This course will explore the relationship between cultural forms and social change by focusing on the representation of human self-consciousness and or “conscience” in twentieth-century short story, poem, novel, and documentary film. We will explore in particular the ways in which ethics, morality, responsibility, and justice are attributed to the human psyche in representations of imperial/colonial and neo-imperial/post-colonial subjectivity. These texts all question how humans can come to perceive the role of “history” in their day-to-day experience and how they might become agents of social change in relation to specifically colonial/imperial histories they often do not fully recognize or understand. Our focus across these texts will be on the rise of the U.S. as a global force in the twentieth century.

Our primary texts will include one nineteenth century precursor, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, followed by Joseph Conrad’s turn of the century Heart of Darkness and later 20th century texts such as Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, Theresa Hak Kyng Cha's Dictee, and J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. These texts will be read alongside poetry by Lynn Emanuel, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Claude McKay, William Wordsworth, and C.P. Cavafy, the documentary film Life and Debt, and contemporary essays about life inside U.S. prisons. Each primary text will also be read in a cluster of secondary readings intended to foster critical inquiry and research practice. This course will introduce students to academic research methods in cultural and literary studies and require a final research paper of 12-15 pages.