Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description
Who Are You? The Danger & Promise of "Identity"
Instructor(s): Robert Boyers, English
How do we know who we are? Are we often deluded about our identity? Do we rely too often on others to define for us what we are? Doesn't the very idea of identity suggest that we are one particular thing when in reality we are many things. The writer Zadie Smith writes that "the unified singular self is an illusion," and yet many of us cling to that illusion, as if we would be lost without it.
This Scribner Seminar will consider "identity" by examining a variety of creative works by several of the world's greatest writers and film directors. The works chosen--several feature films, works of fiction, creative non-fiction and critical essays--will focus on the struggle to discover who we are and to escape the damaging fantasies offered up by those who want to make us seem simple and predictable to ourselves. Students will learn to formulate questions appropriate to the kinds of works they study and to differentiate between evidence and wishful thinking. In their written work and in classroom conversation they will examine their own assumptions about identity and learn how to challenge ideas and assumptions that seem to them misleading. The efforts of writers and thinkers like Virginia Woolf, Orlando Patterson, Annie Ernaux, Doris Lessing and James Baldwin will provide models against which students may measure their own efforts as writers and thinkers. In films by directors like Spike Lee, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini and Joseph Losey students will find narratives that unsettle standard views of identity formation and suggest that it may not be a bad idea to retire--at least for a while-- the more comforting notions many of us favor.
Course Offered: