FYS 51 Reimagining Family
We will read several contemporary American and British novels that offer alternative family structures – families of choice, families where all adults take care of all children (The Color Purple), families formed by the happenstances of war (The English Patient), families where motherless children are parented by a young relative (Saint Maybe). The class will ask you to think creatively about different ways of organizing family life and different strategies for handling the ethical issues that arise when several people live together. In keeping with the experimental nature of the families we will study, some of the novels employ experimental writing styles (Alison Bechdel writes a graphic novel, Fun Home, Alice Walker writes a novel, The Color Purple, written partly in African American vernacular). But most of the novels are in straightforward realist prose. These works give readers immediate access to their humor and their complex human relations. Supplementing the novels, we will read short articles about the history of the family, including the economic origins of the family (Engels) and the origins of the exchange of women and the taboo on incest (Gayle Rubin). And we will look at how concepts of romantic love and companionate marriage gradually developed from kinship-based family structures.