| Transatlantic
Fictions (Fall
2005)
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This course fulfills Category IV of the General Education Requirement. Faculty:
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Course Description: This interdisciplinary course explores how early modern Europe digests or assimilates the New World. The course considers the genres of encounter and colonization—letters, "relaciones", chronicles, utopias—and the transformation of those genres by writers from the Americas and later authors. How do problems of quotation, translation, and certification shape European visions of the Americas? How do literary strategies relate to imperial goals? We will address the relation between desire and conquest; the contrasts between Renaissance conceptions of the New World and first-person, experiential accounts, and the role of language in the American exchanges. We will also analyze the relation between imaginative and historiographical accounts, focusing on how texts deal with problems of truth and authority in representation. Students will learn how to read highly self-conscious texts for their rhetorical and ideological goals, and how the broad category of the transatlantic enables investigation beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. Authors will include Columbus, More, Shakespeare, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Behn, Defoe. (Back to Course Descriptions Menu) |