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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 BABELEROTIC 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

 
OFFICIAL BOOK LIST

note, 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.

     
Visit our social media seminar site here: https://www.facebook.com/eyegiene