Course Description
This discussion-based and writing-intensive course prepares students to be English majors by introducing them to basic tools of literary studies—reading, research, and analysis. Special attention will be paid to research methods and to learning a range of critical and scholarly approaches to literary texts. Requirements include participation, short essays, and a research paper.
Course Theme 1 (Summer 2015): "Human and Non-Human Animals in Relationship: Theory and Literature"
The “proper” study of humankind has always been “our” difference from animals, and it has been the job of the humanities to produce this difference. In the past few decades, however, scholars across disciplines have become increasingly interested in what has been termed “the question of the animal” or “animality studies.” We have started to take seriously the animals around us and this has challenged traditional ways of drawing the boundary between the human and the animal. This “turn to the animal” has inspired fundamental reconsideration of issues such as human subjectivity, difference, and otherness. We have begun to ask questions about animal consciousness and subjectivity, about animals as ethical subjects, the cultural place of animals—as pets, in zoos, in images and literature, in science, and in food. In telling stories about animals, humans mark irreconcilable cultural differences among themselves, as well as set the limits of what (and who) counts as natural object and/or cultural subject, as “human” and not-human. We will consider the ways that species boundaries intersect with historical and hierarchical constructions of gender, race, class, sex, and ethnicity, giving students a broader sense of social and global awareness.
Required Texts
- Kalof and Fitzgerald, The Animal Studies Reader ISBN 9781845204709
- Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone 9780312264123
- J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello 9780142004814
- J. R. Ackerley, We Think The World of You 9780671678111
- Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter 9780820320410
- David Brin, Startide Rising 9780553274189
Course Theme 2 (Spring 2015): "The Orgy as Utopia in American Literature from Irving to Delany"
The imaginal world of the orgiasm permits little dysfunctionings in everyday life that are customarily considered to be without redeeming social value, but that actually assure the maintenance of the societal will to live. David Émile Durkheim, who founded the discipline of sociology, noted for instance that “sexual communism” without regulation has never existed. Alongside the onerous rules and regulations that govern marriage, however, one observes multiple other arrangements, some open, some concealed, related to the circulation of sex and affects. This course explores alternative arrangements, where a social consensus that exists makes it is possible to commune during sensual manifestations that morality disapproves of, but which take part in what Michel Maffesoli calls a “communal affective symbolic.” They become utopian, José Esteban Muñoz notes, when multiple forms of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity.
Required Texts
- Euripides, Bacchae (Hackett) ISBN 9780872203921
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland 9780394736655
- Allen Ginsberg, Howl: A Graphic Novel 9780062015174
- Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue 9780814719206
Course Theme 3 (Fall 2014): "Sex, Desire, and Identity in Literature from Sappho to Hedwig"
In this class we will explore, through analysis of literature, how understandings of sexuality are culturally and historically specific. We will problematize the notion that sex, desire, and sexual identity are timeless, unchanging, and ahistorical dimensions (or “essences”) of human experience—not to assemble the one correct story about “sexuality” (a term most of our authors and their contemporary readers would not have even known)—but to demythologize (or “unhinge”) the present by revealing diverse historical worlds of socio-sexual plurality and difference and highlighting the ways our current ideals grow from arbitrary and contingent circumstances.
Required Texts
- Katherine Acheson, Writing Essays About Literature 978-1-55111-992-2
- John Cleland, Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure preferred edition: Oxford University Press ASIN: B008T268G6 (which may not be available). as an alternative the Penguin Classics edition ISBN-13: 978-0140432497.
- Euripides, Bacchae (Hackett edition) 978-0-87220-392-1
- Allen Ginsberg, Howl: A Graphic Novel 978-0062015174
- Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye 0-452-27305-6
- Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body 978-0679744474
