Beyond Survival
| Faculty | Post-Doctoral Fellows |
|---|---|
Harry J. Elam, Jr., Department of Drama |
Renu Cappelli Matthew Daube Joyce Moser Janna Segal David Walter |
| Michele Elam, Department of English |
Text Selections
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
William Shakespeare, Othello
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Art Spiegelman, Maus
August Wilson, The Piano Lesson
Course Description
How do men and women survive--not just physically, but intellectually, creatively,
spiritually--in the world? Our course examines texts that imaginatively model
strategies to overcome physical deprivation (everything from enslavement to prison camp
confinement to sexual violence) and social oppression (from religious persecution to
gender discrimination). How does a legacy of psychic and social trauma manifest itself in
the contemporary moment? How does the past impact on the present? How do we reach beyond survival and rise above the historical circumstances
into which we are born? We will examine these questions
through works that range from the seventeenth century to
the present. Significantly, all the contemporary texts look
back to critical moments in the past.
The texts confront monumental events of political
and psychological rupture: slavery, the Holocaust, the
reign of a vicious Latin American dictator. History and
memory, ritual and reality all collide as characters confront
the past and negotiate its meanings and its presence. In
each work characters must determine paths of endurance.
The often brilliant and innovative strategies of
survival represented in these works appear in
diverse form—as physical resistance, as bearing
witness, as purposeful manipulation, or as ritual
communion and other times as artistic challenge,
as cultural rebellion, or as rhetorical suasion. In
addition, the strategies take shape in diverse
genres: we will read and discuss drama, fiction,
a graphic novel, and a slave narrative. These
texts ask us to consider not only how to survive
the constraints of gender, of race, of nation, and
of history itself; they ask us also to consider at
what cost and for what greater purpose does one survive? Our readings thus not
only explore the many strategies of survival but also the possibilities expressed in
these texts for effecting social and personal change.