Body Politics in American Culture

elective courses
proseminars

Classroom

This course examines cultural, in particular literary, representations of human bodies in American contemporary culture. It investigates various ways in which human bodies are made culturally meaningful and how literature participates in the production of that meaning. We’ll be especially interested in exploring what is political about the body and discuss it as a site of pleasure, desire, identity-production, colonization, resistance, and surveillance. We’ll ask how various operations of power shape, inform, and determine body politics. We’ll also think of economic systems, in particular neoliberalism, and its impact on the ways in which bodies are understood, experienced, and represented. The course will center gendered, colonized, and racialized bodies and it will be organized around two novels and one collection of short stories: Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties.

This course examines cultural, in particular literary, representations of human bodies in American contemporary culture. It investigates various ways in which human bodies are made culturally meaningful and how literature participates in the production of that meaning. We’ll be especially interested in exploring what is political about the body and discuss it as a site of pleasure, desire, identity-production, colonization, resistance, and surveillance. We’ll ask how various operations of power shape, inform, and determine body politics. We’ll also think of economic systems, in particular neoliberalism, and its impact on the ways in which bodies are understood, experienced, and represented. The course will center gendered, colonized, and racialized bodies and it will be organized around two novels and one collection of short stories: Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. We’ll also read theoretical texts ranging from critical articles on these novels to theoretical texts on race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. Since we’ll be focusing predominantly on these three texts we’ll be privileging close reading and discourse analysis.

Additionally, throughout the course, students will pursue individual research projects that will allow them to deepen their understanding of a specific question pertaining to the body and gain training in research, writing and presentation skills. This is a research proseminar and students will be expected to read all the texts and complete all assignments on time.

Texts may be subject to change

Primary texts:

Monique Truong, The Book of Salt (entire novel)

Otessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (entire novel)

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (selected short stories)

Secondary texts:

Elizabeth Grosz, “Refiguring Bodies”

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (selection)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”

Eula Biss, “On Immunity” (selection)

Critical texts on Truong’s and Moshfegh’s novels

Upon completing this course a student:

1. KNOWLEDGE

- has knowledge of cultural representations of the body in literature

- distinguishes key ways in which bodies are framed in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality

- is aware of multiple contexts of how bodies function in cultural and social spaces of contemporary United States

2. SKILLS

- knows how to search for theoretical knowledge and critical texts in order to write an academic text

- is able to create a bibliography, use critical and theoretical materials related to the text under consideration, plan an article and formulate a thesis statement

- is able to use the knowledge gained in the course to analyze a selected text

3. COMPETENCES

- is aware of various forms of embodiment and their impact on social and cultural experience

- understands the contexts of the political dimension of various cultural and social phenomena

- understands the need to counter discrimination, marginalization and invisibility of minority subjects

- active participation 20% (including classroom assignments and homework)

- in-class presentation of the final project proposal 20%

- literature review or bibliography with annotations of key critical texts relevant to the selected text for use in the research paper 20%

- final paper 40%

grading scale

98 – 100 5+

90 – 97 5

83 – 89 4+

75 – 82 4

68 – 74 3+

60 – 67 3

0 – 59 2