Lecture (LEC)

• COLL INTENSIVE WRITING SECTION
• COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inq
• IUB GenEd A&H credit

• A portion of the above class reserved for majors
• Above class COLL Intensive Writing section
• IUB GenEd A&H credit
• COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
• TOPIC: World Building

Topic: World building

The birth of the cosmos, how to organize your calendar year, a nine-story prison-house of the soul, your personal playground of aesthetic self-indulgence, the perfect society¿few topics in literature are more inventive or sophisticated than building a new world from scratch, whether that world is inhabited by all of humanity, generations in the afterlife, or a single home-owner. Through the semester, we will read five texts from four different authors, time periods, cultures, and genres: an archaic Greek genealogy of violent gods along with a manual for living your best life, a medieval Italian epic on the structure of evil and the degradation of the human soul, a decadent French novel about the most freakish home makeover, and the fate of a single-sex society isolated in South America. Any interested student is welcome, regardless of major! Prerequisite for the intensive writing credit: successful completion of the General Education English composition requirement. Reading list: Hesiod¿s Theogony and Works and Days, Dante¿s Inferno, Joris-Karl Huysmans¿ novel Against Nature, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman¿s feminist utopian fantasy Herland. Workload: weekly attendance and reading, 4 analytical essays, 4 short proposals, revision of one essay draft, in-class participation.