Beverly Garside's Blog: Books: Mine and Others' - Posts Tagged "rutgers"

I and YouApparently, "I and You" is BAD LITERATURE - bad enough to be so interesting that they are studying it at Rutgers! I'm proud to be sharing the syllabus of this class with such luminaries as James Baldwin and Joe Sacco (graphic novel "Palestine.") And since in the academic language, very little means what it says on the surface, I've studied the matter and discerned that it is, indeed, a compliment! Here's the syllabus from the Comparative Literature Department at Rutgers University, Fall 2016 term:

Short Fiction
195:135:03; Index 10942
MW7 (6:10PM-7:30PM), FH-A3; CAC
Instructor: We
Fulfills SAS Core Code AHp
Does not count towards major or minor

“Bad Literature: Genres of Fiction, Genres of the Human”.
This course deals with various fictive failures: failure to be good literature, to be fictional, to be or become human, through racialization, gendering, ableism, colonialism, and special boundaries between human/animal. In what contexts are they failures and how do we read their “badness” otherwise? We will read texts from spaces inside and outside the U.S.-Europe and that push the boundaries of literature. What “makes” (and not what “is”) a good literature? Sylvia Wynter wrote about “genres” of the human to describe the inherently exclusive definition of the human. We will explore different genres of fiction and the human.
You will be expected to read little, but be prepared to discuss the reading at length in detail. Topics in the class will be dense, affectively challenging to the common sense, and also, fun. Readings are varied in form, genre, location, and fictiveness: we will read politicized literatures like manifestos, graphic novels, short fictions from the others of Euro-American canon, fables, theoretical texts as fictions, novellas, online textual and video production. In short, we will read texts that are short but push the boundaries of the human as fiction. They include works by:
Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortazár, Dazai Osamu, Gerald Vizenor, Junot Díaz, manifesto (Combahee River Collective, Zapatista Manifesto, and Cannibal Manifesto), Miyazawa Kenji (fable), Joe Sacco (graphic novel Palestine), Luis Négron, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Audre Lorde, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's essays, Tierno Monénembo, Choi In Hoon, Leslie Marmon Silko, Beverly Garside (graphic novel I and You), Kim Nam Cheon, Cathy Park Hong’s Engine for Empire, Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.”