ClassInfo

Telling stories is a fundamental part of human existence; we all do it, all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not. We are drawn to stories, and we use them to make sense of the world around us and our experiences. Thus they are a central component of the ways we negotiate, continuously, between our private selves and the many public roles we play (and, indeed, sometimes the line between public and private is not easy to spot). I am interested in moments when a person's life intersects with something much bigger than themselves: a massive social change, a historical event, another person's very public experiences. How does that affect us, as private citizens?

In our three central readings, we will encounter these issues in a variety of ways. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich tells her own story of experiencing, temporarily, a life of low-wage labor, but she also tells the stories of her co-workers for whom low-wage labor is an ongoing fact of life. Susan Collins' dystopic novel The Hunger Games tells a story of one possible future for us all, but also shows her protagonists struggling against the public story that is being built around them. Lin-Manuel Miranda's ground-breaking musical Hamilton uses modern storytelling techniques to retell the story of the founding of our nation, and shows the figures at the center of those events struggling to find their own stories within that larger narrative.

To be successful in all of the aspects of this course, you will need to display active, empathetic engagement;
independent, critical thinking; organization and motivation.

A few logistical requirements:

1. You must have hard copy editions of the Ehrenreich and Collins texts. Electronic texts are not acceptable.

2. We will also be listening to and reading the annotated lyrics of Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton; the annotated lyrics are available online, and I will provide links to a number of ways to listen to the songs. Thus, while I will encourage you to buy the Original Broadway Cast Recording of the musical, I am not requiring it.

0A

This particular section of the course will primarily read texts from about 400 years ago, such as one or two Shakespeare plays, Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666), Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (1627), Milton's Areopagitica (1644), and some Montaigne essays (1592). We will read excerpts from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1638), and Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1564), and Thomas More's Utopia (‎1551). We will also read some even older texts, including an excerpt from Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). We will close the semester with a book by our contemporary, Annie Dillard's For the Time Being (1999).

There is an optional service-learning component.

Meaning/practice of citizenship. Historical themes, contemporary issues in American public life: access of citizenship, tensions between social duties and individual freedoms, role of moral values in public life. Diverse literary materials. Optional service-learning component.

What does it really mean to be a responsible citizen and to engage in public discourse? How do we construct our public identities, reconcile our private and public selves, and gain access to the true beliefs and opinions of the many selves and identities which populate our social networks? In the aftermath of possibly the most acrimonious election cycle in US history, these questions acquire an even greater urgency. This class will seek answers in three interrelated places: in literature, in literary expression, and in the literary-like behaviors with which we broadcast our beliefs on social media. We will explore how literature both contributes to the creation of public opinion and influences the "politically correct" and "politically incorrect" attitudes that we use to navigate the contested sites of individual freedom, civic responsibility, and social duty. In addition to studying the power of words in public contexts, students will have the opportunity, through a service-learning project, to turn words into active community engagement. Our wide range of texts and genres -- stories and essays, novels and plays, poems and tweets -- will give us a strong literary basis to ground our discussion of the truths and fictions we all tell ourselves while negotiating our personal worldviews in private and public spaces.

Meaning/practice of citizenship. Historical themes, contemporary issues in American public life: access of citizenship, tensions between social duties and individual freedoms, role of moral values in public life. Diverse literary materials. Optional service-learning component.