English Composition in Connection with the Reading of World Literature

Contemporary philosophy and literature place significant emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge production. We will study this emphasis, as it is taken up in a variety of literary and critical works. But what is the body? Is it my epidermis, my senses, the complicated nexus of impulses called drives, my emotions, the lump of meat known as the brain? Where does my body end and my mind (or my ideas or whatever the not-body is) begin? Is the contemporary emphasis on the body an oblique response to a set of historical and political developments? If so, what are those developments? We will study how literary and philosophical works attempt to think through these questions.

Since this is a reading and composition 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. Readings include Augustine, Diderot, La Mettrie, Faulkner, Borges, Butler, McGinn, and Cabezón Cámara. Films by Pontecorvo and Glazer.