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English Department Offers Experimental Courses
What's the difference between a rock and a tree? Can we ever care about a cockroach as we might a panda? How is gambling a metaphor for the human condition? The Ohio State English Department offers some unusual courses for spring 2008 quarter: Professor Frank Donoghue's course on Gambling on Film (English 378), Professor Marlene Longenecker's course on Animal Studies ( English 576.03), and Professor Sandra MacPherson's course on The Meaning of Life, According to 18th-Century Philosophy and Literature (English H598).
English 378: Gambling on Film
Frank DonoghueThis course will explore representations of gambling, something that many of us do, but few of us really think about. We'll analyze a series of films about different venues for gambling: the pool hall (The Hustler), the poker table (The Cincinnati Kid, Rounders), the racetrack (Let It Ride) and the world of sports betting (The Gambler). We'll look at two films in which gambling figures as a metaphor for the human condition. We'll ask the same questions of all of them: What does gambling mean to the characters involved? What's at stake when someone wins or loses a wager? What kinds of personal relationships does gambling create? Think about enrolling. What do you have to lose? Questions: donoghue.1@osu.edu
English 576.03: Issues and Movements in Critical Theory: Animals
Marlene LongeneckerStudents in this course will have one of the first opportunities at Ohio State to explore the new field of Animal Studies. The central questions are: what is, what has been, and what should be the relationship between humans and non-human animals, both wild and domestic? What does it mean that we have discovered that they have languages and they use tools? Do animals have rights? What obligations do we have to them? We will look at the controversies about zoos and animals used in research; the role of pets in our lives; the ethics of vegetarianism; the crisis of species extinction and the effects of global warming on the food chain. We will read essays in theory and in creative non-fiction, poetry, and fiction in which animals play a principal role. We will look at medieval bestiaries and paintings throughout history; we will see at least two films, and have a field trip to the zoo, and watch Animal Planet on TV. Possible texts include: poetry by Robert Frost, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Oliver; The Life of Pi (novel); films Gorillas in the Mist or The March of the Penguins, and almost anything by Disney. Questions: longenecker.2@osu.edu
English H598: The Meaning of Life
Sandra MacphersonIs sperm a living being? Is grass? Are rocks? Machines? Do we have ethical or political obligations to natural objects? To manufactured ones? To animals? Theorists of artificial intelligence and the "post-human" increasingly turn to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "vitalist" philosophical tradition in which the mere capacity for self-motion makes something a someone ¬to think through such questions. And we shall do the same, asking in addition: are theories of the post-human truly post-human? We will survey the major vitalist genres: ¬philosophy, georgic, and pornography. Primary texts by Descartes, Cavendish, Leibniz, La Mettrie, Marvell, Pope, Thomson, and Sade. Questions: macpherson.4@osu.edu
