First-Year Seminar
Contagion and the Global World: Infected Texts, Infectious Writing (Sample Syllabus)
Professor Khristina Gonzalez
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Course Description:
What do vampires, the swine flu, and the latest youtube phenomenon have in common? They are all
viral, easily spreading themselves from person to person, body to body, place to place. The concept
of contagion makes us question whether borders of any kind can ever be secure. It forces us to
consider, for instance, whether our nations, our bodies, and even our minds can ever be truly
enclosed: free from outside influence and uniquely our own. It is no wonder that the threat of
contagion is often figured as causing panic—think of the typical zombie story, in which a few
survivors struggle to protect their thoughts, desires, and indeed, their humanity against the spread of
a monstrous infection. Concerns about contagion become particularly magnified when global
exchange increases trade and mobility, blurring traditional borders thought to separate nations,
cultures, and individuals. But is contagion always a bad thing? After all, the spread of emotion,
information, and ideas can serve to unite people and communities across large spans of space and
time; consider the effects of a viral news article, the spread of national pride at the Olymics, or a
contagious laugh. The concept of contagion thus forces us to consider what ideals and beliefs we
give up when our borders are revealed to be permeable—and what we gain.
In this first-year seminar we will take a critical look at how and why an eclectic group of texts
across multiple mediums (novels, poems, essays, short videos, news stories, and movies) and
historical contexts construct narratives of contagion. We will consider how these texts use the trope
of contagion to test social conceptions about purity, national enclosure, and even individuality. In
our approach to the material, we will focus especially on issues of race, nationalism, and
imperialism, analyzing the ways that these texts designate certain behaviors, bodies, spaces, and
social developments as the particular sites of contagion. In doing so, we will be able to consider
how these texts engage with contemporaneous social debates around colonialism, globalization, and
international exchange writ large. Why, for instance, might the recent box-office hit Contagion
attribute the origin of the illness to the actions of a global mining company? Why does Bram
Stoker’s Count Dracula move to London to spread his vampiric infection? Do such designations
mark these behaviors as pathological threats, opposed to an ideal, self-enclosed nation, community,
or individual? Or can we read their contagious nature as a positive alternative to isolation, excessive
nationalism, or atomized personal existence? In this course, you will learn to read closely—to
identify, explore, and make meaning from textual details, some of which may support contradictory
interpretations. In doing so, we will see how even those narratives that, on the surface, represent
contagion as a dangerous threat, might also reveal its social value—and vice versa.
Course Goals:
This course is designed around three main learning goals: first, it will introduce students to some of
the “core” texts in the Western literary canon, including, but not limited to work by Boccaccio,
Shakespeare, Adam Smith, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde; second, it will give students a
theoretical framework for discussing social issues crucial to our own historical moment, like
imperialism, globalization, race relations, gender construction, and class structures; third, it will
give students the foundational skills necessary for critical reading, thinking, and writing.
Course Methodology
Our approach to the course material will be two-fold. First, we will treat all of these texts, no matter
their medium, as literary documents, looking closely at the way they use particular words, images,
sounds, and form to convey their meaning. Second, we will consider the historical context from
which these texts emerge, in order to more fully understand the way that these narratives engage
with contemporaneous social debates and concerns. Toward that end, our course material will be
grouped in three loose chronological periods—the turn of the 19th-century, the turn of the 20thcentury, and the turn of the 21st century. Each of these historic periods corresponds to a moment of
particular social preoccupation with global exchange: the rise of the British imperial project, the
height of the British Empire, and our contemporary globalizing world. For each of these categories,
our work with the primary literary texts will be supplemented by historical documents, personal
accounts and authorial letters, and scholarly criticism that allow us to get a better sense of the
historical context.
Through this dual commitment to close literary analysis and historical understanding, you will learn
to respond to these texts responsibly and rigorously. You will develop as a critical thinker and
writer, learning to produce your own interpretations and finding the best means of communicating
those interpretations through written arguments.
Course Pedagogy
Our thematic focus on contagion will also influence the assignment structure for this course. Every
text, including your own writing, must inherently be interested in the idea of contagion. Texts are,
after all, always both infected and infectious, housing the ideas and opinions of past authors and
striving to spread their own arguments throughout the world. Through this lens, contagion is the
very thing that enables successful writing. Through our readings, we will analyze the ways that texts
in different forms and with various purposes negotiate this position. How, we will ask, do these
texts absorb infectious ideas from other thinkers and still produce their own unique, compelling, and
contagious claims? Once they produce these claims, how do these texts choose the best forms and
mediums for spreading them throughout the world? Through this analysis, you will learn how to
negotiate this same challenge in your own writing. You will discover how to engage with external
sources and your own classmates while creating original ideas and gripping arguments in
transmittable forms.
