This course is about the literary transformation and translation of place. While place used to be seen as a geographical fixed point, now it seems to be more like MySpace, a virtual and conceptual space. However literature has in some ways always served as a virtual place, a fictional location of utopias, empires, and individual imaginations. This course will use several contemporary literary works to explore the ideas of space and place. Is a place a location, a point of origin, a community, or something more theoretical and abstract? What does it mean to be dis-placed? How does a text produce its own kind of place? Together these works will help provide some very different perspective on post-modernism, whereby we can explore its possibilities or suggest some of its problematic consequences. Texts include Mark Danielewski’s complex novel, House of Leaves, Nicholson Baker’s comic novel of the office, The Mezzanine, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Marilynn Robinson’s Housekeeping, Julie Otsuka’s novel of internment, When the Emperor was Divine, and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus.