ENGL 3810: Uncanny Reading, Canny Critical Writing

FALL 2014 • TR 1:25-2:40 • Stuart Davis

Course limited to 15 students.

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 those works return, critically and uncannily, in what is written about them.

Reading and writing are uncanny practices: the ghosts of earlier fictions return in later ones, which revise their precursors hauntedly. And canny critical writing repeats the process explicitly and clearly. In this course we may read Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire; Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre with Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Henry James's Turn of the Screw; a tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann and a treatise by Sigmund Freud; Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and its postcolonial revision, Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North; and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway with Michael Cunningham's The Hours. We'll write frequently and read one another's works as collaborators and critics, producing portfolios of finished prose by the semester's end.