GERM1701 · Complex Problems and Enduring Questions
Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences
This is an Enduring Question course and is open to FRESHMEN only. You must take SOCY1710 with this course. This course traverses a history of our cultural and aesthetic conceptions of otherness, abnormality, madness, illness, abjection, and sexual difference through literature and theory. Such notions are bound inextricably to the ways in which we define normality and to the tacit processes of exclusion and discrimination we employ for those definitions. In this course, textual representations of threshold figures and experiences guide students in discovering a poetics of deviance: how what we consider threatening, abnormal, unreasonable, incomprehensible, repellent, or deviant both constitutes a cultural, aesthetic construct and shapes our own changing self-understanding, identity, and imagination.
Course experience
Averages use the original five-point historical evaluation scale.
Organization
4.3 / 5
How well the course was organized
Challenge
4.2 / 5
How intellectually challenging students found it
Attendance
4.8 / 5
How necessary attendance was
Assignments
4.3 / 5
How helpful assignments were
Weekly effort
~5
hours per week
Estimated from the original workload response buckets. Individual sections may differ.
Instructor options
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Across time
Available section-level results across semesters.
Spring 2024
1 section