REL 281(F) Conflicts of Identity in Late Modern Literature: Gender, Religion, Ethnicity, Politics

Although he marked our understanding of identity and subjectivity by expanding the meanings of the word "freedom," Michel Foucault maintained that "the political, ethical, social, [and] philosophical problem of our day" remained "liberation." How do we understand, today, the struggle for liberation? Where is this struggle located? What are the consequences of liberation-assuming that liberation happens-and how can they be measured? How does liberation stand in relation to its linguistic and literary expression? What have those movements brought about that express in literary forms the multiple and often conflicting demands (political, cultural, religious, ethnic, sexual, linguistic, etc.) of communities and of individuals seeking freedom? This course will address these and other questions in order to think about whether and how subjectivity, as it appears in the texts we will read, provides or fails to provide a focal point for thinking liberation and its effects. We will engage critical texts that highlight the difficulty of freedom (Hegel, Foucault, Butler, and Brown), but will mainly focus on those expressions of a desire for freedom that have been seen as particularly founded in "religion" and in the religious identity of those expressing these desires. We will address a wide range of literary texts written by not always quite identifiable American (African-American and Native-American), Arab, Arab-Jewish, French, Israeli, Jewish, and Palestinian authors, authors who, in singular and complex ways, refuse - seek to liberate themselves from - qualifying simply as "representatives." Through our attentive readings of selected passages from Driss Chraïbi (The Simple Past), Hélène Cixous (Inside), Jacques Derrida ("Circumfession"), Assia Djebar (Women of Algiers), Emile Habiby (The Pessoptimist), Edmond Jabès (The Book of Questions), Claude Kayat (Mohammed Cohen), Sami Mikhael (Refuge), Toni Morrison (Beloved), Anton Shammas (Arabesques), and Gerald Vizenor (Manifest Manners), and we will measure ourselves with the-often comical- manner in which identity (understood, provisionally, as the freedom to be who one is) is not a restful or coherent position that can simply be affirmed, but a conflict that constitutively tears - or even, like laughter, "explodes"-the "self" apart. Aside from the literary selections, readings will include Michel Foucault, History of Madness, Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Albert Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized, Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Requirements: full attendance and participation, written comments on weekly readings, three 5- to 7-page papers. Lecture and discussion. Open to all classes without prerequisite. (This course is part of the new Jewish Studies cluster.)

Hour: ANIDJAR