Reading & Composition

“Maybe one day…I’ll write a love story…where the characters will be insects. I have a bad tendency to overspecialize. I envy you your broad scope, Jim.” –Jules et Jim

We don’t often pay attention to bugs, unless they bite us, eat our plants, compromise our computers, or otherwise annoy us. In this course, we will try to put aside our squeamishness and examine plays, stories, poems, films, and scientific literature involving insects, bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that may be visible only under a magnifying lens. We will cultivate our close-reading skills as we learn to analyze language and images with focus and care, without losing sight of the broad scope, the textual ecologies that our specimens inhabit. And we will consider what happens when tiny insects, writ large, are made to exemplify or critique human virtue, vice, and social organization.

This is a writing-intensive course, with an emphasis on revision, and students will be asked to complete small, focused writing assignments as well as more protracted essays.

Texts may include:

Aristophanes, Wasps

Poe, “The Gold-Bug”

Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Nabokov, “Father’s Butterflies”

Hooke, Micrographia

selections from Seneca, Montaigne, Donne, Mandeville, Keats, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Pollan

Film:

Perrin, Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe

Lasseter, A Bug’s Life