Reading

We will be working with the following texts this semester:

John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”
Alice Walker, “Am I Blue?”
Nick Abadzis, Laika (978-1596431010)
Martha Kolln, “Cohesion”
Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals  (ISBN 978-0-316-06988-5)
Richard Lanham, Revising Prose, Ch 1
Randy Malamud, “Zoo Spectatorship”
Grizzly Man (Dir. Werner Herzog, 2005)
Andrea Lunsford, ed., St. Martin’s Handbook (7th ed)
Val Plumwood, “Being Prey”

The texts identified above by ISBN number are all available in the College Store.  The DVD Grizzly Man is also available in the College Store.  I ask that everyone purchase the same editions of the books required for class so that, during discussion, we can all turn quickly and easily to the same page.  So if you buy your books elsewhere, please check ISBNs to be sure you have the same edition as the ones ordered for us.  The bookstore may not able to get us copies of the documentary film Grizzly Man, so you may need to order one for yourself.  You should have a copy of The St. Martin’s Handbook from your FYS.  If not, copies are available in the bookstore.  (Please buy the 7th or a later edition.)  The other texts given above will be available as downloadable PDFs on Moodle.  We’ll spend about 1-2 weeks on each reading, and (except for the St. Martin’s Handbook) we’ll read (or view) them in the order given above.  In addition to reading on our course topic, there will also be a couple of assignments (Kolln’s “Cohesion” and Lanham’s “Revising Prose”) that provide you with strategies for revising your writing.

Overview of the course reading

Let me say a bit more here about what you can expect from the reading and how it’s related to the writing assignments.

After some informal in-class discussion during the first week, your first reading assignments outside of class will be John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?” followed by Alice Walker’s “Am I Blue?”  Both of these texts pose questions that are at the center of our inquiry this semester.  Berger’s essay considers how and why humans have looked at animals.  How did we view them in the past, and how are past views related to the present?  What do we learn  about animals by looking?  About ourselves?  Alice Walker wonders about the essential differences between human and non-human animals, about the responsibilities of humans toward other animals, and about how relationships with other animals can be seen to reflect human anxieties about racial and cultural others.  After those readings, we’ll turn to Nick Abadzis’ graphic novel Laika, which takes up the issue of animals as research subjects by re-telling the story of the first dog sent into outer space. At that point in the course, I’ll ask you to reflect on the writing that you have been doing about these three texts and pull that work together into a longer essay.  I’ll meet with you to discuss your drafts and provide some feedback for revision.  You will then compile a portfolio that includes a revised essay and selected examples from the rest of your written work that you think best represent your writing and learning to date.  More information about preparing portfolios will be posted on Moodle closer to the first portfolio due date.

In the next part of the course, we will consider representations of animals as food.  We’ll read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, part personal narrative and part journalistic investigation of the practice and consequences (public health, environmental, political and moral) of eating animals.  Like Walker and Berger, Foer is asking questions:  what is meat? where does it come from? how is it produced? how are animals treated, and how does (or should) that treatment matter to us? what is animal experience really like?   Foer’s book looks in particular at the ways in which language and discourse have constructed our  understanding of the categories “human” and “animal,” and the practice of eating animals as “normal,” “natural,” “healthy,” etc.  For your blog posts, in this section of the course, you’ll be asked to draw on Foer’s work to analyze a representation of a food animal.  We’ll also put Foer’s work in conversation with a recent discussions in the media about eating meat.  After discussing and writing about these readings, you will again be asked to draft a longer essay, conference with me about your drafts, and compile a portfolio representing your writing and learning.

The final section of the course will focus on representations of “wild” animals.  (Wild is in quotations here because we will be thinking about what it even means to say that an animal is “wild,” “domesticated,” “tamed,” etc.).  We’ll read Randy Malamud’s analysis of zoos and the politics of spectatorship.  Next, we’ll watch Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man, which examines the life and work of Timothy Treadwell, whose efforts to protect grizzly bears and educate the public about conservation were considered by many to be controversial.  And last we’ll read Val Plumwood’s essay about surviving a crocodile attack.  For your blog posts and essays, I’ll ask you to apply the questions and ideas posed by Malamud’s and Plumwood’s essays and Herzog’s film to some human-animal encounters that you find intriguing and worthy of further investigation.  We’ll have a final round of conferences, and you will compile your final portfolios.

A word of advice about reading

Leave yourself enough time to read and then re-read texts assigned (including writing by members of the class).  Whenever you’re assigned to read something, it also means that I expect you to annotate your text and to have a set of notes that allow you to find your way around the text and also find passages quickly for the purposes of class discussion.  Please bring all texts up for discussion on a given day (including any student writing) with you to class.  Should you forget (it happens), please sit next to someone who has the assigned reading.  And of course, if you notice that someone doesn’t have the reading, please offer to share.

On average, you should be spending about 6 hours /week preparing for this class.  (This is the usual ratio of in- to out-of-class time for all Lafayette courses.)  That time should include work on both the reading and the writing assignments.