Reading and writing about such texts will involve students in interpreting, interrogating and think critically about the traditions, values and cultural assumptions promoted therein. It is an investigation of poetry and its resistance to traditional poetics. Though the focus of the course is predominantly critical, students are invited to participate in the poetic process. This course introduces students to some of the central orthodoxies of cultural criticism and presents the major challenges to these orthodoxies in the 20th century, including perspectives from linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and various post-structuralisms. It includes literary, film and popular culture criticism.
Students receive practical experience in collecting and interpreting folklore.
This course also explores relationships between folklore and areas such as history, literature, anthropology and psychology. This course explores texts written for children through the elementary level. Emphasis is placed on scope, artistic merit and selection. This course will examine a wide spectrum of scientific writings from a number of non-fiction sources. Reading authors from Michael Crichton and Carl Sagan to Danah Zohar and John Borckman, students will discuss how science has widened its appeal and become a dominant discourse for analyzing the changing nature of culture today.