Professor: Dawn Marlan

credits 4.00

• CRN 22618: Tuesday & Thursday, 4:00-5:20pm @ CHA 301

This is a course focused on the paradox of community, namely that the very safety and protection it offers (by virtue of strength in numbers, for example) poses a danger to the individual, whose freedom it curtails and whose interests are never perfectly aligned with those of the group. Born of exclusions and maintained by strict adherence to its rules, community promises a coziness that belies its potentially coercive dimensions. In The Inoperative Community, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes a state in which a nostalgic conception of community is obsolete. And not only that, but it never really existed in the first place. The longing to return to the “good old days” of organic togetherness was always a mythic ideal. What’s replaced this idealized notion of community is our shared experience of its impossibility and the recognition of our finitude and isolation. And yet, the search for intimacy and belonging has not been abandoned. While this testifies to a certain hopeful idealism, we often seek community in counter-productive ways. We huddle within clusters of like-minded people, affirming group identities that make us ostensibly closer to those with whom there’s an assumption of mutual understanding and further from those whose difference makes them suspect. We tread carefully, “mindful” that we cannot imagine experiences we have not lived. Instead of reaching across the aisle, we shout across the abyss. 

In this course, we will ask what happens to community when “connection” seems more accessible than ever, but when its very availability may be responsible for increased loneliness. In works of global contemporary fiction and cinema, and with the help of social theorists and philosophers, we will examine utopian and dystopian dimensions of the personal and social bonds that ground communities. From the most modest and mainstream attempts at forging connections to the wildest visions of alternatives, we will explore various answers to the question of whether “belonging” is still imaginable.