Modern Literary Studies - Fall 1998

Please visit the course website at:

http://wwwcatsic.ucsc.edu/~ltmo64d/index.html

Our starting point will be Walter Benjamin, with forays into the work of Cynthia Ozick, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and then we'll reach out to a range of other traditions and diasporic writings, including those of Milosz, Tan, Ellison, and Mukherjee. We will be exploring theoretical issues -- exile, communities, homelessness, cosmopolitanism -- and works of diaspora fiction. The resulting reciprocal interpretations will elaborate central aspects of diaspora writing, and take the historical experience of different communities into account, beginning with Jewish diaspora writing. We'll read a book a week and while focusing on the general theoretical issues -- exile, communities, homelessness, cosmopolitanism -- test them against a particular work of fiction. The result should be reciprocal analyses. The different kinds of expertise we bring to the course should make it possible for us to collaborate in various ways. My notion is that we'll work out of literary and cultural traditions we know best and report on them to each other in the diasporic context, thus the long reading list.

• Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Reflections.
• I.B.Singer, The Slave
• Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor & Memory, The Messiah of Stockholm
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Shadow & Act
• Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah
• Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman & Other Stories, Jasmine
• Amy Tan, The Joy-Luck Club
• Moacyr Scliar, The Centaur in the Garden
• Clive Sinclair, Diaspora Blues

• Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
• Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto
• Amy Levy, Complete Novels and Selected Writings
• Czeslaw Milosz, Selected Poems
• Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish
• Woman Writer: Romance & Reform In Victorian England
• Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
• Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Benjamin
• Homi Babha, The Location of Culture
• Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion
• Bryan Cheyette, ed., Between Race & Culture
• M. Baumgarten & H.M.Daleski, editors, Homes & Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination
• Gerard Chaliand & Jean-Pierre Rageau, The Penguin
• Atlas of Diasporas

Suggested Films: Enemies, A Love Story, Hammet, Chinatown

We'll do seminar reports, one small, one large paper.

Revised 7/19/04.