How are our bodies composed and perceived? How are our bodies liberated and controlled, celebrated and stigmatized? How do we live our bodies and the intersecting identities that shape those bodies? In this class, we will explore the politics of the body, as influenced by factors like race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. We’ll ask how that politics can become a kind of poetics. We’ll also ask how authors and performers from various times and places, from ancient Greece and Rome to modern day America, use poetry to think through the body and vice versa. Using texts ranging from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to Martha Graham’s journals and modern dances, to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, we will think about the body as a site of translation, about the poetics of dance, and about embodiment and representations of the body in poetry.

In this course, you will learn to create complex, analytic, well-supported arguments as well as hone your critical thinking and reading skills. Through a progressing series of paper assignments, you will be asked to think about what it means to read and write the body, while practicing key techniques of academic writing such as close reading, narrative argument, and comparative analysis. In the final project for this course, you will be asked to repurpose one of your written essays into a new form (a performance, a visual project, a blog or other kind of digital presentation, etc.), in an effort to consider the very distinctions we make between texts and other kinds of media.

Course Requirements:

This course will make use of a grading contract determined at the beginning of the semester between each student and the course instructor. Students will receive a document outlining of all of the course components required to receive a B in the course (essay completion and revision, peer review, participation and discussion, self-reflection, etc.) as well as a range of options that they can choose to complete in order to receive an A in the course (optional synchronous meetings, additional revision and reflection assignments, community engagement opportunities, etc.). Each student will be expected to follow the plan for success that they outline in the grading contract (with the understanding that the contract allows for flexibility, changing circumstances, and differences in student needs throughout the semester), and final grades will be assigned based on the work the student completes.

Class Format:

This course will primarily use Canvas for all asynchronous online components. We may also occasionally use Google forms and docs for collaborative work. Optional synchronous meetings with the instructor will be conducted through Zoom every Wednesday from 8:30-10am. Students should have access to a camera and microphone, especially for small group/breakout group work, but while students are encouraged they will not be required to turn on cameras during the synchronous meetings.