ENG 100/125 - Of “Savages” and Civilization (Core/First-Year Seminar)

Three or Four Credits
Fall Semester

This course examines the figure of “the primitive” (and its avatars: the “cannibal,” the “barbarian,” the “savage,” and so on) in Western literature and visual art from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. We will trace the persistent life of these invented “Others” from early modern travel narratives and drama to Enlightenment-era philosophy to modern anthropology, social science, novels, and imperial politics. Through these texts, we will examine how racial, ethnic, and national identities are intertwined with the emergence of the modern conception of the human—and of the idea of “the modern” itself. Our semester will end with a section devoted to the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih to consider how a postcolonial African author responds to European constructions of Otherness. Additional texts to be covered may include Montaigne’s “On Cannibals,” Shakespeare’s Othello, Darwin’s The Descent of Man, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kipling’s “Gunga Din,” Gauguin’s Noa Noa, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Gide’s The Immoralist, Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, Forster’s A Passage to India, and Orwell’s essays.

Prerequisite(s): ENG 125 is a First-Year Seminar and open to First-Year Students only.
 
 

When offered as ENG 100, for 3-credits, fulfills the Literature Cornerstone Requirement.
When offered as ENG 125, for 4-credits, fulfills the First-Year Seminar and Literature Cornerstone Requirements.