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Description: |
What is a witch? Culturally, most people associate the term with pointed hats, black cats, and broomsticks. Historically, it refers to a threat to the social order, an enemy of the state, a confederate with the devil. Many scholars see the figure as a figment invented to attack those (usually women) perceived as defying community norms or infringing on official turf. Complicating these accounts, witch identity has been subsequently claimed by those who see in the term forgotten histories of female power, and better attitudes toward nature, gender, mind, and being. Through readings in drama, fiction, criticism, and history, this course introduces and explores this complex of perspectives on the figure of the witch. We will spend the bulk of the course in the early modern period (focusing in particular on the witch-hunting crazes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). But we will also read ancient and current writing on this subject. Authors will include Euripides, Shakespeare, Condé, and many others.
Fulfills upper level writing requirement and diversity requirement.
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