The Lure of History: Memory, Trauma and the Archival Impulse in Contemporary American Writing

This course’s primary focus will be on Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, both of which address the violence of history in an attempt to trouble the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Through close readings of excerpts by Mendelsohn and Whitehead as well as leading female authors of narrative nonfiction (Harjo, Choi, Lorde, Nelson and others) and exposure to key critical concepts (by Butler, Derrida, Caruth, Glissant and others), it aims to challenge common assumptions about literary genres, disciplines, gender, and race through an investigation of the lure of History and archival impulses in American literature.