First-Year Writing Seminar: The Poetic History of Science in Western Thought

Catalog description

What does poetry have to do with science? It seems at first glance a fairly implausible pair. Unlike in our world today, however, in Ancient Greek thought these two ideas were actually far more similar to one another than they were different, both stemming from the same notion of creating or “crafting” something. What happens when we moderns forget the poetic roots of our idea of modern technology? Where did our thinking go astray? Working with the texts of figures from Parmenides to Goethe, Mary Shelley to Martin Heidegger, and Plato to Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, this essentially interdisciplinary course focuses on the interpretation of complex manuscripts from poetry to cybernetics to connect seemingly disparate ideas about the interlocking histories of the arts and the sciences. In this class we will be turning concepts we think we know inside out in order to pose fundamental questions about global issues that occupy our minds today, from social media to ecology. As a First-Year Writing Seminar, this class challenges students to rethink the obvious by interrogating language and grappling with difficult texts to become both more rigorous and technical but also creative and questioning writers.