The meaning of the terms “east” and “west” might seem self-evident at first, but on closer examination they raise many questions: Do they refer to specific regions of the globe, and if so, which ones? Are they, instead, descriptions of distinct types of culture? What do “eastern” and “western” cultures consist of? Where did our notions about the meanings of these terms originate? And what can literature and film tell us about the west, the east, and the relations between these two ideas?

In this class we will study cases of people living in the margins of mainstream rationality or commonsense--people whose rejection of this world takes the form of a flight to fantasy, utopianism or outright madness. We will investigate what about their respective societies makes such flight compelling or necessary. 
 

In a 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin offers the idea of “the charmed circle” to reimagine how sexualities are stratified within societies in terms of power and visibility. This course takes up Rubin’s concept as the starting point for practicing fundamental critical skills of inquiry, writing, and research.

Under the regime of idleness, to kill the time, which kills
us second by second, there will be shows and theatrical
performances always and always. 
—Paul Lafargue, “The Right to Be Lazy” (1883)
Was ever idleness like this?
—Emily Dickinson
Nothing to be done.
—Estragon, Waiting for Godot

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and
katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding
darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.”

- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

A group of Chicano/a artists spray paint the exterior of an art museum in protest of the museum’s exclusionary practices. An African-born woman writes poetry about the experience of becoming a slave. The son of a dying woman journeys to a land of the dead hoping to meet his long-lost father and reclaim his inheritance. A Native American man spends twenty-four hours trying to earn money to buy back a family heirloom. A black woman abandons her home and previous marriages in search of

This course will explore fairy tales and how such stories are adapted and translated across cultural, linguistic, national, historical, and temporal boundaries. Most of us know many fairy tales, but the versions of those fairy tales vary widely. Examining these variations, together we will be asking what it means to adapt a story that ‘everyone knows.’ What old meanings are lost, and can they be recovered? What new meanings emerge with new adaptations or as the surrounding culture evolves?