English | Introduction to Writing and the Study of Literature
L142 | 1908 | Gubar

L142 1908 GUBAR
Lecture Section:    1908   11:15A-12:05P MW    BH 310

Entitled "Writing Disaster," this course will concentrate on a
cluster of questions about the reasons why and the means by which a
range of writers deal with personal and public disasters.  In what
ways does the expression of imaginative vision help people survive in
a time of suffering?  What roles can the imagination play to help us
confront, comprehend, and survive inexplicable catastrophe?

After starting with the biblical Book of Job as a paradigm that
sets up the problem of representing calamity, we will then focus most
of our attention on literature composed in an American context.
Poetry, fiction, and films will be chosen to illuminate three crucial
cataclysms in western culture: African-American slavery, the
Holocaust, and the Viet Nam war.  We will therefore be dealing with
diverse forms of violence associated with the Othering of various
groups of human beings, be they African Americans, Jews, or Asians.
Given the pain addressed in the texts with which we will deal,
participants need to be forewarned that the material of trauma can
itself traumatize, that our common discussions may disrupt and disturb
us as much as they record the disruptions and disturbances that have
resonated throughout our country's history.  In the last two weeks of
the semester, we will look more explicitly at a transnational context
through a contemporary British novel about what it means to feel
oneself to be living in a post-disaster age amid cohorts (members of
the so-called Generation X) that experience what might be called

The course, which meets twice a week in large lecture and twice a
week in smaller discussion sections, requires students to do their
reading before they attend class.  In the composition component of the
course, we will struggle to avoid writing disasters more pedestrian
than those we encounter in the literature but nevertheless disabling.
Students will be asked to complete four differently structured writing
assignments, to keep a journal of reading responses, and to take two
exams, one at midterm and one at the end of the semester.