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The Class Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Theme Course on "Madness in Literature" Branimir M. Rieger Origin of Theme Courses at Lander University When Lander University revised its general education curriculum in the early 1980s, the concept of a theme or idea course devised for sophomore literature was part of the overhaul. In addition to the already entrenched, traditional survey courses in English, American and World Literature, it was decided that a fourth option, a theme course, would be a welcome alternative for both students and teachers. This fourth course could also be used to satisfy the sophomore literature requirement, and would include a more non-traditional approach. It would give teachers a new and exciting idea course to prepare and teach. However, the course was still to contain a mixture of English, American and non-Western literature from different centuries. This was to prevent someone from teaching a course like "Anti-Serbian Metaphors in the Modern Croatian NoveL" So, while the new course was an alternative course and contained a non-traditional approach to a survey course in literature, it nevertheless had boundaries and limitations and was meant to expose the student to important concepts from different countries and ages. The course was called "Literature and Experience" and was described in the catalog as follows: "A thematic approach is used in exploring the continuity and development of human experience as reflected in significant works in both English and American literature and in other world literature in translation. Such various themes may be explored as the nature of man as expressed in literature, man's relationship to the natural world and his changing understanding of that relationship, or man's search for understanding of the supernaturaL" While faculty offered sporadic courses on the nature of the hero, man and nature, and man and animals, I was the only one who was "crazy" enough to offer the madness course on a regular basis. 221 222 Dionysus in Literature My First Theme Course: "The Rebel in Literature" My teaching background and my disposition for experimentation made me a perfect candidate to construct our first theme course. As I searched for ideas, I recalled that I had recently enjoyed teaching Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Kafka's The Metamorphosis in an honors course in fiction. Both works had appeared in the text I used, Nine Modern Classics, edited by Barnett, Berman and Burto. I had also recently come across Albert Camus's essay, "What is a Rebel?" Therefore, the combination of Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Camus gave me the core for my first theme course, "The Rebel in Literature." Rebels in literature were worthy of study because rebellion is a recurring response to the human condition and to authoritarianism. Using Camus's essay as a core essay, the course focused on the nature of rebellion, and the writer's portrait of a specific character, a rebel, who acted against conventional rules in his society. Rebellion is a theme or idea that is not peculiar to one culture or age. Camus's definition that a rebel is a man who says no was particularly useful in discussing rebels from different ages. While there is an anthology called The Rebel: His Movement and His Motives, edited by John Cole and F.L. Schepman (prentice Hall, 1971), I did not use it because I concentrated on whole works in paperback form. The books I used in the "rebel" course were: Sophocles' Antigone, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Camus's The Stranger, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Ellison's Invisible Man, Orwell's 1984, Plath's The Bell Jar, and Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July. The course, "The Rebel in Literature," showed that there were individuals outside of mainstream society who were forced to rebel or take unconventional actions by choice, necessity or force. These "underground men" or rebels were used by thei r writers to show how the dominant values of a culture were irreconcilable with the characters' personal lives, political or moral convictions, and social consciousness. Some of the values these characters rebelled against were social hierarchy, the sanctity of personal property, gender rules, fervent nationalism, racial oppression, absolute morality, indiscriminating respect for the law and the wisdom of the status quo. Time for Change I taught this course a number of times with some success and the course seemed to be popular with students. I even changed the [18.191.135...

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