ENGL 3810: Reading as Writing

TR 2:55-4:10 C.I.D 352847 - 2840

Course limited to 15 students. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor on the basis of a writing sample.
expanded description

In this course we'll read a small number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and poems, write frequently about them, and read each other's work as collaborators and commentators. We will pay much attention to the way original literary works "read" other works and to the way our own readings may, critically and creatively, rewrite the texts we read.

English 3810's themes are the connections among the works studied and the uncanny reading possibilities these open up. The fall 2008 list foregrounds uncanniness. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre recalls and weaves together folktales, romantic ballads, and religious allegories in order to tell the story of a young woman's maturation: to surpass the Gothic novel, she reinvents it. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys writes a post-colonial "prequel" to Jane in which the Rochester story returns in old clothes but in an entirely new spirit. Henry James' Turn of the Screw features a governess and two children haunted by uncanny figures of ancient evil -- who may have been resident in Jane all along. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita turns out to be a hilarious, ghostly parody of Edgar Allan Poe's aestheticism and Sigmund Freud's own speculations on uncanny primal scenes; reinventing Poe's dead-lady stories, it also curiously re-invents a Lolita tale from 1916, recently rediscovered. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway defies news of "the death of the author" to survive in, and also survive, Michael Cunningham's remake of the book in The Hours of 1998.

We'll let these texts contend or cooperate to deliver unusual reading and writing experiences and (not least important) pleasure.

Questions to Stuart Davis, sad4@cornell.edu, GS g39

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