First-Year Research Seminar: Language and the Political

Semester and Year	SP 2010
Course Number	FIRST-UG709
Section	001
Instructor	Andrew Libby
Days	Mon,Wed
Time	12:30 PM - 1:45 PM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement

Description

Can language affect politics? How have writers and activists sought to change society through changing language? How is rhetoric used politically, in essays, oratory, propaganda, and poetry? We will read arguments about the relationship of language and the political, examine political rhetoric, and look at literary works. We will write about rhetoric's power to form and criticize political movements, such as movements for civil rights, rights for women, human rights, workers' rights, and animal rights. We will explore how language participates in our ideas about rights, ethics, political action, and social justice. In the course of our inquiries, students will write three papers and one longer project, in which students research an area of social justice vital to them. Our sources may include passages from Plato, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Martin Luther King, Jr., Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Spike Lee, and Ursula LeGuin.

Course Type

First-Year Program: Research Seminars (FIRST-UG)