SEMINAR PROFILE

H10 -
On The Road in U.S. Novels and Films

This seminar takes a counter-intuitive, meta-view of cultural classics set "on the road." Inspired by the esoteric criminal narrator of Nabokov's Lolita, the exile Humbert Humbert who declares that he is putting "the geography of the United States in motion," the course explores the variously anti-social, therapeutic, aspirational, and self-destructive motivations for and consequences of migration, travel, and social mobility in modern U.S. literature and film. One assumption of the course that I hope to test is that most major works of U.S. Modernism can be classified as 'road novels or films,' and may be most deeply apprehended as such. The course will begin with analysis of Ernest Hemingway's pain-seeking veteran expatriates in The Sun Also Rises, and then turn to John Ford's film The Grapes of Wrath taking a theoretical approach (covering literary theorists such as Zizek, Hardt, and Negri, and 'culture of poverty' sociologists like Oscar Lewis and Orlando Patterson) to the task Ford's film sets for itself: representing poor migrant laborers as worthy of emulation. Next, we will examine how film stars and young girls become edible icons and commodities in the U.S. consumer culture of the 1950's, using as our guides the popular film The Wild One which turned Brando into a celebrity and the canonical novel, Lolita. We will then leap forward a few decades to explore the political reaction to such commodification, by studying two feminist road films whose visions depend on the sexual revolution of the 1960s: Thelma and Louise and Kimberly Pierce's Boys Don't Cry, which draws on The Wizard of Oz in depicting the excruciating odyssey of its transgender character.

Scholar:

Susan Mizruchi

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

5/8/2017, 5/18/2017

H10 -	On The Road in U.S. Novels and Films

	This seminar takes a counter-intuitive, meta-view of cultural classics set "on the road." Inspired by the esoteric criminal narrator of Nabokov's Lolita, the exile Humbert Humbert who declares that he is putting "the geography of the United States in motion," the course explores the variously anti-social, therapeutic, aspirational, and self-destructive motivations for and consequences of migration, travel, and social mobility in modern U.S. literature and film. One assumption of the course that I hope to test is that most major works of U.S. Modernism can be classified as 'road novels or films,' and may be most deeply apprehended as such. The course will begin with analysis of Ernest Hemingway's pain-seeking veteran expatriates in The Sun Also Rises, and then turn to John Ford's film The Grapes of Wrath taking a theoretical approach (covering literary theorists such as Zizek, Hardt, and Negri, and 'culture of poverty' sociologists like Oscar Lewis and Orlando Patterson) to the task Ford's film sets for itself: representing poor migrant laborers as worthy of emulation. Next, we will examine how film stars and young girls become edible icons and commodities in the U.S. consumer culture of the 1950's, using as our guides the popular film The Wild One which turned Brando into a celebrity and the canonical novel, Lolita. We will then leap forward a few decades to explore the political reaction to such commodification, by studying two feminist road films whose visions depend on the sexual revolution of the 1960s: Thelma and Louise and Kimberly Pierce's Boys Don't Cry, which draws on The Wizard of Oz in depicting the excruciating odyssey of its transgender character.

		Scholar:	Susan Mizruchi
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	5/8/2017, 5/18/2017