INTIMATE COMPANIONS: READING AND WRITING

This First-Year course will engage with literary expressions of the universally interesting topic of relationships. Tony Tanner in his Adultery in the Novel characterizes marriage as “the structure which supports all structure.” Contemporary critics have seen marriage as essential to maintaining the “family values” of the bourgeoisie; feminists and Marxists have challenged the economic assumptions of patriarchally-defined marriage. Folklorists have treated marriage as the endpoint of the search for a safe domestic space. We will touch on this subject, but will also turn to writing about other indispensable relationships that, increasingly, fill our lives. Animals and botanicals—and our relationship with nature—have become so obviously  Important in the past ten years that they deserve to underpin our core values, too.

Starting with classic fairy tales and moving on to short fictions, contemporary American poetry, an affectionate study of the psyches of trees, and brief essays on animals we live with, this course will deliver an exportable cluster of ideas that may change our lives.