Professor: Gantt Gurley

4.00 credits

• CRN 32202: Monday & Wednesday, 10:00-11:20 AM @CHA 201

As a rule, we fail to take failure seriously. However, many great artists, musicians, and writers have credited failure with some of their greatest achievements. It is an uncomfortable paradox. What do we learn from failure? And what can we learn from reading texts that foreground failure as a prominent if not creative act? In this course, students will grapple with narratives that either disrupt the typical notion of structure (beginning, middle, and end) or feature a protagonist that fails to complete the hero’s journey. Incomplete and ruptured novels from Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun will be read alongside fragments from Sappho and the experimental narratives of Kathy Acker. The second portion of the course will fixate on characters that fail to transcend the obstacles put before them. Writers like Meïr Goldschmidt and Chinua Achebe will be framed by theoretical works from Costică Brădăţan and Obiajunwa Wali. Through this investigation, students will discover an alternative paradigm to the Western idea of progress and linear achievement.