ADVANCED ACADEMIC ENGLISH 2

概要

What exactly is romantic love? Is love a kind of madness or sickness? Is it a form of blindness? Why does love feel so real and yet ultimately illusory? Is love the union of two lovers, which gives birth to a shared identity? Is this shared identity real in the same way we experience our own individual identity? What happens to one’s own autonomy and individuality in this union of identities? Is love best understood as a story? Or as an emotional state most exquisitely expressed through poetry? Is love something bound and shaped by one’s social class, status, or culture? Or is it most fundamentally understood as the product of biochemical processes and the biological imperative to reproduce? Such perplexing questions! What is it about love that seduces us and yet resists our very best efforts to say what it is? In this course, we will appeal to poets, novelists, philosophers and other thinkers to assist us in answering these most perplexing questions of love and life.

目標

The primary aim of this course is to engage students’ intellectual curiosity on a universal topic. We do so by reading challenging texts from multiple disciplines, including the humanities, social science, and natural science. Students will be expected to form views on assigned class readings (as well as extracurricular sources through independent initiative) and express these views in class verbally and in writing.

授業外の学習

Students will be expected to fully read assigned texts and form well-considered written responses on a weekly basis. Further, students will be given opportunities to present verbally on their responses as well, and so they will be expected to prepare and be ready to give their views when asked in class.

所要時間: At least 190 minutes per class.