S1423 Literary Visions of Venice

Venice is a visionary city: the fantasy location of passionate life in works by authors such as Henry James (The Aspern Papers) and Ian MacEwan (The Comfort of Strangers); the aesthetic city par excellence for Ruskin (Stones of Venice) and Joseph Brodsky (Watermark); the ultimate imaginary city for Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities); and now “spectral” in Agamben’s essay, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living Among Specters.” If Venice has been the unconscious of Europe, so to speak, for centuries, where fantasies of love and death can be played out (e.g., Mann’s Death in Venice), it is partly as the meeting grounds of Occident and Orient: Shakespeare’s Othello, Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Pamuk’s The White Castle. We shall make a selection from these texts to consider the aesthetic, erotic, and political imagination that Venice has inspired in works of great literature. Two papers: one midterm (5-6 pp.); a final paper (10 pp.). Discussion will be our primary mode of engagement.