Honors Seminars Fall 2011

What does it mean to label someone monstrous or mad? All cultures have some means of identifying those who transgress accepted boundaries and standards of established behavior. Looking at the ways in which these loosely related concepts are rendered in a given historical moment is a useful way of assessing the most strongly defended values of a particular culture and era.

This course will examine how these categories of exclusion have been represented across a broad spectrum of British and American literary, anthropological, medical, sociological, and cinematic works of the last two centuries. In the process, students will develop their critical and interpretive skills as readers, and their analytical and rhetorical strategies as writers.