An examination of prose fiction as a venue for explorations of power and identities, particularly of how identities are constructed as well as how literary texts (re)present and can work to deconstruct identities. Specific facets of identity considered include those of gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality in The Arabian Nights, Le roman de Silence, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Ngüguï wa Thiong’o’s “Minutes of Glory,” Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child, and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. Reflection on broader questions of identity construction in terms of self and other in the world in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Calvino’s The Non-Existent Knight, and several short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Emphasis on close reading of literary texts as well as on critical analysis and writing.

This course focuses on issues of cultural and individual identity that arise in literary texts situated in select regions of the Mediterranean World, or that center on tensions between the European North/South and East/West divides. We will examine texts that span a wide time range, from ancient to contemporary. Topics of interest include: “Orientalism” (idealized, distorted, and stereotyping representations of the “East” by Western writers); slavery in the Mediterranean world; imperialist struggles between West and East with reference to the Persian and Ottoman Empires; national identity and the question of Greece; religion, cultural identity, and Turkish guest workers in modern Germany; the European refugee crisis of the 21st century. We will work within an antiracist framework: analyzing, critiquing, and demystifying stereotypes, religious prejudice, and East-West cultural binaries.

Through an examination of literary texts over several centuries, along with relevant background readings, we will analyze issues of European power and identity, thinking of “Europe” as a socially and politically constructed fiction rather than as a normative fact. To do this we will pay particular attention to literary texts that thematize this constructed notion of identity or that were written by authors who themselves reside on the margins of Europe. Among more canonical authors who address these issues, this will include authors of immigration, displacement, and marginalization, as well as authors writing from the traditional border areas of European culture. Sample authors include: J.W. Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Christa Wolf, Emine Özdamar, Zafer Şenocak, Orhan Pamuk, Laila Lalami.

Examination of contemporary texts that (re)tell the story of an earlier text by having previously marginalized and/or silenced characters narrate their own stories. Focus on how these contemporary texts address otherness and marginalization, specifically in terms of gender, race, class, language, and power. Texts include John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), in which the monster Grendel, the villain from the 8th-century epic Beowulf, retells the events of the epic from his perspective; Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife (2018), which sets the characters from Beowulf in contemporary, suburban American and which Grendel’s mother narrates in part; Maryse Condé’s I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986), in which the historical figure, Tituba, a West Indian slave accused of witchcraft, tells her story, one that includes the stories of others, as Condé’s Tituba shares a prison cell with Hester Prynne, the heroine in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850); and Suzan-Lori Parks’ In the Blood (1999), which tells the story of Hester La Negrita, a modern-day Hester Prynne, and her fight against myriad systems of oppression. As we engage with these intertexts, we will focus on developing and strengthening the skills of close reading and critical analysis, both as readers and as writers.