Catalog Course Description
The survival genre is not limited to alpine or maritime disasters; the genre is replete with examples of individuals surviving a difficult childhood, internment, and war. Survival Literature hopes to address the issue of how and why people find themselves in these situations and, once in the environment, how they manage. Are they explorers who must climb the highest peak, or navigators who sail the world’s most dangerous oceans or are they average individuals involuntarily called up to serve their country? And, regardless of their reason for being in a situation, how do they survive? What reserve do they call upon to overcome what might otherwise destroy them? Is it the human spirit that will not die? What enables an individual or group/team to survive against almost insurmountable odds? Additionally, we will attempt to maximize the capability of the technology available to us by using archived threaded discussions, the web and asynchronous e-mail. Individual and collaborative knowledge-building will be demonstrated through the creation of web pages.
Rationale For Course
Reading fiction and non-fiction and viewing assorted media contribute to the intellectual development of learners by giving us the techniques for delving into the importance of story and personal narratives. Vicarious experiences of the human condition far vaster than any of us could ever acquire on the basis of luck and our own first hand encounters will become readily available in Survival Literature. Mature development is the process of gradually acquiring kinds of knowledge that go beyond our first hand experience. We must learn, for example, that the lives of people we will never meet count in the same way our own lives count.
The goal is to develop the cognitive skills that support the critical reading of texts, the precise use of language, and the creation of sound arguments. Such cognitive skills as analyzing, synthesizing, writing, reading, evaluating, and appreciating are addressed by Survival Literature.
By learning to think the thoughts, construct the arguments, and use the vocabulary of authors/writers you will experience a vast degree of cognitive complexity unobtainable in any other way. The reading and viewing opportunities afforded by Survival Literature will explore this complexity.
In Survival Literature, you will encounter gripping, detailed, and concrete accounts of individuals who face choices about the right and wrong thing to do. Because these accounts mirror, to some extent, the circumstances and choices that readers themselves face in everyday life, they can learn from them how to see themselves through the varnish of their own defenses and more comparatively.
Issues of private conscience, relations between spouses and among family members, issues of moral conduct within the professions and on the job, questions of religion and morality and principle, ways of seeking entertainment, attitudes about sexual conduct and power relations between the genders: all of these issues, crucial to the quality and texture of everyday life for all of us, are given the kind of representation in the reading selections that invites readers both to identify with and simultaneously to distance themselves from what is represented.
Readers will gain a sense of what ethical choices exist in the world and what choices other people both similar to themselves and different from them make.
As readers distance themselves from these vicarious experiences, they gain an ability to make comparisons that clarify the choices of their own lives. In addition, Survival Literature aims to makes us, like all readers, participants in ethical deliberations. Readers will track the actual thought processes traced by characters and authors who are working to discover the criteria for ethical and moral decisions. This kind of practice, generated by required participation in threaded discussions, does not ensure that readers will always deliberate better about moral and ethical problems in their real lives, but without practice and considered thoughtful responses, real-life improvement cannot occur.
That fiction and non-fiction are a universal feature of all human cultures implies that fiction and first hand experiences constitute an indispensable component of the education we all require about the means and ends of human life.
The author’s moral and ethical deliberations will be examined. Sharing the troubles and destinies of authors will give us the direct access to other minds and lets us observe an author’s deliberations all without the pressure of immediate self-interest. All of us require negotiations with stories on the road to development of a self that is capable of making ethical and moral choices.
We hold existential views more as attitudes than as arguments, but those attitudes are nevertheless the foundation of our approach to life. Existential views consist of such basic beliefs as whether the universe is open or shut to human effort; our basic confidence or lack of confidence about the existence of God or Truth; out belief in the importance or unimportance of reason and reasonableness; our sense that life is more tragic than hopeful or more hopeful than tragic; our sense that human beings either can or cannot achieve their important goals on their own, and so on. Survival Literature offers students the opportunity, through exposure to the reading material, threaded discussions, web page development and knowledge-building, not only to take experiences in, but to study them in contexts that place a premium on thoughtfulness, analysis and evaluation.
The current cultural popularity of watching individuals on TV, from the comfort of our living rooms, compete against each other in group survival games for financial reward diminishes the personal spirit and individual strength we will see in the reading selections of Survival Literature.
Finally, in stark contrast to the contemporary TV culture, the readings of Survival Literature will reveal the true explorer, survivor, navigator, worker, soldier, prisoner, and architect overcoming tremendous odds for personal survival and the betterment of mankind.
To obtain a print version of the Survival Literature EG43 Special Topics Course Proposal for Fall 2002 - Spring 2003 click on the link below. You are then free to print the proposal .
EG43s - Special Topics Course Proposal - Fall 2002 - Spring 2003 - pdf file
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