Reading & Composition

This course will explore the concept of contagion and the fears, real and imagined, that surround it. What does it mean for a body, a place, a community to be “clean” or “unclean”? What does life look like in “plague-time”? And finally, what can we learn from these fictional and historical sites of contamination? We’ll be examining the idea of pollution in a variety of contexts in order to compare the ways that humans respond to crisis, from the level of the individual to the global. Drawing our own case studies from literature, film, and television, we will consider the shapeshifting terror of contagion from hereditary curses in ancient myth to recent zombie films, from the Black Death to the AIDS crisis, from turn-of-the-century eugenics to the Chernobyl disaster.

Since this is a writing-intensive course, our goal is to engage with these texts and films while communicating our thoughts in writing with clarity and sophistication. Over the semester, we will write three essays, regular posts on bCourses, and at least one creative assignment that addresses the challenges of composition and rhetorical technique.

Texts and films include (in full or selections from):
Seneca, Thyestes
Sophocles, Oedipus
Boccaccio, Decameron
Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death
Edgar Allan Poe, “Fall of the House of Usher”
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Peter Greenaway, “The Falls”
Tsuchimoto Noriaki, “Minamata: The Victims and Their World”
Andrei Tarkovsky, “Stalker”
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On
John Carpenter, “Nightmare on Elm Street”
The X-Files, “731”
Danny Boyle, “28 Days Later”