Fys: Living and Writing across Cultures
3.0
creditsAverage Course Rating
Many of us live across multiple cultures, but those real, visceral experiences often go unrecognized or even suppressed in our everyday lives. Whether stemming from migration, relocation, family backgrounds, or even the global ubiquity of social media and pop culture content, more people are living cross-cultural lives than ever before. And yet, the existing vocabularies appear quite inadequate to grasp the nuances, challenges, and complexities of those lives. Going beyond overused notions like cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and cultural hybridity, we explore in this First-Year Seminar what it means for us as individuals to live and exist across multiple cultures and consider the roles reading and writing play in making sense of such lives. What happens to us when we cross a cultural boundary? How have cross-cultural experiences been written about and conceptualized in different civilizations and periods of human history? How do economic and political circumstances influence those experiences? How do the transformation of information and media technologies shape them? We examine literary, philosophical, ethnographic, cinematic, and other artistic works from different civilizations and historical periods that engage with cross-cultural lives. Based on discussions of those texts, students are invited to explore their own cross-cultural experiences through writing and other creative media.
No Course Evaluations found