L399 9972 JUNIOR HONORS SEMINAR
Patricia Ingham

11:15a-12:05p MWF (15 students) 3 cr., IW.

TOPIC: “Secrets and Lies”

“Tell all the Truth, but Tell it Slant” writes poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s poetic instructions notwithstanding, literature has a long and vexed relationship with truth and its claims; language always reveals while it conceals, and literature both announces its aims and dissembles about them, elucidating some secrets while making sure others are left untold. Fiction itself, as Elaine Scarry has pointed out, sits on a continuum with truth at one end and lies at the other. And if fiction writers, poets, and essayists have explored the problematic of language and narration through various formal strategies of representation (unreliable narration, stream-of- consciousness, intertextuality, metaphor and metonymy), literary theorists have emphasized the ways in which silence, secrecy, and even self-deception haunt language, constituting the problem of the literary as such. How do literature and literary criticism deal with the problem of what can’t or won’t be said? And how might fiction’s link with untruth, its multilayered polyvocality, constitute a pursuit of “all the Truth” whether in Dickinson’s terms or some others? What are finally, the implications of this for understanding literature’s place in society, culture, politics at large?

This honors seminar will engage with a range of literary and theoretical texts that explore the frailties and impossibilities of representation. Literary works to be read may include: Tereus, Procne, and Philomel from Ovid’s Metamorphosis; Browning’s “His Last Duchess”; Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (read with facing-page Modern English translation); Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Coetzee’s Foe; Poe’s, “The Purloined Letter”; Melville’s Billy Budd; Morrison’s Beloved and/or others. Theoretical readings may include: Pierre Macherey; Geoffrey Hartmann; Patricia Joplin; Jacques Derrida; Barbara Johnson; Jacques Lacan; Cathy Caruth, to name a few.

Students will be expected to attend the seminar regularly and participate actively in our discussions. Work for the course will include small papers and a final seminar project of the student’s choosing. For further information, or to suggest topics, texts, or related areas of particular interest, contact pingham@indiana.edu. Honors students only.