This course examines the imaginative possibilities of the border in literary and visual texts. We will consider how writers portray cultural, national, temporal, and linguistic frontiers; how literature embodies the experience of crossing or dwelling within borderlands; how texts reinforce or transgress the boundaries at which we are positioned as readers; and how writing itself can construct and bridge differences. Reading poems and stories of liminal figures—em/immigrants, expatriates, exiles, animals, misfits, racial others, queers, and adventurers—we will analyze how the border challenges our ideas about place, body, identity, language, and text. In encounters with new aesthetic forms (hybrid genres and multimedia texts) that disrupt the way we read, we will explore the edges of language. For a broader picture of the border in the human imagination, we will also turn to films and other arts.

Borders are more than physical lines dividing geographic maps; they are spaces of ambiguity. They are symbolic, psychological, fixed and fluid, multidirectional, contested, discontinuous. Themes we will consider include: migration, transgression, Americanness, belonging, metamorphosis, passing, mobility, transnationalism, periphery, threshold, and genre. We will also look at formal techniques of texts: fragmentation, narrative gaps, disruptive poetics, to think about the ways art enacts, creates, or disassembles borders. We’ll focus attention on radical aesthetic forms, experimental poetics, travel narratives, and fringe genres. Questions we will ask: How is the border a site of contact, exchange, community, transformation, and freedom, yet at the same time a space of violence, confinement, and displacement? How is the formation of individual and national identities influenced by the border? How are marginalized figures simultaneously between and among states of being? How does liminality challenge the binary politics of identity, including ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender, and social class? How do borders simultaneously divide and link us? How do texts and artworks become sites that unsettle the way we read, think, and remember? How does literature have the power to situate us as readers at textual borders; to invite reading as border crossing? How do words themselves contain boundaries?