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| English 525: LIT OF THE US 1960PRESNT {Surveillance, Sexuality, & "Sinema" in the Americas, Post-1960} | 9:30am-10:45am | TTH | P-149 | ||||||||||||||
SDSU | Spring 2013 | English
525  Dr. William A. Nericcio | Office Hours are Before and After Class on Tuesdays! Arts and Letters 273 “She
refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing
which I have called certification.
Nowadays when a person lives somewhere,
in a neighborhood, the place is
not certified for him. More than likely
he will live there sadly and
the emptiness which is inside him will
expand until it evacuates the
entire neighborhood. But if he sees a
movie which shows his very
neighborhood, it becomes possible for
him to live, for a time at least,
as a person who is Somewhere and not
Anywhere.”
Walker
Percy, The Moviegoer
  ven before
Hollywood (and by extension, Los Angeles)
became the
epicenter of American entertainment culture,
the camera had already
changed the world in ways that are
traceable—as American sage Susan
Sontag puts it in On
Photography, “needing to have
reality confirmed
and experience enhanced by photographs is an
aesthetic consumerism to
which everyone is now addicted. Industrial
societies turn their
citizens into image-junkies; it is the most
irresistible form of mental
pollution.” In our English 525 class, a
survey of American literary
history since 1960, we will see that
American authors were not immune
to this “irresistible form of mental
pollution” and that their
relationship with still photography and
motion pictures infected their
writing in dramatic fashion. 
The final list of authors (graphic narrative
artists, and directors) is
still being determined, but the working list
of texts includes The Moviegoer, by Walker
Percy, The
Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin, Blue Velvet,
by David Lynch, The Crying of Lot 49, by
Thomas Pynchon, The Confederacy of Dunces,
by John Kennedy Toole; Ghost World,
by Dan Clowes, Human Diastrophism, by
Gilbert Hernandez, People of Paper, by
Salvador Plascencia, Fight Club,
by Chuck Palahniuk, and The Bluest
Eye, by Toni Morrison.  Though
this class is designed for majors in English
and Comparative
Literature, students (both undergraduate and
graduate students) from
all majors/fields are more than welcome to
join our
sinematic/sinematic, “American” festival of
the imagination.More info breaking soon... here are two links to previous incarnations of engl 525 I whipped up back in the day... AMERICAN BABEL & EROTIC NEUROTIC SEMIOTIC... and to the Grad Seminar, American Panopticons, where some of the leading themes of this s/cinematic-literary experiment were hatched... William A. Nericcio Director, MALAS Professor, English & Comparative Literature, CLAS, and Chicana/o Studies |
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 OFFICIAL BOOK LISTnote, the image below, a screengrab from the Aztec Shops bookstore notes RENTAL prices; all good English majors appreciate the value of a library and prefer real books; note, in class, for better discussion, it is required that you bring your old fashioned, paper, analog books with you--laptops are not allowed in our seminar, nor are kindles, ipads, iphones, etc. An alternative listing of books can be seen here outside the sdsu.edu domain.  |
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Visit our social media seminar
site here: https://www.facebook.com/eyegiene |
