Modern literature is replete with protagonists who represent a position or identity that is outside an accepted mainstream; they are different, peculiar and/or attractive, and potentially dangerous. This course will focus on the experience of being or being made into such an outsider or "other" and on the moral, cultural, racial, sexual, or national norms or boundaries such an outsider establishes for the inside. Reading both fiction and theory, we will ask how the terms of inside and outside are culturally and historically constructed, as we also look for proposals for dealing with outsiders and their otherness. Authors may include Kafka, Mann, Camus, Colette, Fanon, Sartre, Beauvoir, Duras. |