ENGL 109
Complaints, Rants, and Grievances Fall 2013
Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

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We interpret some emotions, like love and happiness, as individually and socially “good.” But how did these feelings come to be the good ones? If some feelings are “bad,” then what makes them so? As philosopher Sara Ahmed notes,”If good emotions are cultivated, and are worked on and towards, then they remain defined against uncultivated or unruly emotions.” This class will embrace “unruly” emotions–rage, despair, irritation, apathy–in order to investigate the literary, social, and political potential of “bad feelings.” Examining literary forms of protest and figures of dissatisfaction and dissent, we will ask: Are emotions political? Can literary expressions of emotion reinforce or challenge social hierarchies? (More broadly, can literature in general germinate social change?) How do some literary forms disrupt our assumptions about emotion and character? In what ways do social categories like race and gender affect representations of emotion? In what ways could “irrational” feelings operate as forms of reason or knowledge? We will read works by Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Herman Melville, Langston Hughes, Jamaica Kincaid, and Valerie Solanas with an eye to the ways these texts rail against, resonate with, transform, or do nothing at all to their literary, political, and social contexts. As part of the Exploring Diversity Initiative, this class examines how philosophies of emotion have helped to create and consolidate social privilege, and, through analysis of literary forms and representations of protest, encourages critical theorization of social conflict and dissent.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 1618
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active class participation; 4 or 5 essays totaling 20 pages of writing
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: first-year students who have not taken or placed out of a 100-level English course
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative

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