Professor: Barbara Mossberg
4 credits
This is a course of scholarly feats and feasts of surprise and discovery of our best and least known and loved stories that inform our lives. Since ancient times, we know what we know because of stories we are told. Stories across media in the forms of literature, speeches, films, plays and musicals, art, music, video games, board games, jokes, sayings, toys, holidays, recipes, streets, parks, even amusement park rides. Stories across disciplines, informing laws, theories, equations, political movements, inventions. Where do these “stories” come from? Sometimes the story (or stories) behind the story may be as interesting as the story itself. What can we learn from the backstory? T.S. Eliot wrote, “We had the experience, but missed the meaning” (Four Quartets). The backstory is where we spy the meaning in the experience. In this research course we will be scholar sleuths. Knowing what was behind artistic, political, or scientific developments can deepen our understanding of creativity itself, and the impact of popular culture, education, global politics, laws, and news, in what, why, and how something is created that is meaningful to us. We will be detectives on cold and hot trails tracing a story through history, biographies, journalism, archives of journals and letters, and other sources. How did the story (finally) get to us? We begin with fanning out to research representative backstories, choosing among iconic and improbable laws, theorems, bestsellers, movements, inventions, and texts ranging from Goodnight Moon, Wuthering Heights, LesMisérables, Evita, Wicked, The Color Purple, Beauty and the Beast, The Divine Comedy, Fiddler on the Roof, Roxanne/Cyrano de Bergerac, Barbie, The Horse’s Mouth, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Winnie the Pooh, Peter Rabbit, My Family and Other Animals, The Great Gatsby, The Little Prince, Moby Dick, 1984, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s UIysses, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Everett’s James, John Muir’s Stickeen, The C&O Canal, Yosemite National Park, The Underground Railroad, The Voyage of the Beagle, Log of the Sea of Cortez, to the golden album sent to the stars—and other examples. With new investigative skills, you will research a story important to you and present it to our class as “the story of a story.” Join a focused research forensics class that results in an annotated bibliography and smoking research paper—maybe thesis—and/or screenplay!