ENGL 379 – Representing Nonhumans

ENGL 379 is the course I took to satisfy the Global Leadership/Aesthetic Perspective of the Civitae Core Curriculum. The course was taught by Dr. Thomas Nez. When I registered for this class, I did not know what I was getting myself into, but I saw that it met a perspective that I needed, and the class was recommended to me by a friend. In the class, we looked at various pieces of literature and analyzed the text in terms of philosophical concepts. My favorite unit/concept of the course was when we looked at social contradictions and ontological ambiguities through Phillip Dick’s, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. I have always enjoyed reading science fiction, and looking at the text through a more analytical lens than I usually do, made me think more about why the author chose a certain word, or why the author chose to portray certain characters in the way that they did.

ENGL 379 has changed the way I will read novels, especially science fiction, in the future. By focusing on the nonhuman elements of a text, there was a clear focus on what we should be analyzing when looking at the literature. The concepts taught in the class were challenging, but once we practiced looking for clues that would signify the concepts, it got much easier. The two papers that we wrote during the course also served as great tools to challenge us to develop arguments based on the concepts we learned. Our first paper was about how ontological ambiguities give rise to social contradictions in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and through the course of drafting that paper, I had to go back multiple times in order to formulate my arguments effectively and find evidence to support my claims.

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The artifact that I chose for this class is a revised copy of our first essay in ENGL 379. One of my favorite things about this class is the “workflow” of writing our essays. Dr. Nez’s procedure for turning in papers is very free-flowing and permits for a very open writing style. Once we have a draft of a paper ready, we would meet with Dr. Nez one on one and talk about our draft and ways that we could improve the paper. The artifact above is the result of one such meeting with Dr. Nez. the highlighted lines are those that I changed and resubmitted for the revision. I think one of the biggest takeaways from this class is that I have completely changed my writing style. Prior to this class, I would outline and develop a clear plan for every paper that I wrote, which has its benefits. But Dr. Nez preached a more free-flowing style, where you just start writing and getting your thoughts on a page, and later on is where you organize and perfect the word choice and grammar of the paper. I found that this method worked much better for me and allowed me to articulate arguments and thoughts much more effectively than I had in the past.