This course explores the complex relationship between experience, memory, and narrative and asks how narrative shapes both a sense of one's past and a vision of self, world, and future. How does telling the "story" of oneself transform lived experience into narrative? What are the risks of representing the "other," and how are these risks multiplied when we attempt to represent others from different cultures? We'll also grapple with the complicated relationship between the individual and the social world. Among other things, we will ask:
- How are retrospective narratives structured by and structures of narratives of identity?
- How is narrative representation both mediated and mediating?
- What steps, materials, people, and processes intervene between the experience of an event, the writing of it, and its publication, distribution, and reading.
- How does a "story" circulate and become known? How might it outlive the events it narrates? In what ways might a story gradually assume a "reality" that exceeds the event itself?
- How does our memory of an actual event change over time?
- Is it possible for our experience of an event to be "untrue," "incomplete"-- what is the relation between "experience" and "truth"?
- If the process of narration transforms the author's experience of the events narrated, how might the finished narrative construct the reader's experience of them?
- In the case of nonfiction, or of heavily autobiographical fiction, what are the ways in which narrative representation may be understood as a "truth," and what are the problems with this understanding?
Our consideration of Bengal Nights and It Never Dies, then, foregrounds questions of memory, audience, motive, experience, truth, and reality. In particular, we will be concerned with the ways in which European male phantasms of India and Indian women construct Eliade's narrative, and ask how European ideologies of gender and family shape narrative representations of Eliade's relationship to Devi, her family, and their possible future together. Through our reading of Devi's autobiographical response, we problematize Western phantasms of the East and interrogate the politics of gender and sexuality at work in these phantasms as well as the colonial and neo-colonial power relations through which Eliade, and, like him, other colonialist students of Oriental culture, enter into relationship with "other" women. In particular, we will closely examine differences in memory, motive, and representation between these texts, asking of each how the lines between fact and fiction, autobiography and novel, blur.
From this ground, we move to I, Rigoberta Menchu, where we engage more closely with issues of translation, author, subject, truth, reality, and the politics of representation. Taking seriously Menchu's compelling plea for human rights and political, economic, and social justice, we will also explore the narratives constructing the speaking subject in/of the text even as we hold in critique who/what the speaking subject is. Menchu told her story in her native Spanish to the French ethnographer Elizabeth Burgos Debray-- What are the issues at stake in an autobiographical narrative representation translated and transcribed by another? To further understand the problematics of autobiographical representation in translation, we will read Menchu's 1998 text, Crossing Borders. What are the differences between the texts? Who is the speaking subject in these texts?
From Menchu we move to Timothy J. Knab's War of the Witches. Knab, formerly an anthropologist at the National University of Mexico, describes his work as an anthropological ethnography chronicling his study of Mexican culture, but explains that he writes his ethnography as a novel, both because he believes readers will not believe the story and because the novel form makes the story more accessible. Grappling with the issues of narrative representation, reality, and truth central to this course, we will juxtapose Knab's text with Gloria Anzaldua's "The Serpent" to consider the similarities and differences between Knab's and Anzaldua's narratives of the Aztec underworld. We will move from Knab and Anzaldua to Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale. Collapsing the genres of autobiography, history, and the novel, Ghosh explicates the ways in which the materiality of lived experience shapes and inflects scholarly research and publication. We juxtapose this with Sara Suleri's Meatless Days, a post-modern post-colonial autobiography in which history and theory inform the narration of a life-story and call into question what it means to tell the story of a life. We end, finally, with Etal Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose, a novel situated in war-torn Beirut. Adnan's novel explores the complex weight of historical narratives shaping the identity structures of the characters in Sitt Marie Rose and grapples with the impossibility and the necessity of "seeing" the "other." Revealing the role of private fantasy in public discourses of war, Adnan's text confronts the ways in which people's projections of their (our) fear and self-hatred are imbricated in representations of the other and structure their (our) images of themselves (ourselves). Sitt Marie Rose thus brings a deeply personal, private/subjective and concrete materiality to a narrative engaging the abstract politics of sex, colonial and neo-colonialism, and war. We conclude the course by asking, then, how the genres of autobiography, ethnography, and fiction collapse; how "truth" is represented in these texts; what kinds of "truth" fiction can tell; and what the limits of truth-telling in history, auto/biography, and ethnography are.
Reading List
- Anzaldua, Gloria. "The Serpent."
- Devi, Maitreyi. It Does Not Die: A Romance.
- Eliade, Mircea. Bengal Nights: A Novel.
- Knab, Timothy J. A War of Witches: A Journey into the Underworld of the Contemporary Aztecs.
- Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale.
- Menchu, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchu
- Menchu, Rigoberta. Crossing Borders