Welcome Message - Spring 2009

This post is NOT for Fall 2009 students!

Hello students in the ENG 201 class:

Our course theme is "Political Fictions."

While it may sound as if the course theme is tied to the recent election of Barack Obama it is not.

The course theme has its deepest roots in the ways all people in all civilizations across time and place have attempted to gain, maintain and assert power.

For the purpose of this course, the term "political" means "power" not what we think of as Democratic or Republican.

Fictions, of course, are made-up stories. While we will read some fiction together, what we will be most interested in is how the people in our texts relate to power. Some try to gain it while oppressing others; some try to challenge oppression and suffer for it.

Our first text for discussion is a series of articles from The New York Times series called "The DNA Age." You will find links to these articles on the right toolbar.

I ask that you read all NINE of the articles by the THIRD class: print them out, organize them together by theme (research, commerce or ethics - three articles each), identify vocabulary and ANNOTATE the articles. Our guiding questions for these articles:

1. What underlying assumptions drive the quest for genetic research and answers?
2. What new challenges will people face in the world of increasing access to genetic information?

Our first class is on Monday, January 26.

We will not have class the following week: February 2. I have a family matter to address and will be out of town.

At the third class we will have the full discussion of the articles.

I have posted the course syllabus to the COURSE DOCUMENTS of Blackboard.

Please buy new or used copies of the course texts:

Junot Diaz's novel Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Tony Kushner's plays Angels in America (both plays).

Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Complete Persepolis

Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism


So, welcome to the course and I look forward to your active engagement and participation!

WAYNE GAGNON