Semester:
Offered:
Professor, Collier Brown
Tuesday & Thursday 9:00-10:15am
Representations of wastelands in literature typically revolve around ideas of emptiness, desolation, and depravity. But is any land ever really empty? Think of colonization. Entire continents have been declared vacant by invading nations. In this unit, we will read several short stories about wastelands. We will ask ourselves who and what these wastelands erase and to what purpose. How do writers accomplish these erasures? What writing strategies do they use: metaphor, stereotype, hyperbole?
The goal of Unit I is to explain something that is not obvious about literary wastelands. In what ways does literature reinforce or complicate our assumptions about wastelands?
And, conversely, in what ways does it provide the tools we need to combat those assumptions? To convince your readers that your interpretation makes the most sense, you will need to draw on evidence from the story itself and explain how that evidence ought to be understood.