COMP 401
Senior Seminar:Stories, Silence, and Power Fall 2016
Division I Writing Skills
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Class Details

A study carried out by political scientists at Dartmouth and Exeter confirms the “centrality of narrative to our way of understanding the world.” “We all have any number of stories we tell ourselves about the world,” they write, “and our dependence on those stories is so strong that we actively resist anything that might call them into question” (qtd in Chronicle of Higher Education 1/27/16). What kinds of stories become our master narratives? Perhaps more importantly, what is the nature of the hold they have over us? Finally, is it possible to change our master narratives? The seminar will examine all of these questions through close readings of literary texts from multiple traditions, as well as narratological, psychoanalytic, and post-colonial theory. The course will move from the individual level-including the stories that “hysterical” bodies tell and stories that enact the transmission of trauma across generations-to the large-group level, including the the narratives of superiority that are told in the interest of domination and those that resist them. Finally, we will engage with the silences that exist between the lines of our prevailing stories. Silence can be “holding a secret-a tacit lie;” it can be a “muteness caused by trauma,” or a “silence due to not learning to speak.” It can also be “the only sane response” to catastrophe, or a silence that exists “so that the un-said can be” (John Muller, personal communication). As Isak Dinesen famously wrote: “Where does one read a deeper tale than on the perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page.”
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 16
Expected: 10
Class#: 1101
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active participation in discussion, some short writing assignments, and a 5-page conference paper that will be revised into a 10-page final paper
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the fifth course option
Prerequisites: one 300- or 400-level literature course
Enrollment Preferences: Comparative Literature majors
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills

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