The postwar psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott said: “Home is where we start from.” If home is where we start from, where are we going? Somewhere else? Somewhere better? What constitutes a home anyway? Is home a feeling? A place? A mother? A memory? And if we are leaving home, who stays home? And what do we carry with us from home as we go out into the world? Working comparatively across a range of media and texts from different genres, time periods, and national traditions, this course explores this question of home and why there is no place like it.

The postwar psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott said: “Home is where we start from.” If home is where we start from, where are we going? Somewhere else? Somewhere better? What constitutes a home anyway? Is home a feeling? A place? A mother? A memory? And if we are leaving home, who stays home? And what do we carry with us from home as we go out into the world? Working comparatively across a range of media and texts from different genres, time periods, and national traditions, this course explores this question of home and why there is no place like it.

Many of the literary texts we study today come to us incomplete. Perhaps the author passed away before the work was finished, or perhaps we know the text only through scraps of parchment used in the binding of a different manuscript. Still other texts consciously position themselves as fragments, even if this move is but an artifice on the part of the author. Though the precise type of fragmentation may vary, all these texts pose similar interpretive challenges to their readers. How can we productively engage with a text that is or that claims to be incomplete?

The postwar psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott said: “Home is where we start from.” If home is where we start from, where are we going? Somewhere else? Somewhere better? What constitutes a home anyway? Is home a feeling? A place? A mother? A memory? And if we are leaving home, who stays home? And what do we carry with us from home as we go out into the world? Working comparatively across a range of media and texts from different genres, time periods, and national traditions, this course explores this question of home and why there is no place like it.

A plague-ridden Thebes, an Indian reservation, a Rio slum, a U.S.-Mexico border town, the LA hood, a California women’s prison. These are the settings for our examination of characters who run up against obstacles—from within themselves, their families and tribes, the economic and legal systems they live in—that lead them to make criminal choices. These choices, and the risks they provoke, taint the characters even as they dare us to care for them. How do fiction writers, dramatists, journalists and filmmakers get us to invest our feelings in morally compromised characters?

Is it time to abandon “the Westphalian label” of territorial states as the main actors on the global stage? The question is justifiable at a moment when corporate and civic, religious and secular, as well as academic “globalizers” all around see the trans-nation as the only real present and the only possible future political form (this in spite of a neo-Westphalian attention to ensuring ‘national security’ around the world).

Three years of HS Spanish or two years with B+ average

This class on “the manual” will investigate what is particular about literary language by looking at fiction next to and as a form of “self help.” How does literature help us to understand the world—and how doesn’t it? How does literature help us to understand ourselves? And, again, how doesn’t it?  Is reading literature a socializing or antisocial activity? A form of solipsism or access to points of view different from our own?

Modernity often seems to be defined by a sense of loss and fragmentation. We will read several texts in which here and now seem largely to be defined by a there and then that are painfully absent, yet still consume the present. Paradoxically, the acts of remembrance performed in these texts take a strikingly innovative form. Moreover, writing itself can be said to be a way of leaving the past behind as well as of sustaining it.

Goals of the Course:

This course fulfills the second portion of the undergraduate reading and composition requirement. It is designed to help you develop clearer and more effective writing as you also hone your critical reading and research skills. The course emphasizes reading and writing as processes that are shaped by communities of readers and writers.  This means that peer editing, oral presentations, and discussion in class and on the web-based discussion board will be important components of the course.

Theme of the Course: