Course info

We learn to read books for what they say, but what if we read them for what they do not say? Contradictions, silences, things present in absentia, statements ex negativo, questions asked and never answered – or answered but never asked, unspeakables, and ‘left-unsaids’ are as central a part of a text’s poetics and politics as its plot. How can a word mean one thing and its opposite? Why does a text circle around one concept without ever “saying” the word? Why do narrators contradict themselves? 

This seminar will engage textual ambiguity (Uneindeutigkeit, Mehrdeutigkeit, Unbestimmtheit) and investigate its meaning within the logic of a text and its historical context. We will work with two hypotheses: 1) that textual ambiguities are more than blunders: they allow precious insights into cultural struggles with difficult concepts – above all, race; 2) that the lack of a language to express uncomfortable ideas manifests itself in uncertain, unstable, and oblique textualities. In these “ambiguity readings,” we will develop strategies to deal with ambiguous texts without dis-ambiguating them (i.e. opting for one explanation or the other, demanding clarity, violating open endings…), and to magnify textual ambiguities to allow them to reach their full potential.

At the same time, this seminar offers a parallel “survey” of US and Canadian literature from the perspective of ambiguity: it will start with early modern texts such as captivity narratives from the Americas and Africa (Mary Rowlandson and Maria Martin), continue on to the 19th century (Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Washington Cable, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Chesnutt, Winnifred Eaton), touch upon the 20th century (Robert Frost, Audre Lorde), and end with ambiguating strategies in recent texts from the first decades of the 21st century. The goal of our seminar will be to theorize ambiguity as full-fledged a literary device and contribute to outline a field I like to call “ambiguity studies.”