This is the course site for English 130. Please stay tuned while I fill it out with course readings, discussion questions, and posts! Post here when it is your turn to be a discussion leader.

There isn’t much to see here yet, but there will be a discussion question posted after class on Thursday, January 30, and the readings for the next class are posted in the resources page. There has been a change to the scheduled readings and the text for class due Tuesday, February 4th is a selection from Regarding Animals. It’s longer than the other readings that week, also posted on the resources page.

On Tuesday, we will delve into the course theme, posthumanism. In order to make sense of what is called posthumanism it is important to get a sense of some assumptions about language–more specifically, discourse, that have had a foothold in the humanities since roughly the second half of the twentieth century. Many of the texts whose authors ushered in those assumptions are incredibly challenging for college undergrads in their first two years to read. Instead of assigning those, I have found a much more approachable, accessible text outlining one of those main assumptions: that many of the truths that make up the backdrop of our lives are constructs, things whose definitions and boundaries are constructed through the ways in which people see them, talk about them, and behave with them.

Question: The authors describe a few constructs. What are they? Can you think of something in your life that they do not name but might also call a construct?