MLS 501-001: Success and Its Discontents
Dr. Michael Garval
In our modern, ostensibly egalitarian, meritocratic societies, “success” seems the measure of all things. But from the outset there have been doubts, questions, matters of discontent. How does or doesn’t the pursuit of success align with goals and ideals like wealth, power, fame, happiness, love, or justice? And in what ways does success intersect with a sense of either individual identity or collective belonging through such categories as race, class, gender, or sexual orientation? Our course tackles these questions and more through reading and discussion of works by Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Honoré de Balzac, Nikolai Gogol, Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, Horatio Alger, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arthur Miller, and Rita Mae Brown.
For more information, please see the course flyer.
Meet Dr. Garval
Dr. Michael Garval specializes in nineteenth-century French literature and culture, word and image studies, celebrity, and gastronomy. He earned his Ph.D. in French from New York University and joined the faculty at North Carolina State University in 1995. Dr. Garval’s research interests include gastronomy and culinary history, visual culture, fame, word and image relations, fin-de-siècle and Belle Époque. His recent publications include Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture (2012) and “A Dream of Stone”: Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-Century French Literary Culture (2004).
- Categories:
