| Kommentar |
This seminar focuses literary texts whose protagonists are characterized by their wanderings through the night: they are sleepwalkers, somnambulists, or just restless insomniacs. In each text, we encounter protagonists whose sleep is troubled; protagonists who do not find a place to rest at night; protagonists who cannot lie down but who have to restlessly keep on walking; protagonists who even become murderers in their somnambulic condition.
Far from presenting sleep as an unquestioned anthropological constant, the literary texts written by Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Djuna Barnes, Heidi Julavits and others employ the trope of sleepwalking as a marker of ‘placelessness’ or ‘displacement.’
Drawing on philosophical, anthropological, historical, and medical writings, we will ask ourselves in how far the representations of sleepwalking encountered in the literary texts reflect the political, social, economic, and cultural insecurities and ‘disorders’ of the times in which they were produced.
Please note:
We will have one longer extra session on Sat, 29 November 2014 from 10 am - 4 pm (room: tba)
Selected Texts:
- Charles Brockden Brown, “Somnambulism” (1805)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (1835)
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840)
- Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers” (1855/1891)
- Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)
- Heidi Julavits, “Restlessness“ (2013)
Texts:
Please buy Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood at your local bookstore (ISBN-13: 978-0571-23528-5, features an introduction by Jeanette Winterson). A course reader with additional texts will be made available for purchase.
Course requirements:
Regular attendance, active participation, reading and writing assignments, short oral presentation, graded term paper. |
