The Jehovah Project

Course for Fall, 2007:


The course will continue to add features which will make it more "comp lit," including texts which can be read optionally in Spanish and French, including Elisabeth Vonarburg, Elejo Carpentier, and Borges.



Unknown Nation: the literature of utopia and gift

This is a course on goodness. We might say that utopia and gift are, respectively, the goodness of place and the goodness of action.

We will begin our exploration of the juxtaposition of these two timely and urgent theoretical categories with Kim Stanley Robinson’s “unknown nation,” an immense range of diverse utopias hidden in an astonishing array of geological anomalies across the surface of Mars. Some of these communities attempt to subvert transnational capital flows with gift economies. But given time and the exigencies of life, what gift could there be which would be immune from any expectation of return? Even with the best of intentions, gift is likely to be “ungifted.” Nevertheless gift, like utopia, does its best work without ever quite existing. Our texts will include science fiction, utopian and dystopian literature, and theory. Can we establish a praxis of goodness?

We will encounter difficult theoretical and philosophical texts, but seek a practical route through the various pitfalls and specters of charity, altruism, and benevolence. Our method: close reading. Our desire, le plaisir du texte.

Readings
Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions (2005),
David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (1997)
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I, Counterfeit Money (1992)
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the erotic life of property (1979)
Philip Kindred Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
____. The Dispossessed (1974)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Ben Okri, The Famished Road (1991)
Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars (1996)
Carol Shields, Unless (2000)
Nick Hornby, How To Be Good, (2001)
Barbara Gowdy, The Romantic (2003)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
Scott Gardiner, The King of Canada (2007)
William Shakespeare, King Lear (1623)