Posts Tagged ‘Milwaukee Lion’
New Spring 2016 Course: “The Lives of Animals”
I’ll be teaching two courses in the spring: a second run of my “Magic and Literature” gateway to the major and a senior capstone called “The Lives of Animals.” The first isn’t changing that much from last year, but here’s the description of the latter…
ENGLISH 4997/5997
Course Title: The Lives of Animals
Course Description: We are currently living through a historical moment that many scientists have begun to call “the Anthropocene”: the moment when the activities of human beings become visible in the geological and climatological record of the planet, recognizable many thousands or even millions of years hence. These activities unhappily coincide—and, to an overwhelming extent, have directly caused—what appears to be the beginning of the sixth mass extinction event experienced on Earth since the first evolution of life. The extinction and endangerment of huge numbers of animal species—as well as new research in biology, genomics, and cognitive science that have utterly blurred the once-clear, once-reliable distinction between “human” and “animal”—now calls on us both intellectually and ethically to reconsider the exclusion of animal life from consideration in human political and cultural institutions. This course seeks to answer that call, serving as an introduction to the interdisciplinary scholarly work in the ecological humanities that is increasingly grouped under the heading of “animal studies.” It will also intersect with fervent debates currently raging about the status of animals in the United States and around the world, including contemporary debates about zoos and aquariums; vegetarianism and medical testing; habitat preservation; and even the potential legal personhood of chimps, gorillas, dolphins, and other higher-order mammals. It will, in addition, serve as the research capstone to your English major experience at Marquette, affording you the academic tools and the creative space to independently develop a project of significant literary-critical scholarship on the troubled and troubling figure of “the animal,” exploring some of the different ways animals have been taken up as a problem by writers and thinkers working in multiple historical periods, media, genres, and literary-cultural forms.
Readings: Will be partially determined collaboratively in our initial class meetings by your interests, but will include key philosophical, scientific, and documentary texts about animal consciousness and “animal personhood,” as well as literary texts drawn from a list including Aesop’s Fables; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals; the Planet of the Apes franchise; Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; the short fiction of Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Leo Szilard, Sofia Samatar, and James Tiptree Jr.; Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials; and Disney films about animals like The Lion Kingand The Jungle Book.
Assignments: reflective personal statement, annotated bibliography, major research paper, conference-style presentation, weekly forum posts, class participation
Tuesday Links!
* The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism interviews my friend Ramzi Fawaz about his exciting new book on the X-Men in the 1970s: The New Mutants.
* David Foster Wallace’s blurbspeak.
* J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo Will Be Published In October.
* Scientist studies Diplomacy game to reveal early signs of betrayal.
* US Education Reform and the Maintenance of White Supremacy through Structural Violence.
* Whatever happened to Gary Cooper: You’ve heard of women’s studies, right? Well, this is men’s studies: the academic pursuit of what it means to be male in today’s world. Dr. Kimmel is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system, which will soon start the first master’s degree program in “masculinities studies.”
* The fire next time: The Pension Crisis at Public Universities.
* The Clinton plan for college. This summary leaves out all the awful disruptivation and neoliberalization stuff that will be part of any actual plan, so it sounds great.
* Widespread use of private email revealed a day after Wise resigns. The Revelations in Phyllis Wise’s Emails. Legal experts react. It’s so bad the board is going to vote on whether to pull her $400,000 golden parachute.
* More on Duquesne’s proposition that adjunct unions would interfere with its Catholic mission.
* SeaWorld sees profits plunge 84% as customers desert controversial park.
* The Making of the American Police State.
* The Socrates of the National Security Agency.
* Police Union In Missouri Declares ‘Darren Wilson Day’ On Shooting Anniversary. Yankees’ Minor League Affiliate Holds ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Event On Anniversary Of Michael Brown’s Death.
* One Holdout Juror Was Likely Why James Holmes Avoided Death Penalty.
* Comic book movies and the forgotten art of the ending. You heard it here first!
* The big Superman reveal (from the pre-52 DC Universe) that DC never got around to revealing.
* Always a Lighthouse: Video Games and Radical Politics.
* No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games.
* Netflix’s Dystopian Show 3% To Be Developed Entirely In Brazil.
3% takes place in a world where most of the population lives in “Hither”: a decadent, miserable, corrupt place. When people reach 20 years of age, they go through the “Process”, the only chance to get to “Thither” – the better place, with opportunities and promises of a dignified life. Only three percent of the applicants are approved by the Process that will take the applicants to their limit, putting them in terrifying, dangerous situations and testing their convictions through moral dilemmas.
* More incredibly bad behavior in SF fandom. A little more context here.
* Judge Faults University for Requiring Student to Prove He Was Innocent of Sexual Misconduct. Colleges Under Investigation for Sexual Assault Wonder What Getting It Right Looks Like.
* Here come the automated trucks. Kids today don’t even want to drive anymore (or their helicopter parents won’t let them)!
* The Amazonization of Everything.
* Point: Please don’t have sex with robots. Counterpoint: Humans should be able to marry robots.
* Point: They clearly should have let Max Landis write Fantastic Four. Counterpoint: The Fantastic Four Are Jerks.
* Two interesting essays on sex work and sugar daddies from TNI’s “Daddy” issue: “Letter to a Young Baby” and “You Deserve It, Sweetie.”
* Atlas Shrugs Google Rebrands.
Natalia’s tweet became a whole great blog post on modernism, childhood, and tech.
* Why do hotels have ice machines?
* Why do pro wrestlers die so young?
* Prison-industrial-wildfire complex: Nearly half the people fighting wildfires wreaking havoc across California are prison inmates.
* Sandernistas would do well to reflect on one thing. In a few months’ time, Sanders’s campaign will be gone. He will not win. … But Black Lives Matter, or rather the movement with which it has become synonymous, isn’t going to go away. And it is far more important to America’s long-term future. A useful corrective, I think, though my intuition remains that this is one brand of underpantsgnomism competing with another for underpants-gnome supremacy.
* Diseases of the twenty-first century: Foot Orgasm Syndrome.
* This could actually be interesting: Harvard Professor Larry Lessig To Explore Democratic Presidential Run.
* Because you demanded it: Werner Herzog’s Ant-Man.
* Science has discovered a new pentagon.
* And while the lion still remains at large, Milwaukee remembers its polar bear.