WRITING MASCULINITIES IN 1984/2020 in Fall 2020 (CL1099FB3)

What happens when we try to understand and inhabit historical identities, to write from within the lives of the past? This course will mix analysis, creative reconstruction, and cultural-materialist methods to explore the lives of 1984 (with a special focus on masculinity). We’ll be searching through the archives for what the German anti-fascist philosopher Walter Benjamin called ‘dialectical images’: powerful images of human lives that speak to us urgently from the past. These images, for Benjamin, show us the historical and social and political limitations that constrained lives in the past; but they also contain the seeds of possibility, of hopes and futures that did not come true, and which can serve as an inspiration and a resource for us. In coordination with Professor Payne’s course, our work will proceed in three phases. First, we will establish and explore a repertoire of representations from 1984, looking at images, artworks, television, newspapers, film and literature from across the world (our choices will depend on the languages and interests of students) – we’ll concentrate particularly on the way that poetry registers and disrupts ambient representations. At the same time, we will develop our theoretical tools and methods of analysis. When we have a sense of 1984, we will work on creative exploration, as we inhabit the lives we are researching and starting to understand, writing fictionally from within the constraints and possibilities of 1984. The closing section will take us to the history of the present: we’ll look for dialectical images of masculinity in 2020. How do we intervene in the institutions, social forms, and material practices that are constraining our lives or opening up rich prospects for us, so that we can enable or build the masculinity of the future?