English 891G - S-Form and Theory of Fiction

A Stay Against Silence. From antiquity to the contemporary epoch, writers have explored the tension between the competing grids of freedom and power. Our human quest for autonomy, self-enlargement and the exercise of free will is often besieged by predatory power. Numerous classical and contemporary texts have dramatized this struggle between subjects who strive to speak their memories and authoritarian figures who essay to suppress and silence them, even to erase their stories. Through the study of texts by the likes of Sophocles, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Mariama Ba, Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, Chimamanda Adichie, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Ferdinand Oyono, the seminar will examine the contestation over stories and memories. What's at stake, in ethical and social terms, when powerful entities seek to still others' voices and to abrogate their stories? And how are texts and lives reshaped by acts of resistance to these muting decrees? How is the utterance of forbidden speech, the stay against silence, implicated in the constitution of identity and construction of a different social order?

This class is open to English graduate students only. Sub-title: The Novella