“Good fences make good neighbors” is a well-known proverb which Robert Frost employs in the form of a refrain in his poem “Mending Wall” (1914). Building fences is one form of making borders visible, as, for instance, the fence along the US-Mexican border shows. While political borders are intact and seem to have become more rigid since 9/11, literary representations of borders in American literature present borders as fluid, permeable and contested. The borders we will encounter in the primary texts discussed in this course range from the American frontier, the Mason-Dixon line and America’s national borders, to borders between the US and Native American reservations, color lines, urban segregation and social borders, linguistic borders and metaphoric borders between the realistic and the fantastic.
Equipped with the skills to offer close readings of the aesthetic representation of borders in narrative texts, students will analyze how this highly political concept of the “Border” materializes in American literature. The aim of this course is to enable students to further their understanding of literature; to formulate research questions; to pursue these questions in a fairly comprehensive and well-crafted paper/presentation; to apply theories and methods to literary texts; to deduce cultural phenomena in literature from specific texts.
- Lehrende/r: Silvia Schultermandl