Reading & Composition

In his Keywords, Raymond Williams explains, “community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships.” What we define as a community, our community, is often difficult to pin-down specifically (though we’d like to think we know it when we see it). Still, it is this idea of community that can both defines us and do us in. In this course we will consider texts from varied cultural and geographical locations where the question of community (How we define it? How it defines us?) is a central issue along with questions of kinship, ethics, aesthetics, language, and the law. In these texts, we will consider how community is essential to the development of both content and formal matters. We will be particularly concerned with the potentially negative effects community produces through its exclusionary gestures. Ultimately, in comparing these texts and through supplementary readings, our goal will be to articulate alternative ways of thinking community that aim to avoid these negative effects while capitalizing on the potential of its “warm persuasiveness.”

Required Texts:

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

My Brother, Jamaica Kincaid

Billy Budd, Herman Melville

Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Tomas Rivera

Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo

The Lover, A.B. Yehoshua

Films:

“All About My Mother”

“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”

Course reader with supplementary texts