COURSE DETAIL
As critics including Eric Hayot have pointed out, it can be difficult to analyze and write about contemporary culture because we lack the critical distance to gain perspective on works that depict our own historical moment. This course provides some of that critical distance, or "leverage" as Hayot describes it. Through its comparative approach, the course explores how socio-political topics that are of pressing concern to writers, artists, and thinkers now were also examined in earlier periods. The course illustrates how studying the ways in which these themes and issues were represented and understood in the past enables us to enrich our engagement with the contemporary iteration of those topics today. The course considers a different socio-political topic each week, examining how it has been explored in a pair of texts. The course covers a range of creative works, critical concepts and cultural theories from the 20th and 21st centuries. The genres covered by the course include novels, films, essays, autofiction, memoir, a play, TV episode, and photo-text book.