English R1B

Reading and Composition: Other Minds

Other Readings and Media

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Joseph M. Williams: Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace;Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Course Reader

Films: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour

Description

It’s often been suggested that fiction is defined by the access it grants us to other minds.  While historians speculate about what their subjects must have thought, novelists can provide their readers direct access to the inner workings of characters.  The texts for the course self-consciously engage this access in the construction of character and plot, and in so doing raise a number of questions we’ll address over the course of the semester: To what extent can one know another person in these works?  What does it mean when the mind of another is radically opaque?  Are there limits to the knowledge one can have of one’s own mind?