ENGL 386: Detention, Migration, Asylum

Professor: Nicole Rizzuto Spring 2013/Georgetown University Office: 320 New North Office Hours: Tuesday 1-3 Class: Walsh 394, T R 9:30-10:45 Email: [email protected]

Course Description

This course explores migration, detention, and asylum in broad terms as formal as well as thematic problems that shape modernist and contemporary literature and critical theory. Focusing on British and Irish modernist texts, and Caribbean, African, and South Asian postcolonial works, we will consider how literary aesthetics intersect with the politics of movement and stalled movement. Some issues we will discuss: What is the relationship between movement or stalled movement and narrative time? What are the “media” of movement and stalled movement—land, air, or sea? Stream of consciousness, secret epistles, or vernaculars associated with a particular class, ethnic, or racial group? How do works engage the aesthetic techniques, or the logic of movement and stasis that structure other media, such as photography, painting, sculpture, television, or radio, and might this engagement tell us something about both desires to move and resistances to and incapacities of moving?

The first third of the course focuses on works written in the late modernist period, and places these texts in conjunction with theories of perception, aesthetics, and media technology. The remainder of the course examines the problems of stasis and movement in conjunction with theoretical philosophical explorations of the geopolitical, juridico-legal, and ethical problems of migration, asylum seeking, and detention. In addition to the primary readings, I have included recommended readings for you to use as you write your papers, and have also included readings for presentations, which are non-theoretical works that offer historical context to the novels we are reading, and the specific issues of migration, detention, or asylum that shapes that context.

Course requirements are a short paper, a long paper, presentations, participation, and occasional postings on blackboard. Postings are designed to prepare you to discuss the reading in class, and should raise a question, rather than simply state an argument. Postings are an occasion for you to combine close readings with issues addressed in the critical readings of the course. You can raise a question about a particular figure, or word, or dense series of sentences; you can tie this back to broader questions the text raises; you can tie this into other questions we have seen occur in the course. Because postings are centered on launching discussion through close readings, you must choose a small enough chunk of text, and provide a page number in your posting. You must post by 7 pm the night before class.

**Syllabus is subject to change at my discretion.**

Course goals  To develop an understanding of what it means to “read closely.” Close reading, in this course, is defined as the attention to and examination of form, genre, rhetoric, structure, and stylistic details that govern a work, and not only, or even mostly, discussion of plot, theme, or characterological registers of a text.  To discern how this mode of close reading discloses struggles and tensions among, rather than reflections between, the world and the text.  To gain fluency in the debates, vocabulary, and theoretical concepts that structure discussions about movement and stasis as formal principles, and migration, detention and asylum as geopolitical phenomena that operate in modernist and contemporary postcolonial literature, philosophy, and critical theory.  To gain competency in the protocols of the field of literary-critical writing, deploying close textual analysis to consider wider problems that have no quick solutions.

Book list: ORDER ONLY THESE EDITIONS, whether by ILL, online, or at bookstores. All have been ordered from the University bookstore. Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Harvest Books ISBN-13: 978-0156949606 Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, W. W. Norton & Company ISBN-13: 978-0393311464 George Lamming, The Emigrants, University of Michigan Press; New edition ISBN-13: 978- 0472064700 Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage, Vintage ISBN-13: 978-0679759317 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unameable, Everyman's Library ISBN-13: 978-0375400704 JM Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K, Penguin Books ISBN-13: 978-0140074482 Anita Desai, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Mariner Books; 1st Mariner Books ed. ISBN-13: 978-0618056804 Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup, Penguin Books ISBN-13: 978-0142001424 Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea, Bloomsbury Paperbacks ISBN-13: 978-0747557852

All other texts are PDFs on Blackboard.

Week 1 R 1/10: Syllabus and Course Introduction

Week 2 T 1/15: Woolf, The Waves, 1-147 and Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth R 1/17: WJT Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and The Other” and Woolf, The Waves, 147-184

Week 3: T 1/22: Woolf, The Waves, conclusion and Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All, 119-128 R 1/24: Bergson, The Creative Evolution, pages TBD and Eisenstein, “On Montage”

Week 4: T 1/29: Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 1-130 and Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility” R 1/31: Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, conclusion and Barthes, Camera Lucida, Presentation : Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 51-69 [Recommended: De Loughrey, “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity”]

Week 5: T 2/5: Lamming, The Emigrants, 1-120 Presentation, National Security and Immigration, 166-186 R 2/7: Lamming, The Emigrants, 120-200 [Recommended: Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile]

Week 6: T 2/12: Lamming The Emigrants, conclusion R 2/14: Virilio, Negative Horizon: As Essay on Dromoscopy [Recommended, Speed and War, 1-24 and 60-95]

Week 7: T 2/19: PAPER 1 DUE (6 pages) and Beckett, Molloy, 1-100 R 2/21: Beckett, Molloy, conclusion and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer

