Reading & Composition

Course Description: In The Republic, Plato condemps poetry for being too far removed from reality. A feeble imitation of the world (itself an imitation of ideal Ideas), poetry isn’t “true,” distorting human understanding of the world influence on young people to behave badly. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that didactic, or scientific, verse isn’t really poetry. From the Greeks onwards, we have tended to distinguish poetry and science as different modes of thought with different relationships to truth or the real, and different functions in society. This course will take a long view of this troubled history and read classic scientific writings, poetry, and poetic theory to question the traditional generic boundaries between scientific and literary texts and practices. From the farming manual that is Virgil’s Georgics to contemporary scholarship that uses neurological advances to analyze literature to science fiction from all periods, we will question the boundaries between science and literature and the practice of each.

Reading List:

Readings will likely include selections from the following works and authors, among others. They will be available at the University bookstore, in the course reader, or on bSpace.

John Carey, Faber Book of Science

Aristotle, Poetics, Georgics

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis

Descartes, Discourse on Method

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Cyrano, Voyage to the Moon

Diderot, Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Primo Levi, “The Periodic Table”

Mark Jaddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

Poems and short works by Dorothy and William Wordsworth, John Clare, Percy and Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Charles Darwin, John Keats, William Blake, John Donne, John Milton, Guillaume Du Bartas, Maurice Scève, Rémy Belleau, Percy Shelley, Thomas Huxley,