What do it mean?
Trans studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, queer, and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies of flesh and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice, and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: What is the "corporeal real"? If anyone can build a nuclear bomb, should we report him or deport her? Why is "cunt" less acceptable than "pussy"? How does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice? How might one approach nonhuman interiority? On the basis of what principle would you refute the Freud in "The Future of an Illusion"? How do you define "woman"? Have you ever heard a meadowlark?
-- Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."
-- Shaw, Man and Superman: "There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."
-- Did Voltaire have a mixed view of Plato? If Voltaire, despite ranting against the church, believedf in God, what attributes does that divinity have?.
Comment on four of the following:
-- “We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
-- Auden, "The Age of Anxiety"
“You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.” -- Alexander Pope, "Moral Essays"
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street."
--Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"
“What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.” -- Henry Miller
“I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.” -- Ruskin
“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.” -- Disraeli
"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic" - Joseph Stalin
And Dostoyevski on Lenin, Rousseau, Marx etc.:
“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
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