COLLEGE WRITING in Fall 2023 (EN1010D)

“Animals are good to think with,” observes the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. We will think about concepts like animal/human, nature/culture, body/mind, chaos/order by examining the representation of animals across a range of contexts and traditions – Hindu and Buddhist folk tales (Panchatantra, Jataka Tales), the Chinese novel Journey to the West (also known as Monkey), Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a biography of a cocker spaniel, and contemporary rewritings of oral Native American animal-trickster myths. We will see how the place we give (or don’t give) to animals creates a structured view of the world based on constructed relations between different forms of life. Ultimately, we will be asking: What makes us human – politically, socially, economically, anthropologically, philosophically, aesthetically? Is the line between human and animal clear-cut? What do “human” rights mean? What are “the humanities”? Does “the human” exist?