ENGL 249 - Animal Lit

3 Credit(s) | Lecture | Graded or pass/fail
Course can be counted for credit once

Description:
Animal Studies is a fairly recent development in literary studies that asks critical questions about how animals are represented and imagined in both literary and non-literary texts, thereby challenging our traditional ways of defining the boundary between humans and animals. Questions that the course may consider include: What are animals thinking? Do they dream, reason, theorize? They communicate to each other, but can they talk, and can we talk with them? Or is this a human dream and animals have their own dreams that we can’t access? Is there a larger question of beingness here we can think about? Are animals different for us according to whether we love them or fear them, ride them or eat them? We will be reading a series of texts that will help us raise questions about the animal as ‘the other,’ whether companion-other or feared-other, and about what it means as a writer to try to speak for animal being and the nonhuman generally.

Course Attribute(s):
Distribution Area: Humanities

Enrollment Requirements:
Prerequisite: ENGL 102

040700:1