This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students' reading and writing skills through a series of assignments that will provide them with the opportunity to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. Other goals in this course are a familiarization with French literature and the specific questions that are relevant to this field. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.

The family unit—in its various forms across space, time, and culture—is one of the primary vehicles by which societies perpetuate themselves physically and ideologically. Just as human populations and collectives change in step with the multiplication, maintenance, and decline of family lines, social knowledge is learned and transmitted, to a significant degree, in families and down hereditary lineages. Because the motor of this mechanism is generally heterosexual marriage and procreation, marginal and non-normative genders and sexualities have had complicated and often exclusionary relationships to conventional family structures, as well as to the legal, social, political, and economic benefits that these structures are accorded. In this course, we will examine media (literary and philosophical texts, fictional and documentary films, and graphic novels) that attempt to critique and subvert traditional family configurations or rethink them entirely, offering alternative models of acceptance, belonging, connection, community, and kinship independent of reproductive imperatives. In so doing, we will establish a critical distance from received ideas about family and reflect analytically, transhistorically, and transculturally about what it might mean to discover and create families on the margins of society.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills