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This blog was completed as part of a semester-long project by the students of "English 26.02: Weird Science: Experiments of Fact and Fiction" at Duke University in Spring 2007.

Course Description:
AMERICA, as a self-governing democracy of and for the people, was originally idealized and indeed marketed to “the people” themselves as a kind of grand political experiment. In this course, we will trace the idea of the “American experiment” through multiple trajectories--political, religious, social, and otherwise--but mostly focusing on how regimes and practices of scientific experimentation have informed and shaped U.S. literature and culture. From hair-raising tales of fatal birthmark-removal procedures to machines that turn African Americans white, from old-school Frankensteinian transformations to more recent genetic accidents in the lab, we will explore bizarre, unethical—and sometimes downright perverse—fictions of scientific experimentation in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century literature and visual culture. Readings will help us think more generally about the status of “experiment,” science’s relationship to the state, and literary investments in imagining/(re)writing weird science. Assignments for the course will ask you to begin to do some of the work of grounding often fantastical-sounding narratives in their various historical contexts; in so doing, we will attempt to outline a factual history of American experimentation that will, at times, seem stranger than fiction.

A complete syllabus can be found on the course website.

Questions or comments may be addressed to the course instructor at bmr6@duke.edu