ENG 499 - Seminar: Senior Honors Thesis- Gossip

Gossip, long an object of serious investigation in the social and life sciences, has only begun in the past few years to receive similarly serious attention in the humanities. Given the recent publication of major critical works that focus on the interpenetrations of gossip, literature, and culture, ours is an auspicious and important moment at which to revisit, expand upon, and complicate Patricia Meyer Spacks’s claim that gossip constitutes a species of “drama” in which interlocutors “[speak] the language of shared experience, [reveal] themselves as they talk of others, [and construct] a joint narrative-a narrative that conjures up yet other actors, offstage, playing out their own private dramas.” A recent article in The New York Times declared, “Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal.” This seminar proceeds from the alternative position that gossip must be historicized for its changing purposes, routes of circulation, and impact to be understood properly. The course will be transatlantic and transhistorical in its focus, and will draw on cultural studies and performance studies for its methodology and mode(s) of critical inquiry. In turning to twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultures, we will investigate the role gossip plays in literature, psychoanalysis, journalism, politics, television, and film. Throughout the course we will foreground the imbrication of gossip and scandal with constructions of gender and sexuality.

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission of the instructor required.