9489 - History, Haunting, Memory: To Ghost is to Stay
Course Description
How do we make sense of afterlives, lingering moments, and ghosts of the past? What is haunting, and why won’t ghosts leave us alone? Who is granted the power to tell stories, and who is worthy of having stories told about them? We’re living in a moment when the past has an ever-deepening relevance to contemporary life.
This course will introduce you to core concepts in the humanities and help you to identify and apply a range of critical concepts to analyze a text through an exploration of haunting and ghosts. We’ll engage the fraught terrains of historical narration; the absence or presence of figures from the past; and the representation of traumatic memory in social life. Using a range of texts and other materials, we will examine how history, haunting, and memory are contoured by race, gender, sexuality, queerness, diaspora, and colonialism. We’ll seek to understand how the intimacies that structure our understanding(s) of the past, present, and future are fluid and powerful. Additionally, this course aims to cultivate your understanding of how literary texts engage political, social, and cultural issues.
Learner Outcomes
Following completion of this course, you should be able to:- Identify how history, haunting, and memory are contoured by race, gender, sexuality, queerness, diaspora, and colonialism.
- Understand how the intimacies that structure our understanding(s) of the past, present, and future are fluid and powerful.
- Identify and apply a range of critical concepts (social hierarchies, empire, categories of social identity, and frameworks of violence) to analyze a text.
- Understand how literary texts engage political, social, and cultural issues.
Notes
For RISD Students:
RISD Continuing Education (CE) credit is treated as transfer credit by RISD’s undergraduate degree programs. If approved, satisfactory completion of this course with a ‘C’ or better can count as 3 transfer credits toward Literary Arts and Studies (LAS) elective requirements. Complete the Prior Approval for Liberal Arts Credit form in etrieve before completing the online course registration.
Students from institutions other than RISD:
Students seeking academic credits are urged to contact their home institution to arrange prior approval before registering. Policies on transfer credit vary by institution and by program, and it is at the discretion of your home institution to determine what credits it will accept and how they might meet individual academic requirements. For additional information about RISD Summer Intensives and Transfer Credit Policies, visit our webpage.
Prerequisites
Students must be an adult age 18 or older to participate.Instructors
- Naimah Petigny