Identity and Agency

Any consideration of identity is bound to run up against the concept of agency. Considering identity and agency as mutually constitutive, this course looks at identity's formation and reformation as a narrative experience and effect, examining its emergence on historical and affective terrains. Approaching identity from a range of vantages (psychoanalysis, gender, history, law), we trace the ways that identities might be consolidated into (or, alternatively, unravel) cultural, political, national, or social arrangements. Works by Woolf, Selvon, James Weldon Johnson, Christopher Isherwood, Proust, Fanon, Arendt, Freud, Winnicott, Butler. Enrollment limited to 15.