We begin from the premise that the religious promise of heaven as the fulfillment of life and perfect love, persist on in modern society. These vestiges of paradise arguably become the driving force of a world organized by capitalism where human life must seek self-transcendence in the world. To understand this elusive and contradictory secular ideology, we will examine some major intellectual arguments that both advocated and critiqued it, including those by Locke, Marx, Freud, and Coetzee. But the main emphasis will be on American and British film as well as fiction by Johnson, Austen, Wilde, Fitzgerald, Roth, Tobin, and Whitehead among others.
Professor Stan's description of what she envisions and has planned for the course:
Is there a more gratifying intellectual pleasure than immersing oneself in the entire body of work of a brilliantly imaginative, knowledgeable, and wise author? Perhaps pairing two such authors, reading them side by side, and engaging in conversation with them—in writing, figuring out what we think about their worlds, in a friendly community of research and writerly exchange and collaboration. In this seminar designed for advanced students passionate about literature, research, and writing, we are going to read most of the novels, as well as poetry and some nonfiction, by two exquisite writers who engage with themes of cultural and personal memory, history, and human life in the long duration: W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and Bernardine Evaristo (b. 1959). While familiarizing ourselves with their (very different) sensibilities and archives, we’ll piece together not only their respective literary careers but also their conjoined, thus expanded, vision of European history, as shaped by colonialism, wars, Nazism, and the Holocaust, migration, decolonization, and various reckonings with the past. Sebald and Evaristo share a keen interest in visual art and have been the subjects of documentaries.
Rather than split the syllabus into two separate units, one dedicated to each author, we’ll move back and forth between their creative worlds. We’ll read and analyze Sebald’s novels Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001), selections from After Nature (1988) and On the Natural History of Destruction (1999), poems from For Years Now (2001), Unrecounted (2003) and Across the Land and the Water (2008). While immersed in his perambulatory texts, we’ll reflect on his insights into visual art and his use of photography.
Whereas Sebald’s explorations are mostly continental European, Evaristo’s work reflects her extended family’s rich heritage (English, Irish, and German on her mother’s side, Brazilian and Nigerian on her father’s) as well as her interest in the African diaspora and the presence of Black people in Europe since Roman times. In addition to her novels, some of them in verse, The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Soul Tourists (2005), Blonde Roots (2008), Lara (1997, exp. 2009), and Girl, Woman, Other (2014), we’ll engage with her 2021 memoir Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, her essay Look Again: Feminism (2021, on the representation of women of color in British art), and a selection of writings on the theater.
