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 and otherness, from the level of the individual to the global. Drawing our case studies from literature, film, and television, we will consider the shapeshifting terror of contagion from hereditary curses in ancient myth to 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, weekly 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):
Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Boccaccio, Decameron
Ingmar Bergman, “The Seventh Seal”
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
Edgar Allan Poe, “Masque of the Red Death”
Carmen Maria Machado, “The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror”
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Quadraturin”
M. R. James, “The Ash Tree”
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived In the Castle
Octavia Butler, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”
Forough Farrokhzad,“The House is Black”
Roger Spottiswoode, “And the Band Played On”
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go