Higher education allows young men and women the opportunity to explore hundreds of different career paths through unique courses, programs, and degrees.
The University of Missouri is taking unique to a whole new level with a course this semester on sibling incest. Seriously.
The class, “Sibling Incest in Theory and Literature” apparently will examine the complicated and rather difficult topic of sibling relations. After receiving interesting feedback, the course’s professor Stefali Engelstein defends the subject matter and goal of the course:
My class, “Sibling Incest in Theory and Literature” is a humanities course. In the humanities, we investigate the relationships between ideas that arise in the history of human thought in order to better understand complex issues, past and present. There are many different disciplines that have asked where incest taboos come from and how they function. Some examples are anthropology, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology, and we will look at how each approaches the question. Erotically charged sibling relationships also appear in many narratives, including myths and legends, but also European literature particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The course asks why there was an increase in incest narratives in this period. Literature provides a way for people to pose questions about how society evaluates different kinds of relationships and identities, so our readings focus on discovering what social, political, and scientific issues are connected to this topic and why.
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