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To Delight and Instruct: First-Year Program Literary Colleges
First-Year Program (FYP) courses use a wide variety of resources for their widely varying topics, all of which have some common goals, among them to help first-year students become better communicators. Two of this fall's 18 courses focus on literature as the primary resource; for your own FYP experience, pick up books from these courses and follow along. -LMC
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
In this course we will explore some of history's most delightful and instructive science fiction novels, short stories, and films: from novels like Vonnegut's Galapagos and Dick's Do androids dream of electric sheep?, to short stories by masters like Asimov and Heinlein, to films like Andrew Niccol's Gattaca and the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix. As we study these works we will have at least three goals in mind: to experience the pleasure of losing ourselves in works of science fiction, to learn some of the science on which these works are based, and to investigate how it is that science can be portrayed both as humanity's precious gift and its dark curse.Infinite Breakfast Demonology
From acid rain to acid trips, the latter half of the 20th century perplexed even the most sophisticated minds. This course takes you on an infinite journey through three such literary minds that will incite with excess, hurt you with irony, and warp you with complexity. Working through three literary works (Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut and My Mother Demonology by Kathy Acker), this course lays the ground work for understanding the philosophy of post-structuralism, the power of irony, and the perversity of art in a world corrupted by its own excessive need for pleasure. You will be challenged to understand the visceral force of stretching your unused intellectual muscles, learn to write eulogies for truth and manifestos for plagiarism, and discover that fact and fiction, truth and falsity, real and fake blend together in a corrupt world of absurd power and tyrannical liberation.