ENGL 569 B1: Borders as Methodologies

L. Harrington

This course invites us to think about how borders might operate as methodologies, as procedures, systems and processes. Borders as objects have long been a focus of political geography however literary and cultural scholars have begun to develop ways of thinking about the processes of differentiation that are performed in, at, around and through borders. In this course, foregrounding Schimanski and Wolfe's research on border aesthetics and border poetics, we will privilege concepts such as borderscapes, border cultures, la frontera, and b/ordering words in our study of how writing and reading are acts of border crossing. In our explorations of how cultural production represents, reflects and negotiates border experience it will also be imperative to attend to the imaginative act of representation and the border work therein. Our visual and literary texts will mainly focus on the Near and Middle East and theoretical texts will include Foucault, Lefebvre, Perec, Butler, Anzaldúa, Deleuze and Guattari.