COMP 12
The Grand Hotel in Modern Fiction and Film Winter 2019

Cross-listed GERM 12
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Class Details

The grand hotel with its dual promise of luxury and estrangement was considered a theater of social transformations in the age of travel. We will discuss novels, short stories and films that feature the hotel as a space of both class distinction and possible class confusion, of sexual taboo breaking, and gendered performance, and a transnational extension of colonialist oppression. Authors will include Edith Wharton, Thomas Mann, Vicki Baum, Ali Smith, Rick Moody. Films may include: The Last Laugh, Grand Hotel, Grand Hotel Budapest, Anomalisa, Screaming Man, Hotel Sahara, Hotel Rwanda, A Single Girl, Maid in Manhattan. We will also consider short theoretical readings on conspicuous consumption, branding, modernity and metropolitan spaces, and postcoloniality. In the present, hotel dramas focus on issues of the invisible worker, neoliberalism (Anomalisa, Single Girl), or the trauma of civil war and the raced body (Hotel Rwanda, Screaming Man), or cultural alienation and the inability to feel joy (Lost in Translation, Hotels of North America). Comedies explore the fantasy of a dramatic social climb through identity confusion in a hotel setting (Maid in Manhattan), satires highlight the confidence man/trickster who profits from social pretensions (Felix Krull, Grand Hotel). Class lines are straddled and the boundaries between death and life blurred (Hotel World, Hotel Sahara) as the hotel space becomes a riotous echo chamber, mirroring precarious lives of illegal migrants and displaced workers.
The Class: Format: mornings
Limit: 15
Grading: pass/fail only
Requirements/Evaluation: 10-page paper
Prerequisites: None
Enrollment Preferences: discretion of the instructor
Materials/Lab Fee: $10 plus cost of books
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
GERM 12 COMP 12

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