Offered Spring of 2027 (Semester 2)

Drawing on Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience” (1849) and Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) – and with special attention to Thoreau’s famous line “Let your life be the counterfriction to stop the machine” — this course asks students to examine central questions such as: What causes human beings to conform, how do acts of nonconformity affect the individuals who do not conform, and what is the impact of nonconformity on an individual’s communities? Touchstone texts may include pairings of canonical plays with re-imagined or otherwise related dramatic works, such as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain; Sophocles’s Antigone and the Theater of War’s production, Antigone in Ferguson, a dramatic work responding to the death of Michael Brown; and Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. In addition to formal essays, students will propose creative writing projects, such as “I Prefer Not To” Resistance Manifestos or Mock Trials Against Nonconformity.