COML 3730 - [Literature of the Outlaw]

(crosslisted)
(also ENGL 3710)(GHB) (LA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

B. Maxwell.

The course draws on the world’s storehouse of writing, song, and film about bandits, pirates, malingerers, revolutionary appropriators, and other defectors from the sacral order of property. Loyalty and betrayal will concern us, as will the melancholy relationship of outlawry and the passing of historical eras. Aesthetics, ethics, and political economy will guide our enquiries. We’ll study several tellings of the legend of Robin Hood, as well as Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas; Kemal, Memed, My Hawk; Genet, The Thief’s Journal; Akutagawa, “Rashomon” and “In a Grove”; Kurosawa, Seven Samurai; material by and about Phoolan Devi, India’s “Bandit Queen”; the Jamaican film The Harder They Come; excerpts from the immense Chinese novel Outlaws of the Marsh, and Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.