English 304 - Narratives of Suffering

There are “moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action,” the novelist George Eliot writes, “like the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.” This is a class about moments like these and the endless struggle to find language for them. Chained anguish has no avenue into ordinary socialized language, and so its tremendous energies can only be sucked into the interior of the self or expressed in non-normative ways—in dwindled-down rhythms, for instance, or strange lingerings and leaps. It can be difficult to respond to the idioms of profoundly suffering people, in life and in literature, but you can get better at it, and it’s important to try. The method of the class is close reading—really close reading, in which you interchange something of yourself with the book you are reading, the film you are seeing, or the person in front of you. Works include The Book of Job, 12 Years a Slave, Oedipus, The Sweet Hereafter, King Lear, Hiroshima, Night and Fog, Maus 1 and 2, Beloved, and The Road.

Limited to 25 students. Fall and Spring semester. Professor Sanborn.

How to handle overenrollment: Preference to English majors and seniors.

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Learning how to read closely and with emotional intelligence; learning how to augment the experience of reading through informal reflective writing and class participation; learning that all ideas are associatively connected to other ideas and that there are powerful alternatives to state-illustrate-restate arguments. There will be pre-class writing assignments, two papers, and an emphasis on the quality of the contributions to class discussion. There will be no quizzes or exams.