The Literature of Identity

This course centers on close readings of poems, short novels, and critical essays that explore multiple literary explorations of “identity,” running from the early modern period to our contemporary moment. How does literature contribute to imagining, shaping, and expressing the definitions and contours of what we call “identity,” and how does art broadly make and unmake it? Can an artwork have an identity, and can identity be a work of art? Our task in this course will be to follow these questions and track how artworks wrestle with making and unmaking identities, allowing for appearance and legibility as well as disappearance and anonymity. Possible writers and artists will be Shakespeare, Montaigne, Wordsworth, Rousseau, Shelley, Wilde, Claudia Rankine, Derek Jarman, Charles Burnett.