English 192-022
Freshman Seminar: The Nightmares of History

Instr: Listoe, Daniel
Office: CRT 519; 229-2972
e-mail: dlistoe@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: MW; 12:30-1:45pm; TBA

Course Description

In this course students will think about how we imagine the past and the powerful effects history can have on our present. Through literature, philosophy, and essays students will learn to think about history as something we make, something that makes us, and something that is always available to question and greater understanding.

At the end of the course students will have had the unique opportunity to think about storytelling and the imagination, our sense of time, notions of evidence and reality, and how we come to understand ourselves through the past. In other words, how our stories of the past impact our hopes for the future, and fight against the nightmares of history.

Throughout the course, students will also be encouraged to engage the crucial, critical questions: How are different cultural identities shaped by the selective use of history? What role does literature play in collective memory? What tales of the past do we use to explain our present? What is our cultural inheritance? How do we escape a past we don't want to repeat? Can one ever be free of history?

Assignments include take-home essay projects and an individual research project that develops a story about the past.

Possible course readings from James Agee, Eric Auerbach, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, J. M. Coetzee, Brian Friel, Susan Griffin, Herman Melville, Friedrich Nietzsche, Patrick Modiano, Kurt Vonnegut, and Virginia Woolf.