FACS 2960
Creative and Critical Fictions: Writing Home

 

www.yorku.ca/caitlin/2960

 

 
 
Dr. Caitlin Fisher
208 Winters, 736-2100 x 20744

caitlin@yorku.ca

Office Hours: Monday 11 a.m. - 1 p.m. or by appointment

 

Prerequisite:
2nd year standing, basic knowledge of Internet browser and email or permission of  the Course Director.

 

Class meets: Monday  2:30-5:30 p.m.

Vari Hall 1018


It is impossible to think or write without some facade of a house at least rising up, a phantom, to receive and to make a work of our peregrinations. Lost behind our thoughts, the domus is also a mirage in front,
the impossible dwelling.

-- Jean-François Lyotard


SCHEDULE
Note: I will make every effort to follow the syllabus as outlined, but reserve the right to make scheduling
changes when further discussion of a given topic is required or to take advantage of unforeseen events and opportunities.

 

Week 1    September 10

 

Introduction

 "the uncanny is that class of the frightening that leads back to what is known and familiar”
- Sigmund Freud "the 'Uncanny'"

 

 

You will be given some photocopies in class that we’ll explore together. Read them over again and check out “The meaning of home: a photographic exploration” at http://www.sfu.ca/~mcelcher/

To do this week:

Purchase course texts. Activate maya account. Send me an email so I have your address handy
(be sure to mention you’re in facs2960): Caitlin@yorku.ca

 

 

Week 2    September 17

Memory

 

Barry Dempster   Writing Home  (excerpt) Toronto: Oberon Press, 1989  (5-26) 

 

And one of:

Anna Bohlin “The Politics of Locality: memories of District Six in Cape Town” In Nadia Lovell (ed.) Locality and Belonging New York: Routledge, 1998 (168-187).

 

John Lowry “Homesick for the memories: The gendering of Historical memory in Women’s Narratives of the Vietnam War” In R. george (ed.) Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity

Oxford: Westview Press, 1998. (255-278).

Week 3    September  24
Idealized homes/ real families

 

“the roots of the words for protection which turn around hos for house,
 are also the roots of the words for aggression, like hostility.”

 Elaine Scarry

 

H.H. “Wanted: A Home’ in Bits of Talk; Home Matters Boston: Roberts brothers, 1873  (233-239).

 

Poetry: (read at least one of)

Christl Verduyn “Housework”

Judith kalman “Untitled”

Sandy Shreeve “Between Sisters”

Zara Suleman “Kitch and Talk”

Margo Button “The Family Tree”

In N. Amin (ed.) Canadian Women’s Studies: An introductory reader

Toronto: Ianna Publications, 1999  (508, 517-19, 520-30).

 

Lifewriting (read at least two of)

 

Audre Lorde  “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name” (excerpt)

 

Joan Nestle  “Two Women: Regina Nestle, 1910-1978, and her daughter Joan” in Catherine Reid and Holly Iglesias (eds)  Every Woman I’ve Ever Loved: lesbian Writers on their Mothers

San Fransisco: Cleis Press, 1997 (19-36).

 

Dorothy Allison “Skin, Where she touches me” in Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and literature

Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1994  (225-251).

 

Dorothy Allison “What do we see? What do we not see?” in Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and literature Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1994 (57-62).

 

Essex Hemphill “Commitments” in Essex Hemphill (ed.) Brother to brother Boston: Allyson publications, 1991

 

Supplementary: Background: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/home.html
The Literature & Culture of the American 1950s

 

Homepage/collage assignment due

Week 4    October 1


[image from PUBLIC 21 - the Childhood Issue]

Little Buffalo River  (thematically linked story collections)

Jean McNeil Hunting Down Home (novel excerpt) Minneapolis; Milkweed Editions, 1999 (177-183).

Charles Henry Fuller “The jazz Singer” in Essex Hemphill (ed.) Brother to brother Boston: Allyson publications, 1991.

 

House on Mango Street moved --
will be used in two weeks

October 8th – thanksgiving – no classes

Week 5    October 15

Leaving

For university:
Calvin Glenn “In My Own Space” in Charles Henry Fuller “The jazz Singer” in Essex Hemphill (ed.) Brother to brother Boston: Allyson publications, 1991. 

 

 “searching for the meaning of home”

http://www.nwmissouri.edu/missourian/archive/vol71/82897/opinion/myturn.html

 

for happiness: Nora Hickson Kelly “headed for happiness” in My Mountie and me: A True Story (excerpt) Ottawa: RCMP Millenium Foundation and PW Group, 1999 (156-162).

 

Josephine Wtulich (ed) Writing Home: immigrants in brazil and the United States 1890-1891 (excerpts) Bolder: East European Monographs, 1986 (ix, 404-414).

 

For paris: John Glassco “Paris” in Kildare Dobbs (ed.) Away from Home Toronto: Deneau, 1985 (92-102).

 

Short writing assignment #1 due

Week 6    October 22
faith
House on Mango Street

“The African American spiritual is a song about place. Home is one of the most often used words in this body of songs: "...swing low, sweet chariot, comin' for to carry me home...", "...sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home...", "...Lord, I'm bearin' heavy burdens, trying to get home...", "...looking for a home....", "...steal away, steal away home, I ain't got long to stay here...", "...going home in the chariot in the mornin'...".

