INQ-110 | My New Identity

Full Title: My New Identity

Topic Description:

“I contain multitudes”: thus proclaimed Walt Whitman, American poet of identity and possibilities. As a beginning college student, sibling, daughter or son, friend, teammate, sometime employee, do you feel—at least sometimes—as if you also “contain multitudes”? In this course, we will study the ways human identity has been depicted in a selection of fiction and films. How flexible is identity in fiction? How dependent is the range of possibilities for identity on the society in which one lives? What strains on human psychology and human morality are evinced when one tries to “contain multitudes”? What needs do these new identities fulfill? What advantages do they permit? What costs do they entail? Students will reflect on, and write about, issues of identity in their own lives as these connect to fiction and films studied in the course.

Counts as Global? No

Topic Approved: February 2012