ENGL 553

Fall 2019 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar Later American Lit

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 4 hours.

May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One college course devoted entirely to an aspect of American studies or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 553 class schedule data for fall 2019
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32356	Lecture-Discussion	T	3:30PM -6:00PM	R	123 English Building	Hunt, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Section Title: Mourning in Comic Time Section Info: This seminar will study comedy as a strange form of intimacy with what we’ve lost for good. Comedy is usually thought of as a form of detachment, but we will explore it as the interplay between closeness and distance to and from the subjects and the things one has lost: dreams, lives, histories, and futures, none of which can be recovered. I do mean to emphasize that overlap between subjects and things, for we will also be probing the promiscuities between the lives of the subjected and object ontologies. We will be thinking of comedy not only as a genre, “a scene of affective mediation and expectation” (Berlant and Ngai), but also as a time, a temporal structure. We will examine how comedy constructs a time in which mourning is not a triumphalist process, a “salvific wish,” to use Candice Jenkins’s lapidary term, but a lingering in ruptures, in simultaneities, in wakes that is also uncomfortably a lingering in pleasure. Our central question is twofold: what kinds of temporalities does comedy bear and what kinds of mourning does that time allow? Full texts or excerpts will be taken from 20th & 21st century black artists: Louis Armstrong, George Schuyler, W. E. B. Du Bois, Bill Bojangles Robinson (and other minstrel and vaudeville performers), Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Fran Ross, Nina Simone, Richard Pryor, Paul Beatty, Kara Walker, Jordan Peele, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others. Our theoretical apparatus will be drawn from Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Freud, Kenneth Burke, Susanne Langer, Hartman, Moten, Alenka Zupančič, and more. Come ready to enjoy how this motley crew of black avant-gardes refashions what we know about humor, affect, memory, redress, fugitivity, and time. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.