Conceiving of the gothic as a kind of counter-narrative to Enlightenment and humanistic values, this course will explore the portrayal of women as embodied, liminal, irrational, and supernatural forces in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and legal materials in England and the U.S. What kind of social forces helped bring about the emergence of narratives of excess and transgression? How do these works conceive of female sexuality and sexual violence? How do they think through and accommodate the relation between reason and unreason, agency and irresponsibility? We will also explore the rebirth of the gothic in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the U.S. and ask what cultural forces brought it about. Possible texts: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Charlotte Brontë, Villette; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; legal cases and treatise literature on infanticide, mania, delusion, insanity, and culpability; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Twilight.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2014-15. Professors Frank and Umphrey.
2023-24: Not offered"Numbers rule the world," many scholars agree. That is, they have become “the dominant form of acceptable evidence in most areas of public life.” We will examine these claims and their implications by asking several questions: How did numbers come to rule? What kinds of numbers? Where do numbers rule and where don't they? What differences do they make? How are the numbers and scientific claims we encounter created? How do they change as they travel from their original scientific context into everyday life? Ultimately, we seek to improve our ability to understand and evaluate the numbers and related scientific claims we encounter by seeing them as human creations, not just as "nuggets of objective fact."
Limited to 15 students. Preference to juniors and seniors. Omitted 2014-15. Professor Himmelstein.
2023-24: Not offered