The Proust Questionnaire – Rebecca Saunders

Rebecca Saunders teaches at the Graham School and is Professor of Comparative Literature at Illinois State University.  Her teaching and research interests include world literatures, literary and cultural theory, continental philosophy, trauma and modernity, and transitional justice and human rights.

In Winter 2010 she taught a Graham School course called Global Snapshot: Circa 1885; this course sketched a global portrait of an age, examining its impact on literature, history, and the arts.

See below for a preview of her upcoming Spring and Summer courses, which are open for registration.

The Proust Questionnaire – Rebecca Saunders

What is your most treasured possession?
My education

When and where were you happiest?
Alone on a train, arriving somewhere I’d never been before

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Being in a shopping mall

Where would you most like to live?
Between Chicago and Paris

On what occasion do you lie?
Answering questionnaires

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
The way it follows me everywhere

What is the quality you most like in a man?
Ferocious wisdom

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Dramatically indecorous wisdom

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Tolerance

What is your favorite virtue?
Comitas

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Moderation

What are your favorite things to eat and drink?
Red wine. Chocolate. Repeat.

Who are your heroes (or heroines) of fiction?
Cassandra

Who are your heroes in real life?
Balthazar Garzón
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Where the hell are my …
[glasses, keys, gloves, notes etc.]

What is your favorite color?
Burnt sienna

What is your greatest fear?
Stability

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Electronic unresponsiveness

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Indifference

What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Miss Edna St. Vincent Miao

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
My species

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Having surrounded myself with extraordinary friends

If you were not yourself, who or what would you be?
Nikolaj Znaider’s violin

Here is a preview of Rebecca Saunders’ upcoming Spring and Summer courses. Click on the title for more information and registration.

The Politics of Memory
This class will examine fictional, non-fictional, and film texts from several sites of contested memory, including South Africa, Chile, Armenia, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka. From the perspective of these contexts, we will consider the relation of individual to collective memory, the political uses of remembrance, and the relation of memory to history. We will explore what “official memory” includes and excludes, and how it is challenged, as well as the specific nature of traumatic memory.

What is Modernity?
This course is an opportunity to think critically about a word that is used to mean many things: modernity. Through a variety of readings in literature and philosophy, we will examine varying theories of modernity, the literary and artistic movements associated with modernism, and conceptions of alternative modernities constructed by those thought to be “other” to modernity. We will consider modernity as a time period, a complex of institutions, a structure of social relations, an experience or attitude, an epistemology, a particular conception of subjectivity, a value judgment, and an instrument of Euro-American hegemony.