Time Schedule:
Jason H Morse
ENGL 200
Seattle Campus
Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature. Examines some of the best works in English and American literature and considers such features of literary meaning as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense. Emphasis on literature as a source of pleasure and knowledge about human experience.
Class description
For AUTUMN 2007: Oprah Nation: Neoliberal Reading. Our “source of pleasure” (to quote the catalog description) will be to explore how literature can be deployed as part of social, cultural and political logics that shape “knowledge about human experience.” Our object of analysis in this class will be Oprah’s Book Club, which we will read as part of the international social, cultural, and political phenomena of Harpo Productions, a multimedia conglomeration of television, film, stage, print and internet sources connected to but distinct from the individual Oprah Winfrey. The rise to fame of all three (OBC, Harpo, and Winfrey) coincides with and is conditioned by a global politico-historical shift that some have called neoliberalism. In our present moment, Harpo can, in fact, be conceived of as a swarming of discourses focused on revealing “the secret” of neoliberal happiness.
The claim of this class is not only that selections for Oprah’s Book Club are based on something more than Winfery’s narrative pleasure, but also that these texts are meant to be educative and/or celebratory of particular neoliberal ways of being in the world. This class will be an interpretive exercise in which we simultaneously read OBC selections in the context of Harpo – as narratives of neoliberal subject formation – and read against the grain of what we might figure as “Harpo-real intent” to t hink about how “such features of literary meaning as imagery, characterization, narration, and pattering in sound and sense” contained in these texts might also be resistant to our neoliberal reading, might actually be critiques of neoliberal ideology. We will explore how other ways of “reading literature” (such as historicist, feminist, narratological, or cultural studies methodologies) might challenge this “Harpo-rial intent.” Part of our exercise will be to think about how OBC is at the intersection of multiple discourses, including narratives of self-help/individual success, (racial) uplift, multiculturalism, consumer culture and other figurations of our current (trans)national politico-cultural formation.
Our literary texts will include John Steinbeck’s East of Eden; Toni Morrison’s Sula; Edwidge Danicat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory; Elie Wiesel’s Night; and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Other texts will include brief readings on neoliberalism, history, and literary criticism. Student presentations will explicate theoretical and historical readings or close read literary texts. Student papers will focus on reading literature to make claims about culture. Critical questions we might ask include: Is it possible now to read these literary texts outside the context of OBC and how might OBC’s cultural influence change ways of reading and interpreting these texts? How can we read history out of these literary texts (including the history the texts represent and the historical moment of their publication) and how does this history coincide with the history produced by Harpo? These questions will inevitably lead us to ask more general questions about what literature is, the relation of literature to history, what role literature plays in culture and society, and how literature and literary form make meaning.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
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