COLLEGE WRITING in Fall 2024 (EN1010I)

This course looks at ideas of self and other as these are expressed in selected literary texts. It starts with ideas of otherness, sexual and cultural, as expressed in a major work of ancient Greek tragedy, Euripides’s Medea, before moving on to the representation of cultural and racial otherness in Shakespeare’s Othello, one of the English Renaissance dramatist’s four major tragedies. Longer prose works read in the course, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Stoker’s Dracula, examine the possibilities and anxieties associated with the opening up of the wider world. Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,’ his case of Dora, probes otherness within, raising the possibility that all of us are ultimately strangers to ourselves, while Kafka’s The Trial conjures up a nightmare world in which there are apparently no meeting points between self and society. Finally, Salih’s Season of Migration to the North reverses the gaze, entering into a complex relationship with Shakespeare’s Othello.

Texts:

Sophocles, Theban Plays

William Shakespeare, Othello.

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe.

Franz Kafka, The Trial.

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North.

Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works Volume Seven.