DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH MA: III: Elective Course, Aug.-Dec. 2022
“Vulnerable Lives”
Pramod K Nayar Credits: 4
This course examines discourses and representations of vulnerability in contemporary literature and culture. It moves from working definitions of vulnerability and ecoprecarity to themes such as biosecurity, life in the age of biocapitalism, the politics of wilderness, the pandemic-induced emptiness of urban spaces, inherited vulnerabilities, and resilience in the face of vulnerability and violence.
The course will contain several theoretical readings, some of which are listed here (the list may expand later).
Vulnerability and Ecoprecarity
Biosecurity and the ‘Invasion’ Narrative
Texts: Alien, Species, Contagion, The Andromeda Strain, etc
Wilderness and Feral Biopolitics
Texts: Into the Wild, Lake Placid, The Jungle Book, Grizzly Man, etc
The Agoragothic
Text: New York Times’ ‘The Great Empty’
Precarious Lives and Biocapitalism
Texts: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale [selections]
Toxic Nature/Biocultural Vulnerability
Texts: Huntington’s Disease /Alzheimer’s Disease Memoirs [selections]
Vulnerability and Resilience
Texts: Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde
Readings
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Dougherty, Stephen. ‘The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel’, Cultural Critique 48 (2001): 1–29.
Raglon, Rebecca. ‘The Post Natural Wilderness and Its Writers’, Journal of Eco-Criticism 1.1 (2009): 60–6.
Sunder Rajan, Kaushik (ed.) Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2012.
Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2008.
Burke, Lucy. ‘The country of my disease: Genes and genealogy in Alzheimer’s life-writing’. Journal of Literary Disability 2. 1 (2008): 63–74.
Bracke, Sarah. ‘Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resistance’, in Judith Butler et al (eds) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 52–75
Content and components of the course may be altered depending on circumstances.
Internal Assessment: As decided by the University
End-semester Examination: As decided by the University
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Additional Readings (optional)
Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity, 2004.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 2003.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
Carroll, Siobhan. ‘The Terror and the Terroir: The Ecological Uncanny in New Weird Exploration Narratives’, Paradoxa 28 (2017): 67–89.
Creed, Barbara. ‘Evolution, Extinction and the Eco-Trauma Film: Darwin’s
Nightmare (2004) and A Zed & Two Naughts (1985)’, in Narine (ed.) Eco-trauma Cinema. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. 25–45
Karmakar, Manali and Avishek Parui. ‘Embodiment and Entangled Subjectiv-
ity: A Study of Robin Cook’s Coma, Priscille Sibley’s The Promise of Stardust and Alexander Baliaev’s Professor Dowell’s Head’, Journal of the Medical Humanities (2018): 1–16.
Shildrick, Margrit. ‘Vulnerable bodies and ontological contamination’, in Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker (eds.) Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 153–67.
Millette, Holly-Gale and Ruth Heholt (eds) The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020.
Fumagalli, Andrea. “Twenty Theses on Contemporary Capitalism (Cognitive Biocapitalism).” Translated by Sabrina Ovan. Angelaki, vol. 16, no. 3 (2012): 7–17.
Petryna, Adriana. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002.
Wallace, Molly. Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 2016.
Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures: A New Theory of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Jane-Johnstone, Megan. Alzheimer’s Disease, Media Representations and the Politics of Euthanasia: Constructing Risk and Selling Death in an Ageing Society. London: Ashgate, 2013.
Behuniak, Susan M. ‘The Living Dead? The Construction of People with Alzheimer’s Disease as Zombies’, Ageing & Society 31 (2011): 70-92