Ekaterina Pirozhenko (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 66N 4 credits (Fall Term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 CANVAS SITE
We will play with the word “play.” What do we play (an instrument? a game?), who do we play (an enemy? a friend?), where do we play (at home, on stage, in the park?) What makes us winners and losers? This course will explore various approaches to games and humans at play. We will try to understand why and how people play; why we have fun while playing; why we prefer some games to others. Interdisciplinary in nature, the course will offer readings from areas of transactional analysis, psychology, mathematics, literary and cultural studies. By reading, analyzing, and playing with Souvik Mukherjee, Johan Huizinga, Miguel Sicart, Sigmund Freud, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Julie Wosk, Stefan Zweig, Eric Berne, and Yoko Tawada, we will make connections between games, play, national identity, gender, race, class, and intelligence, and will construct arguments about various scholarly and fictional written and cinematic texts.