Writing the Present Day Life

Catalog description

This course examines the impact of the digital age on questions of writing, identity construction, ethics, trauma, and love. Our entry into the digital age has been compared to the cultural shift that occurred when the Gutenberg Bible enabled the wide distribution of the written word. What is the relationship between the "spirit of an age" or Zeitgeist and its narratives and texts? For example, at the end of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando (1928), her time-traveling and sex-changing Elizabethan heroine Orlando, enters "the present day." By the novel's end, Orlando has grown into a young woman in "present day" London. Who might Orlando be today? Reading a range of texts including Shakespeare's Hamlet, Durras" The Lover, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, "as well as essays on the gaze, trauma, gender and representation. "We will view Cindy Sherman's photographs and Chaplin's film Modern Times. We conclude with students writing their own last chapter of Orlando, situated in present day New York.