Department of English

Topic: Who Gets to be Human?

Who gets to be human? How has the claim to be human been used to define and exclude others of different races, genders and sexualities, and even nonhumans?  What is it about the nonhuman that horrifies us? Can we define cultures, such as the different periods of British literature, by the way they defined their monsters, or the things and beings they excluded? What do medieval and Renaissance literatures have to reveal to us about our own ideas of who/what “gets” to be human and how that category becomes a way of excluding others?  We will consider what aspect of ourselves get represented in the excluded monster, and why.

• A&H
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