Between You and I: Exploring Selfhood in Contemporary U.S. Literature
What makes ‘you’ you? How does the ‘I’ in speech and writing relate to the living person? How do markers of identity and belonging come alive in the space between ‘you’ and ‘I’? This course asks how poets and fiction writers experiment with language to explore selfhood and relationality. Far from the unique expression of individuality and interiority, writers are preoccupied with how our sense of self is shaped by politics, conceptions of nationality and citizenship, and the imprint of mass media. In this course, we will explore these topics through contemporary American writing that comments on life under late-stage global capitalism. Guided by close readings of texts by Patricia Lockwood, Claudia Rankine, and Ling Ma, we will consider how writing can provide solace and sublimity faced with compounding crises of familial loss, state violence, and pandemic apocalypse. These authors variously track the effect of globalization, racial capitalism, and state governance on our social, psychic, and political lives. They do so by creatively deploying different literary genres and forms—from the confessional lyric, to the social media prose poem, to the speculative fiction novel.
This course will also introduce students to the basics of academic research and writing, with an emphasis on how to make arguments about literature. With reference to secondary readings on our three main authors, we will take up different stylistic approaches to writing about poetry and prose, including: book review essays, academic literary criticism, and collaborative research clusters. Together, we will engage in conversations about texts in their social and political contexts and ask what writing can do –to express relations of self and other, to build critical consciousness, and to make a world that is liveable.
Required Texts: Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This (2021), Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014), Ling Ma, Severance (2018)