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Harvard University Offers Course On Crap In French Literature
If you’ve ever wondered why there is so much crap in French literature, Harvard University might have just the class for you. Starting this spring, they are offering a graduate class on excrement.
Annabel Kim, a French literature professor at Harvard has put together the course focused on the poetics of fecal matter for graduate students.
Entitled, “Cacaphonies: Toward an Excremental Poetics”, the class, which will be taught in English, will explore the subject of fecal matter in French texts from the 20th and 21st centuries.
According to the course description: “This course proposes to take this fecal presence seriously and to attend to the things it has to tell us…”
RT reports: Aiming to take “fecal presence seriously” in scatological French literature, the class will tackle “the gendering of constipation as a feminine condition.” It will also “theorize an excremental poetics where excretion provides a model for the process of writing,” among other scholarly objectives.
“If literature is excrement, then the canon is a chamber pot,” the course description states. Ultimately, “rather than take feces as a site of disgust,” the graduate-level class “takes it as a site of creation.”
The Ivy League school is America’s oldest university and charges students without financial aid $43,280 per year for tuition, according to its website.
The course, which is worth 4 credits, will be taught by Annabel Kim, an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard.
