Reading & Composition

Reading & Composition

Felines on the Sidelines: Cats in World Literature
Course Number: 
R1A.007
Course Catalog Number: 
19400
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Erin Bennett
Days: 
MWF
Time: 
11-12
Semester: 
Location: 
204 Dwinelle

From divine creatures in ancient Egypt, to evildoers in the Middle Ages; from witches’ counterparts in Puritanical New England, to meme subjects and Instagram influencers in the Digital Age, cats have substantiated their ever-evolving place in humans’ lives throughout history and across the world. In this course, we will read a selection of literary texts that feature cats: cats who observe, cats who harbor secrets, cats who speak, cats whose enigmatic natures inspire anxiety and paranoia within humans and lead them into unchartered territories. We will consider the various roles that felines play in literature and how those roles change the course of literary plots. We will explore the comparisons writers make between cats and women as well as the supernatural powers with which writers and cultures imbue cats. We will think about cats as the bearers of truths, the tellers of fortunes, and the harbingers of misfortune. Perhaps ironically, cats won’t always take center stage in the texts that we will read and thus will thematically unify our texts and offer us a point of departure from which to explore additional themes such as human-human relationships, human-animal relationships, literary forms, feminism, and critical theory. As this is a Reading and Composition course, one of our primary goals will be to build and to refine your ability to construct a cogent analytical argument about a literary text and to support your argument using textual evidence. You will write around 36 pages that will consist of various formal writing assignments throughout the semester. You will read around 50-75 pages of literary and scholarly texts per class period.