Reading & Composition

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 really “true” and thus distorts our understanding of the world and is a bad influence on young people. 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 in the history of science, 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.

Hesiod, Theogony

Plato, Republic

Ovid, Metamorphoses
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis
Cyrano, Voyage to the Moon

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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

Primo Levi, “The Periodic Table”

Oliver Sacks, essays

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

Poems and short works by John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Blake, John Milton, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Bishop, Oulipo poets.

Films may include:

Blade Runner

Metropolis

Grizzly Man

Green Porno