The written assignments are designed progressively. You will write a short response paper prior to
most class meetings that focuses on a single close reading, using it as a basis to spread your ideas
during class discussion (the schedule and protocol for these response papers will be distributed
separately). During the semester, you will then choose two of these close readings and transform
them into two longer writing assignments. Finally, with my guidance, you will choose one of these
assignments and turn it into a final research essay by situating your arguments in the context of a
critical discussion. In order to prepare you to do this research, we will be spending one class in the
library, learning to identify and use sources, and we will be learning to work with scholarly literary
criticism in the course itself. Through this progressive assignment structure, you will learn how an
idea can become viral in your own writing, mutating and expanding from a single close reading, to a
classroom discussion, to a larger conceptual argument, and finally to a scholarly intervention.
Course Policies:
Grade Breakdown:
Response Papers and Participation-40%
First Short Paper (3-4pg)-15%
Second Short Paper (3-4pg)-20%
Final Paper-25%
Participation:
This course is run as a seminar, which means that it will involve daily class discussion, student-led
presentations, and the exchange of ideas. It is therefore crucial that you attend each class on time,
having completed the reading. You must also be prepared to discuss and share your opinions on the
day’s material, and have completed any written assignments with care, effort, and precision.
Moreover, this is a class in which critical thought is much more important than having a “right”
answer—what this means is that you’ll never have a reason to say “I don’t know!”
Required Texts:
Course Packet-Contagion and the Global World
Shelley, Mary. The Last Man.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula.
Haggard, Rider. She.
Preston, Richard. Outbreak.
Schedule of Activities
Part One: Foundations, Critical Framework
Week One: Medieval Contagion: “The Wages of Sin are Death”
Guiding Question: How do these texts imagine the relationship between social transgression and
physical disease? How do we? What are the forms of mobility and exchange in the medieval world?
How is textual imitation a form of contagion?
Readings:
--Boccaccio, The Decameron, Introduction.
--Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Pardoner’s Tale.”
Week Two and Three
Close Contact in Enlightenment England: Our Cities, Our Bodies, and Our Minds.
Guiding Questions: How does the natural spread of disease complicate or complement models of
divine retribution? What makes an individual individuated? How can we understand the relationship
between individuality and interpersonal exchange? How is modern geography and social
organization figured in relation to contagion?
Readings:
--Shakespeare, William. Othello
--Langley, Eric. Plagued by Kindness: Contagious Sympathy in Shakespearean Drama
--Defoe, Daniel. Journal of a Plague Year (excerpts)
--Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments (excerpts)
Part Two: Turn of the 19th-century
Weeks Four, Five: Imperial Beginnings, Imperial Infection
Guiding Questions: How do these texts imagine the relationship between colonial enterprise and
disease? Do they express doubt about the colonial project?
Readings:
--Shelley, Mary. The Last Man.
--Bewell, Alan. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. (Excerpts)
Week Six, Seven: National Health-The Political Work of Disease at Home
*Due: Short Paper #1 (3-4pp)
Guiding Questions: How can disease be used as a metaphor for the political state of a nation? How
can disease divide and/or unite a nation? What is the relationship between sickness and social
class? How do these texts figure England as infected by a parasite within its own body?
Readings:
--Wordsworth, William. “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge.”
--Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Cholera Cured Before Hand.”
--Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist
Part Three: Turn of the 20th Century
*Library Trip—Learning to Identify and Use Scholarly Sources
Weeks Eight, Nine, Ten: At Home and Abroad-Contagion and the Fear of Reverse Colonization
Guiding Question: What are the unexpected consequences of imperial expansion? What is the
relationship between sexuality and contagion?
Readings:
Stoker, Bram. Dracula.
Arata, Steven: “The Occidental Tourist”
Library visit!
Week Eleven, Twelve: Contagious Desire and the Cosmopolitan City-Exoticized Sexuality
Guiding Questions: How is disease gendered? How can the romantic desire become viral?
Readings:
--Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delights. (Excerpts)
--Haggard, Rider. She.
Part Four: Turn of the 21st Century
Short Paper #2 Due (4-5pp)
Weeks Thirteen, Fourteen
Guiding Questions: How does medical knowledge affect narratives of disease? How are the issues
inherent in contemporary globalization different and similar to those produced in imperial England?
What is the power of identifying the origin of disease?
Readings:
--Wald, Pricilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (excerpts)
--Preston, Richard. The Hot Zone.
--Soderberg, Steven. Contagion.
Week Fifteen
Viral Videos—Communities and the Contemporary Spread of Information
Guiding Questions: How is contagion necessary for community formation? How has the spread of
information changed through new media? How can we imagine the relationship between politics
and technology?
Readings:
--Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. (Excerpts)
--Berry, Chris. Electronic Elsewheres. (Excerpts)
--Contemporary Cultural Products: Youtube Videos, Social Networking
*Final Paper Due (7-8pp)-TBA