| Title: | To Hell and Back |
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| Course Section Number: | FRT-101-12 |
| Department: | Freshman Tutorial |
| Description: | To Hell and Back: Underworld Journeys in World Myth and Fairy Tale This tutorial explores the recurring human obsession with darkness, transformation, and return. Drawing on texts from ancient Greece, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, nineteenth-century Germany, modern Brazil, and contemporary Japan, students explore how many cultures have imagined an underworld and how their heroes navigate it. 365体育博彩_365体育app-彩票*官网 read Philip Pullman's retelling of the Brothers Grimm alongside Ovid's Orpheus, the Mayan Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh, and Neil Gaiman's Coraline, and view Marcel Camus's Orfeu Negro and Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Dr. Rogers began his career at Wabash College in the last century, before many of you were even born. After graduating from the University of Colorado, he completed his graduate studies in Spanish literature at the University of Kansas, where he became a lifelong fan of Ecuadorian literature and the Jayhawks. Like Orpheus descending into the underworld, he has made his own kind of journey into darkness and back: he has walked the Camino de Santiago several times, a pilgrimage that, like so many of the narratives in this course, is organized around the logic of descent, endurance, and transformation. His scholarly work on Latin American literature has taken him deep into traditions that this tutorial places at its center. As a specialist in Ecuadorian literature and the broader Latin American canon, he brings firsthand expertise to the Popol Vuh and its extraordinary Hero Twins, whose descent into Xibalba remains one of the most viscerally imagined underworlds in any literary tradition. His more recent research on the connections between Asian and Latin American Studies gives him a particular investment in the cross-cultural conversation this course stages between Miyazaki's Spirited Away and the Mesoamerican, European, and Brazilian texts we read alongside it. The question that drives his scholarship (how cultures imagine the border between the living and the dead, the known and the unknown) is, in many ways, the question that drives this tutorial. A diehard Wabash sports fan, he looks forward to the baseball season and to holding office hours at Goodrich Ballpark during home games. He promises that discussions of Orpheus, Coraline, and the underworld are entirely appropriate for a baseball diamond. |
| Credits: | 1.00 |
| Start Date: | August 26, 2026 |
| End Date: | December 19, 2026 |
| Meeting Information: |
08/27/2026-12/17/2026 Lecture Tuesday, Thursday 09:45AM - 11:00AM, Detchon, Room 111
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| Faculty: | Rogers, Dan |
Course Status
| Section Name/Title | Status | Dept. | Capacity |
Enrolled/ Available/ Waitlist |
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