Beyond Fabulous: Animality in an Age of Reason

ENG-L 320 — Fall 2018 — Themester

Instructor
Richard Nash
Days and Times
Tuesday/Thursday: 02:30-03:45 pm
Course Description

From philosophy and fable to poetry and performance, both sentimental and satiric; as pets and companions, and as servants and laboring partners; in the early modern era before the industrial revolution, animals played an important—and long neglected—role in the ways humans defined themselves and those they marked as alien in literature and culture.  If Descartes taught that humans were the only animals capable of reason, Swift reminded us sadly that humans were also animals only capable of reason.