UNI-ENGELSK
TEXT & LITERATURE MODULE
Passing...
American
Literature, 20th Century themes: Identity and Difference
Bent Sørensen
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This course examines the
notion of passing
as an essential part of identity
construction in 20th Century American literature and film. Malcontent
with their
place within the various identity hierarchies society expects them to
conform to, individuals have always
tried to better or protect their position through passing for something
or someone else. This course analyses the specific strategies of
passing employed by American individuals and groups throughout the 20th
Century. The main theoretical claim of the course is that identities
are
discursively constructed (rather than biological or social givens), and
that they are transmitted and negotiated through texts (therefore
literature is an essential way for us to learn about ourselves and to
figure out who we are). In other words, one can use the
notion of passing and
the dynamics of
writing about difference to examine specific, historically bound
representations of identities. The six main discursive differences in
the 20th century pertain to race,
gender, class, nation, belief, and age. Each will be examined
as a discourse of identity construction through one illustrative
literary text or film. The periods investigated are the interwar
years (esp. the 1920s), the Cold War/Eisenhower years (esp. the
mid1950s), and the beginning and end of the
postmodern period (the 1970s and 1990s).
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The texts and identity
differences examined are the following:
Race: Nella
Larsen: Passing (1929) This almost unknown
classic of African-American literature (from the period of flowering in
black literary culture known as the Harlem Renaissance) is particularly
interesting for a Danish reader, since Nella Larsens own background is
part Virgin Islands, part Danish. (Her family emigrated to the USA
before she was born, but Larsen visited Denmark later in her life, and
wrote about her exeriences in fictional form in her other novel Quicksand.) Passing is the paradigm example of
novels thematising the price one pays by forsaking one's original
racial belonging by attempting to pass for white in order to gain
social and economic privileges.
Class: F. Scott
Fitzgerald: The Great
Gatsby (1926)
One
of the two classic novels of the Lost Generation (the other is
Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises),
Gatsby thematises the rise and
fall of its title character and shows the immense hypocrisy of class
and status-based social norms among the upper crust of the East Coast
in the "Roaring Twenties". Fitzgerald was one of the finest stylists of
American Modernist prose writing, and his symbol rich novel merits a
close reading.
Nation: Don Siegel
(director), Daniel Mainwaring (pseudonym: Geoffrey Holmes
(screenwriter)): Invasion of
the Body Snatchers (1956)
(Film based on novel by Jack Finney) This movie is a classic cautionary
tale, capturing perfectly the terror of the Cold War era and the
paranoid anxieties experienced in a USA haunted not only by the spectre
of Communism but also that of totalitarian mind control from within in
the form of McCarthyist witch-hunts. We shall view the film and also
read the screenplay it is based on, with a view to deciphering the
subtle representations of nation and national community, here
metaphorically depicted in a science fiction setting, using alien
invaders as a sophisticated metaphor for otherness of thought, race and
belonging.
Belief: Jack Kerouac: Dharma
Bums (1958) This
novel by the
founding father of the 1950s American version of the 'angry young men'
- known as the Beat Generation - shows a group of young, non-conformist
seekers searching for an alternative to the cramped, conservative norms
of the 'I Love Ike' years. The alternative to a suburban life of quiet
desperation lies, for Kerouac's characters in this less known follow-up
to his debut, On the Road, in
a blend of inspiration from Eastern spirituality (Buddhism and poetry)
and home-grown American transcendentalist longings for a life in the
wild, harking back to the life and writings of Whitman, Emerson and
Thoreau. Jazz and sex play equally significant roles in the young
characters' quest for an alternative belonging and identity.
Gender: Kimberley
Pierce (director & screenwriter): Boys
Don’t Cry (1999)
(Film based on real events)
This movie thematises the drastic consequences of having to live in a
body with a gender one is not mentally and emotionally capable of
belonging to. Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena was a young trans-sexual
seeking to reinvent her/his life in a new community in rural Nebraska.
Sexual passing in this case led to her/his murder and the case raises
fundamental questions about tolerance of otherness and difference in
America in the latter part of the 20th Century. A number of documents
and texts, as well as a documentary film will be used to cast more
light on the events behind Pierce's disturbing fictional treatment of
the case.
Age: Hal Ashby
(director), Colin Higgins (screenwriter): Harold
and
Maude (1971) (Film
based on Higgins' play) This light-hearted, but ultimately tragicomic
movie shows that age is not a biological given. As the character of
Maude shows, one is never older than one's mindset allows, and her
seduction of and love affair with Harold (60+ years her junior) teaches
him to overcome his teenage angst and seek meaning in other areas of
his life than he could possibly conceive of before meeting Maude (his
hobbies were distinctly morbid prior to that (consisting mainly of
faking suicides and driving his mother nuts) and his sex life
non-existent). The film and the play it is based on are two of the most
moving texts from the tail end of the hippie era in American culture -
an era where youth came to the fore as the distinctive identity feature
that fuelled a whole generation's project of self-understanding.
****
The course will build on a
background of twentieth century American
literary and cultural history (Articles from: Passing: Identity
and Interpretation in
Sexuality, Race and Religion (eds. María Carla
Sánchez & Linda Schlossberg, NYU Press, 2001) can be found
in the course compendium), and the
theoretical framework will be
based on the notion of difference discourses.
There will be an
introductory segment consisting of readings and a mini-lecture on
difference discourses and social
constructivism, followed by sessions dedicated to close readings of
each text/main difference.
The final segment of the course will indicate some trends in the
current discursive
fields in early 21st century American literature and film.