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Expository Writing (105-0-20)

Topic

Otherworlds and Ours: Narratives of Inter-world Tr

Instructors

Maria Isabel Vieytez

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 213: Tues, Thurs 12:30PM - 1:50PM

Overview of class

What makes a world, and what does it mean to travel between worlds? For Lewis Carroll's Alice, stumbling headfirst into a rabbit-hole leads to her immersion in a dizzying landscape of talking flowers and cross-species tea parties. In Tolkien's "The Hobbit" (or, fittingly, "There and Back Again"), Bilbo's idyllic world of the Shire gives way to terrains, beings, and dangers unknown as soon as Gandalf knocks on his door. In the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the trauma of his lover's untimely death compels the titular hero to brave Hades' underworld, and in the medieval retelling, "Sir Orfeo", he instead travels through a rock into a fairy Otherworld as he attempts to recover Heurodis from the supernatural king who has kidnapped her. In this course, we will consider different forms of inter-world travel and the conditions of sociality that necessitate a departure from (and sometimes a return to) a world we call "ours." How are environments constituted or unmade by their inhabitants and the interpersonal, affective, and political investments that orient them? How are we changed by the experience of glimpsing the "otherwise"?