First-Year Seminar (101-6-23)

Topic

Afterlives & Living After: Envisioning Other World

Instructors

Lily Clara Stewart

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L04: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM

Overview of class

Afterlives and Living After: Envisioning Other Worlds:
Humans for thousands of years have documented their visions of other worlds and afterlives. Whether informed by religious revelation, collective trauma, or individual creativity, these visions provide important vantage points for assessing cultural values and experiences. In this class we will explore religious models of "The Afterlife" while also analyzing afterlives constructed in fiction, film, art, and other forms of popular media. We will ask how envisioning other worlds can help us to alternately articulate and blur the boundaries between life and death, trauma and healing, past and present, and reality and fiction. We will also explore what it means to "live after" major ruptures in individual and collective experience. For instance, how do we envision life after pandemic? After climate change? Revolution? Immigration? Utopia? Through speculative fiction, how to we envision the afterlives of humanity as we assess the potential for a post-human world?

Sources will include ghost stories from around the world, medieval visions of hell, purgatory, and heaven, videos of dead celebrities resurrected as holograms, episodes of Upload, The Good Place, and Star Trek, contemporary news releases, and short speculative fiction. Students will develop skills in analytical writing, creative thinking, and classroom collaboration.

Teaching Method

Class Materials (Required)

Course Materials TBD,

Class Attributes

WCAS First-Year Seminar

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Reserved for First Year & Sophomore only