Introductory Topics in Literature
Topic: Science fiction and the human microbiome
Class Information
Instructor: Wills, Melissa
CRN: 41985
Time: MW 2:10-3:30
GE Areas: Writing Experience
Description
Since 2007, American science and culture are presently engaged in a radical renegotiation of microbial life. As scientists bring into view the sheer scope and variety of microbial life associated with the human body ? our microbiome ? it is increasingly evident that we must set aside older conceptions of microbes as dangerous invaders. In recent years, it has often been said that our bodies comprise 10% human cells, 90% microbial; that we are a superorganism of heterogeneous lifeforms; that our microbes make us who we are and we simply cannot do without them.
Yet while the insight that we need our microbes may seem revolutionary ? a decisive break with past conceptions of microbial life ? this course will set forth the idea that it is also something we have always known. From the very origins of microbiology in the mid-19th century, scientists and authors have turned to literary modes to describe the essential coexistence of microbes and humans.
This course invites students to consider how the scientific and literary imagination of human-microbial symbiosis have influenced microbiome research, and how the microbiome is shaping culture in return.
The course requires no previous expertise in science.
Grading
Reading responses, discussion forums, short paper, final paper.
Texts
The Select Works of Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Antony van Leeuwenhoek
Micrographia , Robert Hooke
The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish
selected bacteriology texts, Pasteur
The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
Anatomic, Adam Dickinson
assorted microbiology poems, W.H. Auden, Jane Hirshfield, Pattiann Rogers, James Thomson
assorted microbiology short stories , TBD
select papers in microbiome research , TBD
The Select Works of Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Antony van Leeuwenhoek
Micrographia , Robert Hooke
The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish
selected bacteriology texts, Pasteur
The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
Anatomic, Adam Dickinson
assorted microbiology poems, W.H. Auden, Jane Hirshfield, Pattiann Rogers, James Thomson
assorted microbiology short stories , TBD
select papers in microbiome research , TBD