First-Year Preceptorial is your gateway to a liberal arts education. This course will ask questions of you, find you exploring possibilities, considering responses, seeking alternative solutions. This course will also ask you to consider how more than one ‘answer’ might be possible, how complexity is one of the traits that defines humanity, our being human—far more than right and wrong, a or b, true or false. By engaging in close-reading, by participating in a classroom community of respect and consideration, and by allowing voices of those both like and unlike us to be heard, together we’ll work together to explore often difficult (but interesting) questions.
The specific focus of this course is ‘Creating Monsters.’ What is a “monster”? How does a “monster” come to be? What can a “monster” tell us about the society in which it exists? Through a variety of literary texts and films, we will analyze the “monster” as a socially constructed concept reflecting the anxieties, fears, and assumptions of a society. In this light, the monster is often not an entity that threatens us from the beyond, but something conceptualized and created within our own minds. We will therefore consider how the rhetoric of monstrosity can be applied to humans, especially marginalized groups, and ask what purpose inflicting “monstrous” language upon others has. We will draw a little from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and cognitive and social psychology in evaluating and examining the factors involved in the creation and interpretation of monsters. Ultimately, we will consider in detail whether the study of monsters is in fact a study of ourselves and what it means to be human.
- Teacher: Barbara Tannert-Smith