Reading & Composition

In this class we will study cases of people living in the margins of mainstream rationality or commonsense--people whose rejection of this world takes the form of a flight to fantasy, utopianism or outright madness. We will investigate what about their respective societies makes such flight compelling or necessary. 
 
In the process, we will ourselves question the mainstream rationality, reality or commonsense these characters reject. Examples of the questions we will deal with are the following: How do these characters invert labels like the sane and the insane, the normal and the abnormal?  What do they tell us about civilization and the drive to civilize? How might their purportedly individual pathology be a sign of a social pathology instead?

These questions will serve as a general framework for exploring the individual richness of the texts in our syllabus, each of which will provoke its own particular set of questions.  This course aims to put a series of works in dialogue that show how male and female authors from around the globe, working in a variety of narrative forms, have responded to the themes of madness and marginality in their own ways.

Since this is an R&C course, its major goals are to improve students’ skills in close reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing, and to explore the relationships between the three skills. In addition to discussing the texts in class, students will write critical responses to them. Readings include Cervantes,
Diderot, Rousseau, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Lu Xun, Callenbach, Plath, Cortázar and Le Guin. 
 
This course fulfills part of the University’s R&C (Reading and Composition) requirement.