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Love, Literature & Destruction

  • Beginner
  • 21 and older
  • $315
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions

Start Dates (0)

  • $315
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions
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Class Description

Description

What you'll learn in this lecture class:

Love, Literature, and Destruction: an Introduction to Marguerite Duras

Novelist, playwright, and experimental filmmaker, Marguerite Duras resists easy categorization. Despite endless attempts by critics and scholars to claim her for emerging genres and movements, it may be easier to say what she was not: she was not part of the nouveau roman (new novel) movement in France, she was not a forerunner of autofiction, she did not write autobiography, and essays, she thought, were “debased.” She didn’t care about Hélène Cixous’s description of her as a practitioner of écriture feminine (feminine writing) any more than she cared for Jacques Lacan’s claim that she was a “rapturer.”

She was and was not a member of the French Communist Party, a post-colonial thinker, a feminist—if we’re to believe Duras’s own account, anyway. Notwithstanding a body of work that spans all manner of writing and film, which draws ambiguously on her early life in the French colony of Cochinchina (now Vietnam), as well as her later love affairs, political activities, and alcoholism, what mattered to Duras was seeking a truth she saw as peculiar to literature. But what sort of truth does Duras’s work reveal: about love, desire, addiction, depression—and the destructiveness that shadows our social and interior lives?

This course will explore a selection of Duras’s expansive creative output to grapple with how she treats desire, seduction, memory, destruction, melancholia, silence, and femininity. Readings will be drawn from the following:The LoverDestroyShe SaidThe Malady of DeathThe WarEmily L.Green EyesIndia SongandHiroshima, mon amour

Secondary reading will include work by Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Pierre Fédida, and others. We will ask: How is desire portrayed within matrixes of colonial and gendered power dynamics? In what ways does memory become attached to missing photographs or unmoored, “without recollection,” in Foucault’s words, and how does this technique inscribe forgetting at the exact place we expect to find remembrance? What does the pervasive theme of destruction suggest about melancholia, love, and loss? 

What’s at stake in her preoccupation with an austerity of language that reaches for silence? How might we read Duras’s ambivalent political actions and affiliations alongside, in, and through her work? What kind of ethics might be at work in her representations of atrocity? Above all, we’ll be curious about the writing itself and how it traces a certain style of a distinctive character.

Remote Learning

This course is available for "remote" learning and will be available to anyone with access to an internet device with a microphone (this includes most models of computers, tablets). Classes will take place with a "Live" instructor at the date/times listed below.

Upon registration, the instructor will send along additional information about how to log-on and participate in the class.

Refund Policy

  • Upon request, we will refund less 5% cancellation fee of a course up until 6 business days before its start date.
  • Students who withdraw after that point but before the first class are entitled to 75% refund or full course credit.
  • After the first class: 50% refund or 75% course credit.
  • No refunds or credits will be given after the second class.

In any event where a customer wants to cancel their enrollment and is eligible for a full refund, a 5% processing fee will be deducted from the refund amount.

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research was established in 2011 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Its mission is to extend liberal arts education and research far beyond the borders of the traditional university, supporting community education needs and opening up new possibilities for scholarship in the...

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