English 188rf. Rogue Fictions: Satire, Fantasy and the Literature of Lost Illusions

Instructor: Matthew Ocheltree
Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15pm | Location: TBA

“The age of levity is over,” a columnist for The Guardian declared last winter, arguing that moments of crisis are no time for foolish jesting. But are levity and gravity, exuberance and sobriety, really so opposed? This course will challenge such assumptions and look to laughter as a profound means of engaging with both the harshness of reality and the folly of idealism. The satirical tradition we’ll be exploring uses the gap between desire and reality, which always exists but has become an increasingly structural feature of contemporary life, as a space for the play of imagination. Satire offers a clear-eyed, critical vision of the present; it also recognizes that we need fantasies in order to live and provides strategies for reorganizing our fantasy lives when our hopes and ideas about the way the world works are dashed—or when the struggle to make those dreams of happiness a reality proves hollow and even harmful to our well-being, a trap that literary theorist Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.”

We’ll focus on two genres that combine satire and fantasy in the service of a deeper realism: Menippean satire and the picaresque. Although they approach the task from the opposing perspectives of learned privilege and precarious marginality, each takes aim at orthodoxies and hypocrisies of all stripes, undermining anyone who claims a monopoly on truth and power to restrict access to “the good life.” Both genres draw on satire’s ancient roots (Greek satyr, Roman satura), while also experimenting with the baroque notion of desengaño, an effect/affect (disappointment) produced by the knowledge (disillusionment) that everything around us is some form of fiction; what makes them distinctly modern, even postmodern, is their embrace of fictional structures as theaters for the testing of characters and worldviews. We’ll examine the relationship between affective moods and aesthetic modes in analyzing the interplay of cynicism and optimism, humor and melancholy, the carnivalesque and grotesque, allegory and irony. And we’ll consider the real costs to people and imaginative benefits to writers of a game in which one must don a mask and traffic in illusion to catch an indirect glimpse of something true. These rogue fictions, which often take on a life of their own, continue to supply us with resources for navigating the overlapping systems and crises—economic, environmental, epistemological, ethical—in which we find ourselves uncomfortably implicated today.

We’ll primarily be reading fictional narratives and novels, but we’ll also dip into drama (Jonson’s Volpone), poetry (Pope’s mock-epic The Dunciad), and dialogue (Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew). We’ll encounter science fictional utopias (Cavendish’s The Blazing World), fantastic voyages (Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels), masquerades (Haywood’s Fantomina), criminal autobiographies (Fielding’s Jonathan Wild), philosophical tales (Voltaire’s Candide), and hard-boiled detective fictions (Whitehead’s The Intuitionist). Our survey will include tales of the city (Lazarillo de Tormes), writing about war (Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus), historical novels (Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon), westerns (Melville’s The Confidence-Man), children’s literature (Carroll’s Alice books), and immigration stories (Kafka’s Amerika), many of which address issues of gender, class and ethnicity. Along the road, we’ll meet tricksters and con men, imposters and people engaged in “passing,” and a variety of modern avatars of the picaro (snob, child, migrant, ad exec). Finally, we’ll venture into graphic arts (Hogarth’s engravings, Tenniel’s illustrations), serialized television (Mad Men), and, if there’s interest, film.

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.