THEMATIC OPTION HONORS PROGRAM
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
CORE 112 / SPRING 2012
FICTIVE PRISONS
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
— Albert Camus
"We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit."
— Friedrich Nietzsche
COURSE DESCRIPTION
What forces—social, cultural, national—limit our choices and movements? What prisons do we imagine that bind us, and what societal constructions temper our claims to freedom? In this course, we will examine a number of characters that possess an insatiable drive to be "free," but who often struggle to attain freedom—or even define it—because of their imagined prisons both within and around them. All of our readings will help us approach one of modernity's defining question facing modernity : how does one obtain or lay claim to personal freedom?
While exploring our thematic, we'll also work toward situating our texts within a broad historical framework, reading them alongside the epoch-shaping categories of “modernism” and “postmodernism,” terms we'll work toward defining throughout the course.
COURSE TEXTS
Selected writings from Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke
James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Jean-Paul Sartre No Exit and Three Other Plays. 1944. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Edgar G. Ulmer, dir. Detour. 1945.
Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot / A Bilingual Edition. 1948. New York: Grove, 2010.
Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. 1966. New York: Grove, 1994.
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. New York: Harper, 2006.
Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale. 1985. New York: Anchor, 1998.
Sapphire Push: A Novel. New York: Vintage, 1996.
Sofia Coppola, dir. Lost in Translation. 2003
With secondary readings from GWF Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics (1835); Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (1851/2); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882); Sigmund Freud "A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis" (1912); and Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), among others.