Reading & Composition

Consciousness of our own mortality is a key part of what makes us human, giving rise to manifold cultural responses, including practices of commemoration, rituals of mourning, and built monuments. In this class, we will explore a wide range of these responses as expressed in literature, film, and visual art from antiquity to the present day. How do rituals of mourning and commemoration serve the needs of the living? How do these rituals, practices, and traditions surrounding death and dying vary between cultures and across history? One module will focus on the political stakes of death, from the State’s right to carry out executions to practices of mourning as sites of political resistance. Another module will consider representations of death and the dead to interrogate the political dimensions of how we remember, mourn, and memorialize the deceased. Throughout, we will focus on the cultural survival of the dead, whether through the medium of monuments or in the register of haunting, to ask how the dead offer spiritual sustenance and redemptive narratives to the living, how ‘the other side’ still speaks to us, in our world. What does it mean to be haunted, anyway? And how do we reckon with the continued presence of the dead among the living? We will, of course, also consider lighthearted takes on death, to ask what it means to turn death into a joke, as in “gallows humor” and “black comedy.”

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.

Drama:

Sophocles, Antigone

Shakespeare, Hamlet

Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady, pt. II

Short Fiction:

Joyce, “The Dead”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Secret Miracle”

Krasznohorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance (selections)

Gogol, Dead Souls (selections)

Novels:

Becker, Jakob the Liar

Sarah Schulman, People in Trouble

Toni Morrison, Sula

Films: 

Armando Ianucci, The Death of Stalin

Kieslowski, A Short Film About Killing

Visual Art:

Death of Marat (David)

Death and the Miser (Bosch)

Entombment of Christ (Caravaggio)

Poems:

Whitman, Selections from Leaves of Grass

Dickinson, “I felt a funeral in my brain”

Ginczaka, “Non Omnis Moriar”

Celan, “Todesfuge”

Larkin, “Aubade”

Theoretical Perspectives:

Lacquer, Work of the Dead

Derrida, Specters of Marx