Introduction

Intro Image to layout of class

 

[To view first day PowerPoint on the course structure click the following link:  Great Works course structure].

Required texts*

Black Shack Alley (1950) by Joseph Zobel

A Lesson Before Dying (1993) by Earnest Gaines

Nervous Conditions (1988) by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban  (1999) by J.K. Rowling

* Some older texts are out of copyright and an electronic version is easily accessed online. All additional readings mentioned in the syllabus will be either handouts or available through wordpress, e-res, or blackboard.

Course Description

This is a Great Works course (English 2850).  The purpose of Great Works courses is to introduce students to literary studies and critical and culturally engaged thinking by way of exposing students to a variety of literary texts from a variety of regions and over an expanse of time.  Many Great Works courses focus on a theme.  In this class we will be looking at School and Education in Literature.

In particularly we will look at a variety of texts that explore the relationship between education, school, and the making of MAN.  We will begin with philosophy texts associated with the enlightenment.  The purpose is not only to expose you to the rhetoric and thinking of these philosophers but also for you to have a historical understanding of where certain ideas that seem natural to the western world  about (ie. standing on one’s own two feet, self reasoning, self made, rational man etc.) have a sort of origins point in enlightenment philosophers break from notions of a divine creature and the church as the horizons of the world.

Often especially in America (where our declaration of independence and much of our constitution is influenced by some of these philosophers) we hail enlightenment as the beginning of a free modern age where all men are created equal.   We celebrate the freedom of all men (remembering that we mean a more humanity and not a gendered male), but these enlightenment thoughts as much as they did highlight notions of equality between all men had very selective construction of who/what constitutes a man (and most certainly women were not a part of it). Enlightenment thinking helped fuel advances in technology, medicine, and art that we take for granted, but it also initiated and built itself on the backs of Middle Passage slave trade, colonialism, and the systematic denial of humanity and life to most of the world’s human possibility (to say nothing of enlightenment notions of conquering and developing nature).

The purpose of this class is to pierce through the heavy veil of normal and natural that we take for granted as real in order to understand MAN as a historical and cultural construction and education and schools as technologies for 1) delineating among whom can be MAN, 2) making MAN, and 3) properly regulating those who are not MAN.  We will read a mix of philosophical texts and literary texts.  We will read these philosophical texts both for their main points and for the curious literary ways they express these points and how that might affect the way we interpret these texts.  We will read the literature for a wide range of issues, but particular we will focus on where ideas of making a person, of education, and schools appear.  We will do our best to put these philosophical texts in conversation with the literary ones and think about how the literature might speak back to the philosophy texts.  The course will include weekly posts, one paper, and a semester long group project.

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