Literary traditions have developed and continually redefined the often complex relations between author, poet, narrator, character, and reader in literature. The author implicates himself in the narrative intentionally or unintentionally, offering overt or subtle commentaries, opinions, digressions, or self-reflections.The first person narration proves biased, unreliable, limited in the perspective of the storyteller. Even the “omniscient,” godlike voice can be destabilized by the poet’s subjectivity or self-conscious awareness of herself.

If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction,
he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in
the same disorder—which, repeated, becomes order: the Order.
My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope.
—“The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges

The Tower of Babel is a story in the Book of Genesis that describes how languages and habitats became multiple and scattered.

The Mediterranean is a region of convergences: ancient landscapes and modern metropolises; local customs and national identities; peripheries and centers; the archaic and the modern; empires, religions, and nations. It is a space of transits and migrations between the West, the East, the South, and North Africa. Challenging the notion of a temporal and spatial unity, art cinema affords us perspectives of the Mediterranean as a site comprised of micro-regions, multiple identifications, and conflicts. The cinema is a powerful medium that projects an image of the Mediterranean.

Nowadays, we are constantly asked to become “savvy” and “techknowledgeable” in new ways.  Yet this rapid evolution in the uses of our intellect seems to be rooted in a more fundamental understanding of “rationality” which we all share. Does this concept of “rationality” itself change with technological progress? Or are our ideas about “rationality” older than we realize? Popular imagination, at least, has to this day found no better depiction of what it means to be “rational” than the ubiquitous image of the spinning cog-wheels, as Google Images confirms.

Our course takes up its task of developing critical reading and writing skills through an exploration of literary texts that thematize their own reading: texts that draw attention to the work of reading itself; texts that make us think both critically and strategically about how we as readers ought to approach them; texts that implicate their readers in ways that make them uncomfortable or self-conscious.

This course investigates hemispheric American literature, film and art from the 19 th to the 21 st centuries. We will investigate how history is rewritten inside these mediums and how these novelists, film-makers and artists revise the past in order to produce an alternative reality for previously silenced voices. How is history produced in the first place? What versions of history are retold inside these works and to what end? How can these re-makings of history enable alternative understandings of the past to occur?

Borders on maps have historically been used to delimit space and mark differences in cultures, regions, languages, and national identities. However, for the people who live in the space of borderlands the divisions between communities and cultures are rarely as concrete as the state-imposed boundaries that seek to divide them.

This course takes its title from Timothy Morton’s book Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, where Morton is one of several scholars who call for the abandonment of the term “nature” in environmental discourse.

“There are those who believe in my innocence and there are those who believe in my guilt. There’s no in between – either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing, or I am you.”

-Amanda Knox

Class Location: Dwinelle 233

Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:15-3:15                                                             CCN: 23280

Course Description:

Artists across time and geographies and cultures have been driven to reflect on militarization and war: what is war for? What does war do? What does militarization do to the soldier, the civilian, the child, and us? In this course we will examine how the arts are deployed in militarized zones, times of war, and postwar memorializations. To do this, we will examine “performance” in diverse militarized cultures through theatre, animation, film, and new media.