Anger and its Double: IDS385W
In contemporary culture, anger is variously understood as violent, disruptive, ignoble, harmful, vitalizing, liberating, and transformative. ANGER AND ITS DOUBLE is aimed at building an inventory of rage through an engagement with writings and images from the Feminist and Queer movement, Black politics, Critical Caste Studies, psychoanalysis, Affect Theory, and Literary Theory. We will get an opportunity to think through concepts like agency and consciousness, subject, object and abject, structures of feelings, and experiences of euphoria, trauma, grief, loss, disgust, fear, and peril that accompany states of anger. Comprising weekly readings, discussions, and writing assignments, this course will be invaluable for those students of Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Political Science, and South Asian Studies who are interested in understanding the role emotions play in fundamentally shaping our collective life.
Because of the complexity of some of the texts in the syllabus, this course will be more suitable for students with some experience in reading literary texts and cultural criticism. The materials will consist of critical essays, fiction, poetry, photographs, paintings, cinema, and manifesto.