FYSP 016 - Literature of Carnivals, Circuses and Festivals

FC ARHU CD WINT

4 credits
This course studies our fascination with the freakish and the ethereal, the wondrous and the bogus, impromptu families and permanent wanderers. This course will travel, like a circus, across European, American, and South American literature and film, and between cultural anthropology, social history, and fiction. Topics of study will include Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival, Mary Russo’s female grotesque, Coney Island, Burning Man, and Oberlin’s own OCircus and Big Parade.