This seminar focuses on space and the various theories on spatiality and will apply it to American literature and film. The United States is a huge country with an enormous variety of spaces with different cultural beliefs, ideologies, and customs. The literature and films produced about these American spaces can be studied in terms of the protests against or promotion of the ideological beliefs emanating from them. We will be looking at three specific American space groupings—the American city and the American suburb; the American wild; the American south—and discuss them in terms of the social construction of space; embodied space; language, discourse and space; and emotion, affect, and space. These theoretical concepts will be explained in an easily understandable way using case studies in both literature and film. The seminar will alternate between teaching the theoretical ideas on spatiality and the various histories and ideologies of the chosen American spaces and student-led discussions using American writer case studies and films about the aforementioned space groupings. Course Objectives: By the end of the course students should be able to: • Have a better understanding of the impact of space on literature and film and the theories and concepts related to it. • Be aware of the multitude of American spaces and the ideology and culture inherent to each. • Have a greater knowledge of specific American authors and filmmakers and how their work is influenced by the American spaces they are a part of. • Be able to apply the ideas on space theory to the varied spaces of Taiwan. • High levels of English language proficiency in listening, reading, speaking, and writing. • Academic writing skill in research

Required Texts (a course pack will be provided):

Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Vintage International, 2000. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Nick Adams Stories. New York: Scribner, 1972. Print.
Welty, Eudora. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Orlando: Harcourt, 1994. Print.
Do the Right Thing (1989). Dir. Spike Lee.
American Beauty (1999). Dir. Same Mendes.
Deliverance (1972). Dir. John Boorman.
Wild (2014). Dir. Jean-Marc Vallée.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Benh Zeitlin.
Sling Blade (1996). Dir. Billy Bob Thorton.

Supplementary Texts:
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: U of California Press, 2011.Print.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print.
Low, Setha. Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. London: Routledge, 2017. Print.
Tally, Robert T. Spatiality. London: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Walton, David, and Juan Antonio Suárez. Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space :Borders, Networks, Escape Lines. David Walton and Juan A. Suárez (eds). Oxford: New York, 2018. Print.