Long Paper: Prompts, Outlines, Peer Comments

Once again, I hope you’ll write on topics of your own.  To get you started, here are are some prompts:

— This semester we have encountered a great variety of genres: poems by Whitman and Dickinson, naturalist novels by Norris and Sinclair, Native American myths by Erdrich, science fiction by Dick, LeGuin, and Butler, not to mention the unclassifiable Moby-Dick. How do the conventions of these genres shape our perceptions of the nonhuman?

— The “nonhuman” opens out into a web of interlocking terms: the subhuman, the superhuman, the almost-human, the posthuman, and so on.   Choose two of these and show how they are reciprocally constituted.

— The “nonhuman” quite often comes to us not as straightforward description, but by way of metaphors.   Analyze some of these, and the way this layer of mediation complicates our understanding.