hallucinatingmirrors

his is not just an "introduction to literature" class--or, at the very least, that phrase, that description, does not embody our ambitions nor our dreams. Our Fall 2015 experimental literary/art/cinema/web festival will focus on the metaphor of "hallucinating mirrors" as we explore the deliciously and outrageously damaged psyches, minds, and art of women and men in some of the most challenging and eye-opening texts you’ve ever sampled before.

And we come to this collaborative hallucinatory experiment focused on literature at a weird moment in history, a watershed epoch in the history of technology/knowledge--a moment, as rumors have it, where we are witnessing the Death of the Book.

But is it a “death” or a murder?

And, if the latter, “Who done it?”

The first suspect? The Movies or cinema (if you want to be fancy)--the heralded and infamous wonders of the silver screen heaping gasoline on the already burning, pristine pages of literary history. Next suspect? Television, the infamous "boob-tube," a technological innovation that invaded every home in America and turned us all into a nation of brain-addled, screen-sucking zombies. Next Perp?

Computers and the Internet, with their insidiously addictive delights--memes that last a day or two but yank on the collective unconscious like heroin or worse. The last likely suspect? Our ubiquitous smartphones and social media apps—Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram lighting the match that burned Literature forever.

But don’t worry—there’s a happy ending (the ghost of literature not at all keen on making an early exit). The premise of this 16 week class is that the ghostly hallucination of literature will live on—evolving, mutating, transmogrifying. Literature survives and thrives, in books, on screens, in theatres, and, even, scrawled on bathroom walls… The need to leave a trace of ourselves, a tattoo of our existence, cannot be killed.

The SDSU catalogue says this is what English 220 will give you:

But that is not enough for us. We will want more. Much more!

Still, we will need to show caution. We will have to be careful with these formidable, sometimes toxic/caustic narratives! Eyes wide open, so to speak: these textual mirrors, concealing nothing, revealing all, are not without their tricks, not without their surprises, and the fractured souls they flaunt before our eyes will test our intellect, imagination, and, most deeply, our emotions.

The final list of works is still under consideration, but the working list of books will include: Olivas's Things We Do Not Talk About, Sheppard's Explorer of the Mind: The Biography of Sigmund Freud, Plascencia’s People of Paper, Yuknavitch's Dora: A Head Case, Stevenson's Jeckyl & Hyde, Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Fuentes’s Aura, Clowes’s Ghost World, Olivas's Things We Do Not Talk About, Murakami's After Dark, and Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. {Note, my book, Tex[t]-Mex, is an optional book for the class--NOT REQUIRED!!!}

Works of cinema, screened in class for free include: Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, Shainberg’s Secretary, Polanski’s Venus in Furs, and Iñarritu's Birdman.

This course is open to ALL undergraduates without regard to your selected major or minor and assumes no expertise in literature, film, or fine art. If you are breathing, have an imagination, and are not easily offended by adult issues, themes and images then you should seriously consider coming along for the ride.