SHARE WITH STUDENTS: Fall 2019 Creative Arts/World Cultures Gen Ed – “The Devil in Warsaw: Polish Prose in Modern Times” (POL 130 has seats!
There are still seats open in the Creative Arts/World Cultures Gen Ed "The Devil in Warsaw: Polish Prose in Modern Times" (POL 130). This course, taught in English, has no pre-requisites and meets TR 5-6:15 in the new ARC!
Description:
Enter the vibrant and anguished world of 20th-century Polish prose with an introduction to literary works by futurist Aleksander Wat, Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski, poet and acerbic social critic C.K. Norwid, modernist innovator Bruno Schulz, contemporary Polish author and psychologist Olga Tokarczuk, and others, and join us as we discuss the modern text as both a hardworking machine, and an embodiment of desire. In this course we will ask: What does fiction do, and what roles has it played in helping to negotiate the experience of modernity? Is storytelling still necessary and possible in a world characterized by speed, the machine, and the filmic arts? If so, what does it desire, and what does it promise?
Topics in this course include Positivist, Futurist, avant-garde and neo-Romantic movements in Polish literature; witness literature; the post-1989 literature of small homelands; and the role of literary theologies in a secular modern world. Reading short stories and novels written in Poland in the turbulent 20th century, we will consider narratives that offer escape from the modern world into the worlds of fantasy, absurdity, or nostalgia; and narratives whose purpose is precisely to prevent escape from the shock or disillusionment of the 20th century.