Week 8: T 2/26: QUIZ 1: Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, 1-130 Presentation: The Last Years of Apartheid, 15-37 R 2/28: Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, conclusion and Brown, Walled Sovereignty, 43-47 and 107-133

Week 9: SPRING BREAK

Week 10 T 3/12: Gordimer, The Pickup, 1-100 and Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 1-15 and TBD Presentation, Prohibited Persons, 15-36 R 3/14: Gordimer, The Pickup, 100-150 and de Genova, “The Deportation Regime,” 33-61

Week 11 T 3/19: Gordimer, The Pickup, conclusion and Bauman, Wasted Lives, pages TBD R 3/21: Gurnah, By the Sea, 1-75 Presentation, O’Sullivan, from Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and the Rule of Law, 228-253

Week 12: T 3/26: Gurnah, By the Sea, conclusion R 3/28: EASTER BREAK

Week 13: T 4/2: The Final Passage, 1-75 and Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 87-120 R 4/4: Phillips, The Final Passage, conclusion

Week 14 T 4/9: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pages TBD 4/11: Desai, Baumgartner’s Bombay, 1-75 [Recommended: Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory]

Week 15: T 4/16: Desai, Baumgartner’s Bombay, 75-150 and Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, pages TBD R 4/18: Desai, Baumgartner’s Bombay, 150-225

Week 16: T 4/23: Desai, Baumgartner’s Bombay, conclusion R 4/25: Final Quiz

M 4/29: RESEARCH PAPER DUE (12 pages). Due in my mailbox, at 306 New North, by five. Attach a self-addressed stamped envelope if you would like this returned with comments.

POLICIES AND GRADING Attendance Policy: You are expected to come to every single class, but in life, things go awry and you might not be able to achieve perfect attendance. There is no distinction between excused and unexcused absences in the course. You can have three absences, no questions asked (in addition to any religious holidays for which you request, and are eligible, to be excused). After that, you will be penalized heavily for any missed class. I will deduct a letter grade from your final grade. If your final grade is an A, and you have four absences you will receive a B, and so on. MORE THAN 6 CLASSES MISSED RESULTS IN AN F.

Lateness: If you get here after roll has been called you are late. Your classroom participation grade will be lowered by 5 points for every lateness, beginning with the third lateness.

Grading Policy and Calibration: planned quizzes 15 percent each (30 percent total); first paper 20 percent and final paper 40 percent (60 percent total); 10 percent participation, postings, and presentation. Each missed posting and response paper results in minus ten points from your participation grade; missed presentation result in a 0. I use these to check your writing, to make sure you are doing the readings, and so that I can make you aware of issues that might arise in your longer essays. Longer essays should follow MLA citation format. They are to be double-spaced, in twelve point Times New Roman font.

NO LATE PAPERS. Late papers will be penalized heavily: every day your paper is late you will lose an entire letter grade, beginning in the first 24 hours, and after 3 days papers will not be accepted; you will receive a zero, and this will result in failure of the course. ALL ESSAYS AND QUIZES MUST BE TURNED IN AS A MINIMAL REQUIREMENT TO PASS THE COURSE.

Disabilities: If you have a disability that will affect your coursework, I am happy to work with you to make sure you have the necessary requirements and adjustments can be made to best deal with the issue. According to university policy, you MUST, however, first see the Academic Resource Center and have them send me an official letter. See http://guarc.georgetown.edu/disability/accomodations/; and please speak to me early in the term to figure out how we can work together on this.

Academic Integrity: Plagiarism of any kind will not be tolerated. I encourage you to look at the university website and read further details pertaining to academic integrity; you will be held to the standards of the honor code and expected to abide by the rules located in the bulletin. Statement on Academic Integrity from Undergraduate Bulletin: Plagiarism, in any of its forms, and whether intentional or unintentional, violates standards of academic integrity. Plagiarism is the act of passing off as one’s own the ideas or writings of another. While different academic disciplines have different modes for attributing credit, all recognize and value the contributions of individuals to the general corpus of knowledge and expertise. Students are responsible for educating themselves as to the proper mode of attributing credit in any course or field. Faculty may use various methods to assess the originality of students’ work. For example, faculty may submit a student’s work to electronic search engines, including Turnitin.com, a service to which the Honor Council and the Provost subscribe. Note that plagiarism can be said to have occurred without any affirmative showing that a student’s use of another’s work was intentional.

Course Rules 1. NO LAPTOPS, computers, kindles, or recording technologies allowed. Please factor in the cost of purchasing these novels in hard copy, and in printing out the material on Blackboard, when deciding whether to take the course. 2. No cell phones, texting, calling, whatever, and please don’t even put it on vibrate. 3. No eating, drinking, or smoking (!). 4. ALWAYS BRING BOOKS AND PRINT OUT AND BRING ANYTHING ASSIGNED THAT IS UPLOADED TO BLACKBOARD. You are expected to keep a binder of these printouts that you will refer back to throughout the course of the semester.