Documents of Urgency: Reading Walsh, Are

In this course, we will consider three mid-20th-Century thinkers who responded to grave injustices of their day through writing: Rodolfo Walsh, Hannah Arendt, and James Baldwin. Taking three texts by these authors as a point of comparison and departure—Operation Massacre (1957), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and The Fire Next Time (1963)—we will explore the urgency of each text and think together about how these works catch the consciences of their readers. In tandem, we will look at related documentary films—Operación Masacre (1973), The Specialist (1999), and I Am Not Your Negro (2016), among others—to enrich our understanding of these writers’ interventions, with a specific eye to their capacity for holding hope and despair together in their work. We will study the narrative techniques each writer uses to depict the suffering they are confronting while also leaving room for the possibility of improved conditions. In each case, we will also read the work of each writer in different genres—poetry and philosophy for Arendt, fiction for Walsh and Baldwin—and think together about the forms and rhetorical functions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, in these contexts, as well as the specific affordances of literature as a medium (compared, say, to film). As a final, capstone assignment, students will have the choice of either writing a research paper on one or at most two of the authors/central works, or crafting their own work of long-form cultural criticism in response to a social issue of their choice.