First_Year Research Seminar: What is Terror? Literature and Critiques of Violence

Semester and Year	SP 2011
Course Number	FIRST-UG726
Section	001
Instructor	A.B. Huber
Days	Tue,Thu
Time	11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement

Description

In this research seminar we will consider both the routine violence of everyday life—what Michael Taussig has called “terror as usual”—and also more monumental, episodic forms of state and organized violence. We will try to understand what comes to count as violence and why. We will also ask what literature can do that perhaps history or philosophy cannot to help us fathom or survive violence, and to better comprehend how violence travels, passes hands, and how it might be abated. This course works across disciplines and media but close attention to language, our own and others’, is at the heart our shared project. Readings will include essays by Hannah Arendt, Dave Eggers, Jamaica Kincaid, Joe Sacco, Edward Said, and others. Students will write short weekly response papers, and they will investigate and author a final research essay on a topic of their own choosing.

Course Type

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