Approaches to Interiority

We read in order not to be confined to the self nature has assigned us; we read to make prolonged and intimate contact with other inner lives. Day to day we are largely opaque to each other; in literature, by contrast, there are no secrets. What life hides, writing announces. Novels, stories, memoirs, biographies, personal essays, poems and plays exist to reveal what’s really going on in the deep recesses. Our course will focus, across a range of genres and styles, on the endless varieties of inner experience and how outer life disguises, but also intimates, the fortress of secrets within. You will be asked to relate the following readings to other books you’ve read, as well as to what is personal and idiosyncratic to yourself. Your written assignments should reflect the inner changes that reading has wrought -- as well as the core of originality that each of us possesses, just on account of being human