Once again, I hope you’ll write on topics of your own. To get you started, here are some prompts:
— This semester we have encountered a great variety of genres: poetry by Whitman and Bishop, and Walcott; sea fiction by Melville and Ghosh; internet novels by Powers and Eggers; science fiction by Bradbury, Dick, LeGuin, and Butler. How do the conventions of these genres shape our perceptions of the nonhuman?
— The “nonhuman” opens out into a web of phenomena both macro and micro: from commodities and corporations to aliens and robots, from seafaring vehicles to space-traveling epidemics. Choose one such phenomenon and analyze it across a range of scales, from the local to the global.
— The “nonhuman” quite often comes accompanied by the human, and sheds light on the latter. Analyze the reciprocal constitution and mediation between these two.