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Writing the Present Day Life
| Semester and Year | SP 2013 |
| Course Number | IDSEM-UG1722 |
| Section | 001 |
| Instructor | Judith Greenberg |
| Days | Mon,Wed |
| Time | 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM |
| Units | 4.0 |
| Level | U |
| Foundation Requirement | HUM |
Description
This course examines the impact of the digital age on questions of writing, identity construction, ethics, trauma and love. Our entry into the digital age has been compared to the cultural shift that occurred when the Gutenberg Bible enabled the wide distribution of the written word. What is the relationship between the “spirit of an age” or Zeitgeist and its narratives and texts? For example, at the end of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), her time-traveling and sex-changing Elizabethan hero-ine Orlando, enters “the present day.” By the novel’s end, Orlando has grown into a young woman in “present day” London. Who might Orlando be today? Reading a range of texts including Whitman’s Leaves of Grass , Duras’ The Lover , essays on the gaze and gender and trauma and contemporary representation, Cindy Sherman’s photographs and the films Persona and Modern Times , we explore identity and writing, in previous periods and in the Digital Age. We conclude with students writing their own last chapter of Orlando , situated in New York, 2012.
Syllabus
Course Type
Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)
