(The Afterlife of Texts)

L502 is intended to be useful for graduate students in literature, composition, creative writing, and education. Basically, the course is concerned with the effects of writing, reading, and language use. It also considers what these effects imply for the teaching and study of literature and writing.

In Spring 2000, the course will focus on what can happen to a work once it is published. What sorts of adventures might it have when it enters the marketplace and, perhaps, the academy? The work may quickly win public acclaim, or gain fame only later on, or simply fall into oblivion. It may be translated, made into a film, revised by its original author, interpreted in all sorts of ways by critics, or even altered by later authors or publishers. Furthermore, debates may arise over what is the “authoritative” edition of the text, and there may even be courtroom battles over rights to it.

In this course, we will be especially concerned with processes of canonization, adaptation, and revision, as well as with the changing cultural assumptions that these processes reflect. We will think, too, about how our teaching and research might best acknowledge the “afterlife” of texts. We will address these matters primarily through particular case studies, drawn from both literature and nonfiction. For instance, we will look at the various ways Frederick Douglass reports a particular incident in his three autobiographies. We will study editors’ attempts to pin down the exact wording of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and we will analyze the King family’s courtroom efforts to establish their ownership of it. We will read Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, screen its film version, examine how Michael Cunningham incorporates Woolf’s book into his own Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, and analyze how Woolf’s image circulates as a contemporary cultural icon. Students will do oral and written presentations on the afterlives of other works they have chosen.

The course will emphasize class discussion. Required writing will include three short papers (4-5 pages each).