Mar 28, 2024  
2017-2018 HillBook (Class of 2021) 
    
2017-2018 HillBook (Class of 2021) [ARCHIVED HILL BOOK]

ENG 100/121 - Violence and Nonviolence (Core/First-Year Seminar)

Three or Four Credits
Not Offered 2017-2018

We only have to look around us to see that our world is defined in a fundamental way by violence. Writers and thinkers from various historical moments have both recognized the problem of violence in society and have offered critiques of it. Our study this term will be guided by the following question: what perspective does literature provide on the issues of violence and nonviolence in the world? We will encounter novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists whose work contains original, thought-provoking, and moving representations of and reflections on violence and nonviolence. We will pose a number of additional questions of our readings: how do these texts represent the causes and consequences of violence? How do the texts convey the relationships among different types of violence - interpersonal, political, psychological, and socioeconomic? Is nonviolence a viable ethical position in these texts? How is nonviolence defined, and what, if any, are the impediments to lessening the violence of the world? Lastly, what might the role of literature, and art more generally, be in our imagining of nonviolence?

Prerequisite(s)/Restriction(s): ENG 121 is a First-Year Seminar and open to First-Year Students only.
General Education Attribute(s): ENG 100, for 3-credits, fulfills the Literature Cornerstone.
ENG 121, for 4-credits, fulfills the First-Year Seminar and Literature Cornerstone.