![]() To realistically and responsibly arrive at these optimistic visions of inclusion, rigorous discussion and deliberation are key. We hear this in presidential addresses (President Biden’s Inauguration theme-“America United”), voter campaigns (“Unity Over Division”), and on college campuses (“We Are Marquette”). We use the terms “unity” and “belonging” with the hope of celebrating or striving for a sense of uncomplicated and all-encompassing community. This is not a “horror” class, so those who are easily scared (like me) are definitely welcome! But we will examine how fear plays a fundamental role in how we see ourselves and others, and how we move through the world. In addition to these stories themselves, we’ll look at how scholars of horror can help us better analyze the ways expressions of fear are related to an individual’s and a culture’s conceptions (and biases) of race, gender, class, and disability, as well as other identities and social groups. We’ll explore everything from ancient stories of dangerous creatures to modern true crime shows to consider how humans have always used monsters to describe the world we live in and the beings we share it with. In this course, we’ll dive into studying language and culture through the lenses of fear and monstrosity. So what happens if we do look closer at the monsters in our world? How can scary stories help us better understand the cultures that create and tell those stories ![]() Yet we’re often told these stories are not worth studying in academic settings. Stories about “things that go bump in the night” are some of the oldest and most pervasive narratives in human history across essentially all cultural traditions. We’ll also take several field trips to allow for experiential, dialogic encounters, not only critical reading. As so many of us spend ever more time within the built world and the virtual world, how do we understand our relationships with other natural phenomena-since we have them whether we acknowledge them or not? How should we understand them? What are the consequences of different ways of livin g out these various relationships, especially for human self-understanding, human health, social justice, and the safety and thriving of all the other species who call earth home? How have artists, philosophers, and scientists of various stripes attempted to represent, explore, and encourage our species’ interactions with the other natural phenomena around us? These are some of the questions we’ll explore this term with such writers as Robinson Jeffers, Pope Francis, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lorine Niedecker, Val Plumwood, Kate Crawford, and more. Clearly beneficial to our health and well-being, frankly necessary to our survival, and indeed what we ourselves are, the natural world is also something ever more distant from the regular lived experience of more and more humans. Eliciting the loftiest praise from poets and prose writers, the earth itself and non-human species have also been brutely instrumentalized. Humans have had an ambivalent relationship with the world around us as far back as we can tell, but this ambivalence has accelerated at an unprecedented rate since the Industrial Revolution. Our literary texts will be supplemented by selections from jurists, philosophers, and historians, and we will view several film adaptations. Texts may include Sophocles’s Antigone William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure Herman Melville’s Billy Budd Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” poems by Amanda Gorman, Nicole Sealey, and Reginald Dwayne Betts Ida Fink’s The Table and Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case. At the same time that we examine the contributions of literature to pressing legal and moral debates, we work on honing your close reading and writing skills. In this seminar, we consider how imaginative writers from the classical period to the present day have examined the nature, problems, and possibilities of justice. How do we decide what is right and fair? When, if ever, is it permissible to break the law? What role should mercy and revenge play in legal and moral judgment? How should we respond to historical wrongs and how can we rectify legal and social injustices today? Such questions have not only preoccupied jurists and philosophers but have also figured prominently in literature. Justice and Judgment in the Western Imagination ![]()
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