From Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, literature teems with warnings about the perils of

“bad reading”: when characters who over-identify with fantasies, archetypes, and plotlines face dire consequences.

This seminar will offer an opportunity for comparing representations of “bad reading” along with the situations and repercussions they generate.

What are the cultural, intersectional, geopolitical, and historical vectors of bad reading in and beyond imperial nations and their canons?