) does sea-space produce? Join us as we depart from landlocked ways of knowing and navigate towards these watery horizons.
This is an R&C, writing-and-reading-intensive course, whose major goals are to improve students’ skills in close reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing, and to explore the relationships between the three skills. A substantial amount of time will be devoted to writing workshops and instruction as we develop our critical reading and analytical writing skills. Students will be required to actively participate in class discussion, read (and reread) carefully, and write papers with revisions.
Literary-Theoretical Texts may include:
Who remembers the sea (Qui se souvient de la mer), Mohammed Dib
Sutra, Simin Daneshvar
Crossing the Mangrove (Traversée de la mangrove), Maryse Condé
Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan
The Blue Inhabitants of the Sea, The Sea in the Vineyards, Moniru Ravanipur
Omeros, Derek Walcott
Claire of the Sea Light, Edwidge Danticat
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard
Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis, Cesare Casarino
Mourning and Melancholia, Freud
The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy
Poetics of Relation (Poétique de la Relation), Édouard Glissant
Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison
Films and Visual Culture:
The Day I Became a Woman, 2000, dir. Samira Makhmalbaf
Daughters of the Dust, 1991, dir. Julie Dash
At Land, 1944, dir. Maya Deren
About Ely (Dar Bareye Ely), 2009, dir. Asghar Farhadi
Five: Dedicated to Ozu, 2003, dir. Abbas Kiarostami
Selected photographs by Ana Mendieta
Secret Ballot (Ra’ye makhfi), 2001, dir. Babak Payami
Tangsir, 1973, dir. Amir Naderi (adapted from a story by Sadegh Chubak)