English 449

Writing, the Body, and the Other

Amardeep Singh

Fall 2002

Email: amsp@lehigh.edu (most reliable way to reach me)

Office: 610-758-3319

Home: 610-527-2206

Deep's formal office hours: Wednesdays 2-4 pm. My office is in 201 C Drown Hall

I am also available to meet on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays by appointment (please email me to set up & confirm appointments).

Required Texts

Mahashweta Devi, Imaginary Maps

H.D. Tribute to Freud

Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

H.G. Wells, Island of Dr. Moreau

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K**

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Blackboard:

We will make extensive use of the Blackboard service for the dissemination of handouts. To access Blackboard, go to http://ci.lehigh.edu and enter your userid and password.

Requirements:

1. Attendance and participation

2. One in-class presentation, engaging the critical/theoretical readings for a given week. Sign up for this now.

3. Weekly response paper (1 page) to one or more of the readings for each week. You can approach the primary readings and/or responses to the criticism/theory. Your goal is not so much to impress me (the papers will not be graded), but to create a record (notes) for yourself, in case you find yourself working on some of these books or essays in your exams, or teaching them in the classroom.

4. A final paper 17-20 pages in length.

English 449: Writing, the Body, and the Other

Fall 2002

Amardeep Singh

Syllabus by week (subject to change)

Note: all non-book readings are available via Blackboard (or will be soon).

9/3

Franz Kafka short stories: "The Hunger Artist" and "In the Penal Colony"

Jacques Derrida, from Of Grammatology (pp. 3-44)

Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences"

Jim Powell, from Derrida for Beginners

9/10

H.D. Tribute to Freud

H.D., selected poems (Blackboard)

Helene Cixous, "Sorties" (from The Newly-Born Woman)

Toril Moi on Cixous, Sexual/Textual Politics

Susan Stanford Friedman, "The Professor Was Not Always Right" (from

Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.)

9/17

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Jacques Lacan, "Some Reflections on the Ego" and "Anamorphosis" (from Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis)

9/24

Virginia Woolf, Orlando (to page 226)

10/1

Virginia Woolf, Orlando (finish book)

Toril Moi, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (from Sexual/Textual Politics)

Bonnie Kime Scott, from Refiguring Modernism II: The Women of 1928

10/15

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Edward Said, from Orientalism

Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish

Judith Butler, "The Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions" (very short)

10/22

Coetzee, "The Lives of Animals" (Blackboard; you may wish to purchase it)

Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild” (Blackboard)

Maud Ellmann, "Autophagy" and "Sarcophagy" (from The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (on eating/writing)

10/29

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

Anson Rabinbach, from The Human Motor

Jennifer Devere Brody, from Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity,

and Victorian Culture

11/5

Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Edward Said, "Pleasures of Imperialism" (from Culture and Imperialism)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Chapter 2: Literature" (from Critique of

Postcolonial Reason)

11/12

Mahashweta Devi, Imaginary Maps

Spivak's introductory and concluding essays

Spivak, "Literature" continued

11/19

Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost (to page 205/"The Mouse")

11/26

Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost (finish book)

Neloufer de Mel, on female suicide bombers (from Women and the

Nation's Narrative)

Stanley Tambiah, from Levelling Crowds

12/3

Jorge Luis Borges, from Collected Fictions

Especially:

The Garden of Forking Paths: Tlon Uqbar, Orbius Tertius; The Approach to Al Mu'tasim; Pierre Menard; Circular Ruins; The Library of Babel; The Garden of Forking Paths

Artifices: Funes His Memory; The South

The Aleph: Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden; Averroes' Search; The Zahir; The Writing of the God; Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari; The Aleph

12/13 Final papers DUE