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This course combines a practical class on self-defense in the academic world with the topic of magic and the unknown in postmodern society.

Designed to teach a number of the skills required at the beginning of a college education, E110 serves as the training grounds for the first-year student’s two most critical abilities:  reading and writing at a college level.  By reading the argumentation of peers, you will learn by example—exploring your own writing skills by applying practical techniques for generating an argument.  Library research procedures, focusing on the efficient location of primary and secondary sources, will refresh your abilities in researching books, journals, and databases.  Your goal is improved critical thinking skills and the ability to clearly communicate ideas.

The central question for our class is to define how we of the twenty-first century think about magic.  While on the surface our culture appears immersed in technology and scientific positivism, the uncanny and unknown still play an important part in how we chose to define ourselves.

From psychic readings to psychic surgery, from David Copperfield’s stadium shows to David Blaine’s street magic, from Crossing Over to the Pet Psychic, from Harry Houdini to Harry Potter, magic and the unknown play a significant part in our postmodern consciousness.  This class will examine the meaning of mystery and spectacle in today’s culture by focusing on literary and visual portrayals of magic from the nineteenth-century to the present.  Rather than focusing just on occult phenomena, the class will investigate how fictions of or about magic function in past and present time periods.  What does “magic” mean to those who experience it, or how does magic go about creating meaning?
 
 

• Elizabeth Gaskell. Cranford.  Ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson.  Intro. Charlotte Mitchell.  New York:  Oxford UP, 1998.   ISBN 0-192-81531-8

• Max Beerbohm.  Zuleika Dobson.  New York:  Random House, Modern Library, 1998.  ISBN 0-375-75248-X
  NB:  Book is delayed, but should be available by the time we need to read it.

• J. R. R. Tolkien.  The Hobbit.  New York:  Ballantine Books, 1996.  ISBN 0-345-33968-1

• J. K. Rowling.  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  New York:  Scholastic, 1999.  ISBN 0-439-06487-2

• A University of Delaware E-mail account.

• A supply of 8½ x 11 binder paper.