3.0

credits

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Beetles, fleas, bees, ants, ticks, butterflies: as the earth’s most abundant animals, insects affect our lives in countless ways. In this seminar, we will explore the diverse world of insects and other arthropods and analyze their appearance in philosophy, literature, and the sciences. Reading our way from John Donne’s “The Flea” and Robert Hooke’s “Micrographia” to Mandeville’s “The Fable of the Bees,” Uexküll’s biosemiotics, and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” we will ask how concepts and stories of insects reflect and shape the ways we imagine our ecological milieus. We will look more closely at how entomological imaginaries evolved over time and pursue lines of inquiry that will shed new light on human interactions with the environment, politics, and cultural diversity. This course covers a wide range of sources from different European languages (all made available in English translations) and is writing intensive.