OUT OF PLACE

Literature has always attracted the outsider, and literature itself seems to demand from its writers to momentarily step out of the fray in order to hope to observe it. The modern age has offered different examples of this. When Bernard Levin described V.S. Naipaul as an ‘inquiline’ author — meaning, a guest or a lodger, an animal that lives in another's nest — Naipaul responded:

‘When I see the sun set here at Stonehenge, there is a way that it is somebody else’s sun, somebody else’s landscape, it has somebody’s else's history connected with it. I can't avoid that: that's the way I think.’

When Virginia Woolf received news of the death of Joseph Conrad, she sat down and penned an admiring obituary that opens with what might be read as a presumptuously arrogant statement:

‘Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country.’

Despite Woolf’s English snobbishness, her words reveal something true about Conrad’s situation, and about the place of many other writers who were, for one reason or another, obliged to operate in foreign lands, inside other languages or states of being, authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Ovid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Waguih Ghali and David Malouf.

Through the close analysis of a narrow selection of works, this class will chart the ways in which such works reveal the nature and imaginative location of the artist out of place. We will be interested in the question of to what extent is writing a process of mapping an intellectual, aesthetic, psychic or geographical territory. We will be motivated by close reading, interpretation, and the adventure of comparing different portraits of being an outsider-insider.

We may refer to fragments by travellers and explorers such as Leo Africanus, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Ibn Battuta, or look at the work of artists who crossed boundaries, such as the 15th century Venetian painter Gentile Bellini and the impact of his visit to Mehmed II’s court in 1479, or the influence of the Arabesque on the music of Claude Debussy.

We will explore what it is about literature and, in particular, the novel that has made it so well-suited for por