The Junior Seminar is a year-long intensive study in the theory and practice of literary interpretation, or how and why we read literature the way we do. Having grappled with poetry and poetic theory in the first semester of Junior Seminar, this semester our focus will be on narrative and prose forms (acknowledging that poetry/narrative is an imperfect delineation, with a range of hybrid forms within these categories and a world of literary genres that lies beyond them). The loose theme of this semester’s seminar is “Narrative Survivance.” From Gerald Vizenor’s concept of “survivance” to Toni Morrison’s emphasis on “re-memory,” this semester we will grapple with how narrative functions in the work of historical memory, how criticism and critique are bound up in narrative, and how storytelling is linked to our individual and collective survival. What is the work of narrative–and narrative critique–in the long afterlife of colonialism and racial slavery, in the ravages of late stage capitalism and the ongoing slow (but increasingly fast) wreck of climate catastrophe? How does narrative order our understanding of the past, present, and future? How does the novel form–a constantly reconfigured and de-configured historical structure–encode a politic? How do we theorize narrative, and how do narratives themselves theorize the work and power of storying? What are the world(s) that narrative enables us to critique or, alternatively, imagine into being? Throughout the semester, we’ll attend to the colonial history of English as a discipline and to the interdisciplinary decolonial methods that sustain the urgency of literary studies today. We’ll also explore how the collective study of literature might constitute an undisciplined practice of care in the midst of intersecting global crises.
- Enseignant: Lindsay Reckson