WISE: American Picaresque: Identity and Satire in the 20th Century

"I am an invisible man," says the unnamed hero of Ralph Ellison's classic picaresque novel from 1952. Generically picaresque refers to works of satirical fiction that depict the episodic adventures of a likable roguish hero. This course will explore 20th-century American variations on the genre, focusing on three novels that feature seemingly invisible half-outsiders on the move through different settings and social spheres. What do these narratives suggest about the politics of visibility and marginalization? How do they employ satire, ridicule, wordplay, and irony to expose social corruption, hypocrisy, ignorance, and greed? How do they use a picaresque hero's half-outsider status to probe questions of equality and belonging based on race, gender, class, and ability? What do they suggest about the possibility of social acceptance for someone with a marginalized identity? We'll let these and other questions motivate our tour of 20th-century American picaresque and at the same time learn how the picaresque can help us understand literary history more broadly. Novels include Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1927), Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952), and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo by Oscar Zeta Acosta (1974). Critics and theorists may include Mikhail Bakhtin, Claudio Guillén, Susan Lanser, and Michael Hames-García. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact vbeebe@stanford.edu.)