Reading & Composition

Misfits, outcasts, strangers, foreigners, and bohemians – writers frequently are, or are preoccupied with, weird people. An absolutely singular personality, character, or appearance remains perpetually fecund material for narrative fixation; conversely, such figures lend themselves to being captivating narrators, providing us with the opportunity to inhabit a truly alien point of view. In this class, we will examine various works of literature that either describe an encounter with a peculiar person from the perspective of a purportedly normal narrator or that recount the experience of being strange oneself. In both cases, we will see that the weirdness of the subject matter shows up in the strange shape these texts themselves: apparently disinterested spectators will reveal their own fixations and hang-ups through their odd narrative ticks and telling descriptions surrounding their encounters with strangeness, and weird figures will find everyday language and typical narrative conventions inadequate to expressing their own strangeness. The purpose of locating these strange features is not to somehow land on a ‘correct’ definition of the normal, but to see how a variety of definitions operate: who do they exclude and why? why would someone be attached to a particular version of normality, especially if they do not already fit within it? What unique resources for living does being abnormal offer, and at what cost? In pursing these questions, we will attend to how the category of “normal” is overburdened by the societal constraints of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability—among others—that it tenuously upholds.

Working list of texts:
Haywood, “Fantomina”
Wordsworth and Coleridge, selections from Lyrical Ballads
Toomer, “Fern”
Poe, “The Man of the Crowd”
Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Larsen, Passing
Baudelaire, “Counterfeit Money”
Dickinson, selected poems
Whitman, selections from “Song of Myself”
Stein, Tender Buttons
Kafka, “The Burrow”
Hartman, Wayward Lives