“Identity Theft”
In the ancient tales that relate the former lives of the Buddha, the king of the gods comes down to earth and steals the identity of an avaricious treasurer in order to teach him generosity. In Don Quijote Part II, Cervantes’s famous knight must confront his spurious double whose feats had previously been described in unauthorized early modern Don Quijote fan fiction. In Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, Jack Nicholson takes on the identity of a dead businessman thereby leading to his own mysterious murder. Across times, languages, and cultures, literature has explored the problem of how we can lose our own identity and what it might mean to assume the identity of another. In this course we will track these problems as we travel from ancient Sanskrit story collections to Shakespeare’s theater to world cinema, seeking to understand how the potential to have one’s identity stolen might constitute the ability to be someone at all.
Dr. Alexander Brock
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30–1:45 pm
Face to face
No-tech, no-screens, discussion based classroom
Course poster for ENG 4590, Topics in World Literature: Identity Theft, from antiquity to the modern age, with Dr. Alexander Brock: an engraving of a giant crouching in a cave over a man clinging to the underside of a ram.