 

(song lyrics will be made available online)

Week 7    October 29
Witness (writing pictures)

 

Art Spiegelman’s MAUS 

Lynda Barry The Greatest of Marlys! (excerpt) Seattle: Sasquatch Books

you can read an interview with Lynda Barry here

Assignment #2 due

Week 8    November 5
Photographic eye/I

Revisit; the meaning of home: a photographic exploration

http://www.sfu.ca/~mcelcher/

 

Sally Mann’s looking glass Houses (online)

"The place is important; the time is summer. It's any summer, but the place is home and people here are my family."
So begins Sally Mann's introduction to her 1992 Aperture book Immediate Family.

The photographs of Sally Mann are steeped in the influences of rural southwestern Virginia where she was raised and still lives. Landscapes suffused with the melancholy of a lost paradise, abstract color photographs of objects submersed in water, and black and white images of her children playing, their passing moments stilled by her large-format view camera--these form the body of imagery found in Still Time, a stunning mid-career retrospective of arguably one of the most important photographers working today. (left: Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) At Charlie's Farm, from Immediate Family , gelatin silver print, 1984-1991, Copyright Sally Mann, Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery)

Mann sees herself as an artist rooted in the American South in both subject and sensibility. "The South hasn't been fully explored," she has said. "I'm trying to make beautiful pictures, but I want them to have 'pith.'" A powerful sense of place attaches to her work; much of it is set at the family farm and cabin acquired by her father, a small town physician and amateur photographer. It is here in this rustic and remote setting, thick with the humid, Southern summer atmosphere, that Mann achieved her most compelling work--images of her children Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia, in the years between 1984 and 1995 at play in this lush setting. Even when photographing her children, Mann insists that her works are nevertheless about the South--"they're still about here," she has remarked. "It exerts a hold on me I can't define." And yet the evocative, lost paradise of childhood that she recorded has come to represents another important facet of the personal and artistic geography of Sally Mann. Images of her three offspring, often in the nude, display Mann's technical artistry and her fascination with the uncharted terrain between child and adult. (left: Sally Mann (American, b. 1951), Damaged Child, from Immediate Family , gelatin silver print, 1984-1991, Copyright Sally Mann, Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery)  <source: http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa448.htm>

Last day to drop F 2001 course is Friday, November 9th

Week 9    November 12
Virtually home

Apartment: “Apartment is inspired by the idea of the memory palace. In a mnemonic technique from a pre-Post-It era, Cicero imagined inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then reciting that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configurations.”

http://turbulence.org/Works/apartment/index.html

 

Home: “Home is an interactive, navigable virtual-reality environment that explores ideas about swelling and its relation to the psyche. In it, a house abandoned by its owners, is up for sale. Half-empty spaces still reverberate with memories and the most private moments of its previous inhabitants. Deceptively normal looking from the outside, once inside, spaces stretch and break apart and walls fall away, leaving only a small plateau hanging in emptiness, resounding with the lives and voices of those who still haunt it.”

http://www.evl.uic.edu/research/template_res_project.php3?indi=202

 

Susan Leigh Starr “From Hestia to Home Page: Feminism and the Concept of Home in Cyberspace”

In Bell D, Kennedy B M (Eds) The Cybercultures Reader

London: Routledge, 2000 (632-643).

Assignment #3 due

Week 10  November 19

Transnational Communities and the Meaning of ‘Home’

“One of the defining characteristics of transnational communities is that they have multiple allegiances to places. It follows that the meaning of ‘home’ for transnational communities is likely to be complex and multi-dimensional. Does the existence of these communities necessitate a reconceptualisation of the notion ‘home’? To what extent is ‘home’ for transnational communities no longer tied to a specific geographical place? To what extent do transnational communities conceive of more than one ‘home’, with competing allegiances changing through time?”

 “On leaving england, 1945” Charles Fisher (online)
Cecilia Clinkscale “Diasporan Blues”
Rodney Foster “Trinidad” in International Black Writers and Artists (eds.) River Crossings; Voices of the Diaspora, 1994  (34-35, 51).
Pura Del Prado “An Exile’s Monologue”
Belkis Cuza Male “My Mother’s Homeland” in C. Hospital and J. Cantera (eds.) A Century of Cuban Writing in Florida Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 1996. (152-155, 163).

Week 11  November 22
Hybridity

 

Bhargavi C. Mandava “Ghosts and Goddesses” in Barbara Findlen (ed.) Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation Seattle: Seal Press, 1995 (62-74).

 

Judit “Border Conflict” in J. Ramos (ed.) Compagneras: Latina Lesbians

London, Routledge, 1994 (218-219).

 

supplementary: Out of Place,  Edward W. Said

 

journal/portfolios due

Week 1 2  November 26 

domesticity

 

Banana Yoshimoto Kitchen  (excerpt)  New York: Washington Square press/Simon and Shuster, 1993

 (3-41).

 

Ann Ducille “Domesticity and the demon Mother” in R. George (ed.) Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity Oxford: Westview Press, 1998. (279-297).

 

Womanhouse http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/womenhouse/

 

supplementary: excerpts from North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950 (online)

Week 13   December 3

Coming Home: Reading cabaret/performances (location TBA)

 

Kevin lee Lagrone “Homecoming” in International Black Writers and Artists (eds.)

River Crossings; Voices of the Diaspora, 1994 (91).

 

Final projects due

Last day of undergraduate classes is December 5th

 

+ Parts of this syllabus are indebted to or from the work of  Wendy Chun, Princeton University and
Heather Zwicker, University of Alberta.