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This seminar explores the topic of addiction in literature. We will look at how addictions can catalyse both creativity and self-destruction, offering an escape from “tyranny” (Percy Shelley) and from the “miseries of consciousness” (Ottessa Moshfegh); we will be concerned with how representations of addiction raise issues of gender, class, and race; and we will look at the topic from a poetological perspective, by examining phenomena such as unreliable narration. In the first part of the seminar, we will revisit some of the canonical texts about addiction – such as DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”, and Joyce’s “Grace”, before turning our attention to more recent narratives of addiction. The selection of the corpus will be made in class at the beginning of the seminar, with the potential material ranging from novels such as Go Ask Alice (anonymous), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Laurie Weeks’s Zipper Mouth, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggy Bain, to movies and series such as Requiem for a Dream and The Wire.
Please note that the material for the course is going to include emotionally challenging and potentially triggering content. I will do my best to flag especially graphic or intense content. |
