Course Description: This course qualifies for the Loser Studies Track in the English Department. We will read literature and film about missed lives, lives not lived, and love lives that concnern flight, disappearance, ghosts, kidnapping, suicide, death and faked death, and escape, usually from a prison. The films we will watch and the literature we will read question seemingly unquestionable oppositions between escape and containment, lost and found, social and solitary, what it means to be "outside of live" or to become a "living dead man," and and what it means to have lived or not to have lived a life. Escape often turns out paradoxically to be confinement rather than liberation or emancipation. For example, America, supposedly the land of opportunity, turns out to be a place of servitude, impoverishment, and enslavement; disappearance turns out to be a version of escape that leads to imprisonment, isolation, and entrapment across classes, languages, and even within ethnic and minority bodies.  In some cases, the Jewish body itself cannot be escaped; Jesus may be the one who managed to escape. Readings and films will include: Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape; Robert Bresson, A Man Escaped; Henry James, “The Beast and the Jungle”; Edith Wharton, "The Touchstone"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield”; Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; The Invisible Man (dir. James Whalte, 1933); The Lady Vanishes (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1938); Nicolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"; Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855) (Library of America); Franz Kafka, "The Hunger Artist"; Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared;I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932); Robert Walser, Microscripts and Walter Benjamin's essay on Walser in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 1 1927-1930; Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer (2010); Jacques Derrida, "Fichus" and selected letters written by Walter Benjamin that Derrida discusses in "Fichus"; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd"; The Wrong Man (dir. Alfred Hitchcock,1956); Elevator to the Gallows (dir. Louis Malle, 1957); Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal (1904); Robert Walser, Microscripts; A Man Vanishes (dir. Shohei Imamura,1967); The Vanishing (dir. George Sluizer, 1988); The Late Mathias Pascal (Feu Mathias Pascal) (dir. Marcel l'Herbier, 1925 / 1926); Solomon Northup, 12 Years a Slave; 12 Years a Slave (dir. Steve McQueen, 2013); Sullivan's Travels (dir. Preston Sturges, 1941); The Face of Another (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966); Georges Simenon, Monsieur Monde Vanishes; L'Avventura (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960); Édouard Levé, SuicideCharles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood; and Missing (dir. Costa Gravos, 1982). Requirements: Co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Tuesday and once on a Thursday; written quizzes formulated and given at the beginning of each class by the co-leaders; two discussion questions and three or more "BIG WORDS" or two discussion questions and three or more film shot analyes on each film; student quizzes each class; three 650 word papers; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to texts and films.

Please read the Class Policies page now.Chile[edit]
Further information: Operation Condor and Indictment and arrest of Augusto Pinochet

Almost immediately after the military's seizure of power on 11 September 1973, the Chilean military junta banned all the leftist parties that had constituted the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende's UP coalition.[13] All other parties were placed in "indefinite recess," and were later banned outright. The regime's violence was directed not only against dissidents, but also against their families and other civilians.[13] [See: Missing (1982)]
The Rettig Report concluded 2,279 persons who disappeared during the military dictatorship were killed for political reasons or as a result of political violence, and approximately 31,947 tortured according to the later Valech Report, while 1,312 were exiled. The latter were chased all over the world by the intelligence agencies. In Latin America, this was made under the auspices of Operation Condor, a combined operation between the intelligence agencies of various South American countries, assisted by a United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) communication base in Panama. Pinochet justified these operations as being necessary in order to save the country from communism.[14]
Some political scientists have ascribed the relative bloodiness of the coup to the stability of the existing democratic system, which required extreme action to overturn. Some of the most famous cases of human rights violations occurred during the early period: in October 1973, at least 70 people were killed throughout the country by the Caravan of Death. Charles Horman, a US journalist, "disappeared", as did Víctor Olea Alegría, a member of the Socialist Party, and many others, in 1973.
The Disappeared/Los Desaparecidos
"The word "disappeared" was redefined during the mid-20th Century in Latin America. "Disappeared" evolved into a noun used to identify people who were kidnapped, tortured and killed by their own governments in the latter decades of the twentieth century in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela. Colombia with its fifty-year civil war and Guatemala with its own thirty-seven-year civil war further expanded the meanings and uses of "disappeared."
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/art/art/the_disappearedlos_desaparecid.htmlresponses to disaster with disaster understood not as a one time event but as a wound that won't heal, that doesn't close or that reopens, a bad sign. as understanding or misunderstanding. Reading as a wound. Death wish; Sickness as health; salvation as destruction; Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and Richard Wagner's Parsifal, living on through music as a demonic project. No knowledge of music or classical music is required, but both would be helpful. As there are no critical editions of The Magic Mountain and Docktor Faustus in English, we will annotate them ourselves. Secular and sacred, Jewish and Christian.Richard Wagner, Religion and ArtTheodo Adorno, In Seach of WagnerThomas Mann, The Magic MountainThomas Mann, Docktor FaustusRichard Wagner, Parsifal