CHID 270 A: Special Topics

This course addresses the cultural significance of water with the aim of understanding how water’s meaning is changing as we become more conscious of risks posed by pollution, scarcity/overabundance (as a function of political economies and climate), infrastructure, and other factors. We get at this emergent meaning of water by interpreting a variety of documents and objects—literature (e.g., Masters of the Dew), cinema (e.g., Even the Rain), landscape architecture (from the fountains of Versailles to the Brightwater sewage treatment plant in Woodinville, WA). While no ten-week course could pretend to give a comprehensive and global view of a problem as complex as our relation to water, we will study novels, essays, films, fountains, art installations, and other cultural archives from Western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, Asia, the Caribbean, and North and South America with a view to understanding the differential distribution of the water crisis and the variety of aesthetic, cultural, and political responses to it.