High Spirits: Reading and Writing About Spiritual Experience

High Spirits: Reading and Writing About Spiritual Experience is a crosslisted Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies/Interdisciplinary Arts class taught by Deborah Gorlin.

Course Description
The age-old search for the Divine, the Sacred, the Great Spirit, the Source, the Goddess, the Ancestors, among other names, has been the subject of countless literary texts, whether it is the Buddhist-inspired poetry of the Beats, the gothic Catholicism of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, the visions of Black Elk, the confessions of Augustine. In this analytical and creative writing course we'll examine varieties of spiritual experience as they are represented in both past and present literature, including poetry, fiction, memoir, and biography. You'll be asked to do all sorts of writing pertinent to the topic: close readings and literary analyses of texts, personal essays and memoirs based on your own spiritual encounters, and out- in-the-field non-fiction pieces.

Learning Goals

 * Expressive
 * Multi-Cultural
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing