Bad Behavior

Catalog description

What does it mean to behave badly? How is 'bad behavior' distinguished from actions that are otherwise described as evil or criminal? This course addresses these questions by examining ideas of deviance, wrongdoing, and misconduct in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—that is, modern behavioral categories that are considered to be aberrant without necessarily being strictly defined as transgressions of the law. We will consider how bad behavior concerns the disruption of implicit social norms rather than the explicit violation of legal or moral codes.