Prathna Lor | Teaching Portfolio — Sample Syllabuses
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Sample Syllabuses
Sample Syllabuses
Grief and Weltliteratur
Course Description
We are living in an historic moment of cultural, political, social, psychic, and material changes. With the pandemic, civil and global unrest around police brutality, antiblackness, indigenous sovereignty, and the climate crisis, you may be wondering why or how we should be studying literature at what seems to be the looming end of the world.
The challenge that literature often poses to readers is that it leaves us with more questions than answers. For me, that is an incredibly potent zone of possibility.
This is because literature can invite us to explore difference, forgiveness, and empathy. Moreover, the global challenges we are facing require complex forms of humanistic thinking which is why I strive toward cultivating cultural knowledge.
As an educator, I want to help anyone who is willing and engaged to understand and work through issues and ideas of justice, discrimination, compassion, and ethics; and I do this primarily by investigating and demonstrating how literature can help us to do so. Literature can offer us powerful and unsuspecting ways for us to reorient our world-views, confront hidden aspects of ourselves that can be frightening, and to work through sometimes difficult and incomprehensible experiences we have in everyday life. In this course, know that it is your learning that I value most.
One of the contradictions of our age is a heightened sense of global connectivity, of world consciousness, that is accompanied by mental anguish and alienation. Despite the myriad ways that we can connect, we may be left wanting. Or, it seems we are inundated with too much information--images of violence and terror, injustice, new and emergent vocabularies of illness and grievance, and planetary catastrophe. The world-scale feels both expansive and enclosing, distantly attached. This seminar asks: Is it still possible to grieve? How do we mourn our world? Do we need to? How can we grieve nationally? Internationally? Cross-culturally? In solidarity with? What is the work of mourning? Drawing upon Eric Auerbach's concept of weltliteratur ("world" or "universal" literature), we will track grief and its apprentices through a range of literary texts to ask what (literary) history can teach us about grief in the present for the future. We will meditate on grief as a site of the political, as well as its intimacy with aesthetic experience, asking why, for instance, objects of grief become beautiful, or how personal sorrow can enter into national imaginaries.
Required Readings
Course Description
We are living in an historic moment of cultural, political, social, psychic, and material changes. With the pandemic, civil and global unrest around police brutality, antiblackness, indigenous sovereignty, and the climate crisis, you may be wondering why or how we should be studying literature at what seems to be the looming end of the world.
The challenge that literature often poses to readers is that it leaves us with more questions than answers. For me, that is an incredibly potent zone of possibility.
This is because literature can invite us to explore difference, forgiveness, and empathy. Moreover, the global challenges we are facing require complex forms of humanistic thinking which is why I strive toward cultivating cultural knowledge.
As an educator, I want to help anyone who is willing and engaged to understand and work through issues and ideas of justice, discrimination, compassion, and ethics; and I do this primarily by investigating and demonstrating how literature can help us to do so. Literature can offer us powerful and unsuspecting ways for us to reorient our world-views, confront hidden aspects of ourselves that can be frightening, and to work through sometimes difficult and incomprehensible experiences we have in everyday life. In this course, know that it is your learning that I value most.
One of the contradictions of our age is a heightened sense of global connectivity, of world consciousness, that is accompanied by mental anguish and alienation. Despite the myriad ways that we can connect, we may be left wanting. Or, it seems we are inundated with too much information--images of violence and terror, injustice, new and emergent vocabularies of illness and grievance, and planetary catastrophe. The world-scale feels both expansive and enclosing, distantly attached. This seminar asks: Is it still possible to grieve? How do we mourn our world? Do we need to? How can we grieve nationally? Internationally? Cross-culturally? In solidarity with? What is the work of mourning? Drawing upon Eric Auerbach's concept of weltliteratur ("world" or "universal" literature), we will track grief and its apprentices through a range of literary texts to ask what (literary) history can teach us about grief in the present for the future. We will meditate on grief as a site of the political, as well as its intimacy with aesthetic experience, asking why, for instance, objects of grief become beautiful, or how personal sorrow can enter into national imaginaries.
Required Readings
- Eric Auerbach, "Philology and 'Weltliteratur'"
- Sophocles, Antigone
- Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
- Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraphxst
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
- Jenny Heijun-Wills, Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related
- Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed
- Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love