The Outsider

Description

However you think about the outsider – as artist, as outlaw or anarchist, as hero or scapegoat, as criminal or critic – it is clear that this figure is a constant in the study of literature. Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, the exilic wanderers of the Romantic tradition all remind us of the enduring power of a conceit that continues today in our fascination with superheroes and teenaged supernaturals. In all cases the outsider is that figure who can never settle or be settled, who finds themselves between states, forms, conventions and laws, either embodying or initiating some form of transformation. In accounting for such figures we are often required to re-evaluate ideas about justice and morality, truth and representation, similarity and difference, privilege and power; in short, the figure of the outsider offers us a way to think critically about the ways in which a culture conceives of individuality and, in turn, how the individual can be said to reflect the culture’s imagining of identity and nation.

In this course we shall investigate the way the figure of the outsider has been represented in the traditions of American and New Zealand literature and popular culture.

This course can be used towards an English major or minor. BA students who major in English would normally take at least two 100-level 15 point ENGL courses (which must include at least one of the following: ENGL117, ENGL102 or ENGL103), at least three 200-level 15 point ENGL courses, and at least two 300-level 30 point ENGL courses. Please see the BA regulations  or a student advisor for more information.