This class is an introduction to writing about science–including nature, medicine, and technology–for general readers. In our reading and writing we explore the craft of making scientific concepts, and the work of scientists, accessible to the public through news articles and essays. The chief work of the class is students' writing. As part of our ...
La poésie de la nature se caractérise par une sur-utilisation de la deixis. Mais cette utilisation n’est pas homogène dans le temps. La comparaison des textes de deux auteurs, l’un associé à la Beat Generation, l’autre contemporain de la mouvance Language fait apparaître des différences significatives dans l’utilisation de la deixis ; mais ces diff...
This essay argues that the works of the nineteenth-century American philosopher, poet, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) have moulded Australian place writings of the last one hundred years. Beginning with the foundational work into Australian literature done by the American critics C. Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), A. Grove Day (1904-19...
In confrontations with animals, particularly in circumstances involving death, human knowledge suddenly appears limited. Other forms of knowledge have to be taken into account. The case of Oscar, the cat who predicts patients' death in a Rhode Island hospital, indicates that animals know things that are concealed from us. Our knowledge is limited, ...
The new American nature writing is positioned at the borders drawn between the natural and the social, the human and the non-human, the civilized and the wild. In some contemporary works, the attempt to cross these borders has the perverse effect of reproducing them, or rather of revealing how the boundary lines move with the itinerant subject. Oth...
Did Ben Franklin really fly that kite? What are the ethical dimensions of the creation of chimeras—and what should the public know in order to take part in the conversation about them? Is the science of nutrition really science? How did the technology of birth control end up in the delivery system that we know as "the pill"? Is it possible to time ...
