106-212/312 Genealogies of Addiction

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Subject Description:

This subject aims to clarify, through the close reading of a variety of texts, how crucial questions of drug use, addiction, and representations thereof, have been in the formation of the modern West. The subject will investigate how these questions intersect both theoretically and historically with other constituents of identity formation, such as gender, nationality, and race, and how these factors play themselves out within different discursive networks. To this end a range of theoretical, literary, and cinematic representations of drug use and addiction will be studied.

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Prescribed Texts:

Course reader available from the department.

• W Burroughs, A William Burroughs Reader, Picador.
• T De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, OUP.
• G Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Penguin.
• A Ronell, Crack Wars, U of Nebraska.
• O Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Penguin.
• Film: W Duke, Deep Cover