08:179
Literature and Society: Capturing Animals

Assignments • Texts • Syllabus • Policies

Time: M/W 4:30-5:45	Place: 202 EPB
Instructor :   Professor Mangum	Office:   357 EPB
E-mail: teresa-mangum@uiowa.edu	Phone: 335-0323
WebAddress of Community Partner: http://www.icanimalcenter.org	Office Hours: M/W 3:00-4:30 and by appointment
Community Partner: Misha Goodman, Director Iowa City/Coralville Animal Center Contact Person:   Misha Goodman Phone:   356-5297 or 621-3274 (cell)	Library Partner: Reference Librarian Kathy Magarrell Email: kathy-magarrell@uiowa.edu Phone: 335-5093

Course Objectives

In this course, our overarching goal will be to develop an understanding of what animals “mean” in our culture and of the many ways we use animals—as companions, as metaphors and images to represent fears, pleasures, and assumptions, as food, as objects for pleasure and sadly for abuse, as commodities, as projections of qualities we wish to possess.   We will also be participating in a new educational approach called Service-Learning so that in addition to using literary and theoretical printed and visual work as our course texts, we will also be using your own experiences and reflections.   During your service at the Iowa City/Coralville Animal Center, the stories and insights that you collect there will essentially form an additional course text. In effect, we'll be “capturing animals” throughout the semester: in fiction, in the Animal Center, in advertisements, in theoretical accounts of human-animal relations, in community policies governing animals, in university policies on animal research, in popular culture, and in politics.   Throughout the semester, we'll return to a number of research questions which will knit together class readings, your service at the Animal Center, and, I hope, ultimately the reflections, discussions, written work, and research that will bind us together as a class.   I know that you will each help us add to the list through the semester, but here are a few fundamental research questions to get us started:

• What purposes larger than themselves do animals serve in the stories where you encounter them—both in literature and at the Animal Center?
• How do the narratives we find in literature circulate in stories people tell about animals in the Center—from staff and volunteers to advertisements to “animals' stories” to comic strips to human applications for Center animals?
• How many layers of story-telling can we locate?   Consider the role of animals in literature we read, use of animal imagery (mad as a wet hen, monkeying around) in literature and daily life, newspaper coverage of Center activities and animal incidents, the stories the Center staff members tell in educational materials, the stories of success and need the staff members tell to funders and city and county governments, even the individual stories posted about each animal on the website and outside their cages.
• How do the formal qualities of these stories such as character, point of view, plot, sub-plots, conflicts, images, style, and genre push us toward sympathy or judgments or complacency or change?
• How do the stories absorb and rework larger social, political, cultural preoccupations, power structures, fears, beliefs?
• When we step back from particular texts and consider the larger network of texts and experiences, what deductions can we make about how our culture views animals, about the ways we rationale our uses of animals, about the reasons why poets and scientists alike seek to understand the “animal” point of view, intelligence, language, and emotion?
• Where do you see evidence of changes in perceptions of animals depending on historical moment and location (rural/urban, wealthy/poor, comparison of views of animals held by community, regional, ethnic groups, geographical-national comparisons)?
• Where do you see animal subjects in stories being used to help readers work through human conflicts and fears?
• What hopes, desires, fantasies, possibilities, or anxieties do you find being articulated through animal imagery and animal stories?
• Considering both your reading and your Center experiences, what aspects of the stories we tell about our animals and about human relations to and impact on animals would you like to see change?
• What alternate or interventionist stories would you tell to effect change?   Who needs to hear those stories?   What steps could you take to set that change in motion?

Copyright © 2005 Teresa Mangum. All rights reserved.
Last update August 31, 2005 12:13