Fiction is full of characters who exert a pull on their readers: those in whom we see versions of ourselves, those for whom we sense an immediate bond of friendship or feel an intense enmity, those we hate to love or love to hate, and those who remain forever inscrutable no matter how hard we try to get inside their thoughts and feelings.

Our readings and viewings this semester follow authors, artists, activists, and fictional protagonists as they navigate borders between places, nations, times, and identities. Scenes and sites of various fault lines that we will visit in this course include: The expulsion from paradise in Genesis. The Trans-Siberian Railroad.

This is a course about absent presences, or entities that refuse to remain hidden in the shadows of history. Straddling the porous border between here and there, past and present, death and life, the undead, or not-quite dead, figures that populate our readings challenge us to rethink the linear unfolding of time. Ghosts, vampires, and zombies: these are the supernatural forces that we’ll encounter this semester.

How does a book, a text, a poem, an essay, a film show us its insights? How do we get them to show us what they know? Why is it that we get nothing from reading a book one year and get a whole world from reading the same book another year? Why it is that sometimes we find a work (of literature, of poetry, of film, of art) at exactly the right moment in our lives when we are most receptive to it? On the contrary, why do some works of art never speak to us, or arrive untimely, before or after we need them? Who do we trust to help us see what a work of art offers? How do we decide this?

Tales of travelers questing across the globe have been a cornerstone of popular culture from Homer’s Odyssey to Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet, while these adventure narratives continue to seduce large audiences, we must also consider the political and social ramifications of such texts. What ethical problems might authors face in trying to represent foreignness and “the exotic”? How does the notion of “adventure” become part of imperialist and nationalist projects from the eighteenth century to now?

How do contemporary authors and filmmakers create an aesthetic of the “archaic” that is characterized at once by irrevocable loss and an excess of presence? What “archaic” styles of living are possible under contemporary regimes of labor and production? What “archaic” desires are embedded in “contemporary” modes of expression? How do “contemporary” bodies, desires, and anxieties interact with “archaic” matter? Rather than asking after the fate of the ancients, the works we will analyze beg us to ask a different question: what is the fate of the contemporary?

The questions that we’d like to take up in this R1B course are: can literature give us knowledge about other people, especially people of a different class or race? And how does literature signal its own capacities and limitations in providing this kind of knowledge?

How does language convey meaning? Does it provide us with a comprehensive knowledge of the real? Or, does it solely rely on limited, man-made concepts and terms, which fail to fully express and define the fluidity and materiality in the world? In other words, is language always already ideological? And if so, are there other ways to convey meaning which break free from the limitations of language?

This course is about the demarcation, blurring, and erasure of cultural borders in literature. In the texts we read, cross-cultural encounters resound in different historical, linguistic and literary registers. The texts at once dramatize and participate in identity formations during a variety of periods, including colonial Mexico and interwar Poland. We examine principles of “translation” and the reciprocal relationship between language and culture. What are the special capabilities and limitations of literature in meaning transfer across cultures?

Even as economic pressures and modern technology lead young people to move further and further from the places they grew up, we remain attached to the myth of the family home. The home, we are told, is the nurturing and comfortable space to which we can always return. Even (or especially) when we’ve left it, the family hearth continues to promise a refuge from the wider world. Yet literature and film are replete with another sort of home: isolated but never totally private, familiar but never completely safe.