Previous Honors Seminars
FALL 2012
Honors Ithaca Seminars (4-credit)
ICSM-HNR 11000-01 Teenage Wasteland: Dystopic Narratives and Alienated Youth (3a)
Instructor: Bruce Henderson
TuTh 4:00-5:15, W 12:00-12:50
CRN: 21476
Utopias are literary visions of a happy future. Dystopias imagine harder and problematic futures, and in doing so speak powerfully about our culture’s fears and anxieties. This seminar will encounter a great variety of literature that features youth in a dystopian future. Some of the readings will be classics (Clockwork Oranges, Lord of the Flies) others will be more popular and contemporary. We’ll also look at a variety of critical tools that can cast light on these works. The ultimate goal will be to see literature as a means of struggling with our unknown futures. This seminar will be linked with Professor Kittridge’s Lethal Girls and Lady Knights seminar
ICSM-HNR 11000-02, 03 (2 sections) Why Are We Here?: Student Culture and the Problem of College (1)
Instructor: Elizabeth Bleicher
Section 02 TuTh 9:25-10:40, W 12:00-12:50
Section 03 TuTh 2:35-3:50, W 12:00-12:50
CRN: 02, 21477
03, 21478
What does it mean to be educated? Are you here to get a job or to get a life? To answer these questions, we will explore competing rationales behind collegiate study and engage in advanced literary and cultural analyses. We will study historical precedents, scholarly and journalistic articles, social critiques, and fictional collegians. We will conduct primary research into youth culture and attitudes toward education, develop rhetorical skills by sharing our findings, and write extensively across a variety of genres. Individually, you will articulate your personal philosophy of education and develop your own personal goals. Collaboratively, we will analyze the extent to which our readings and writings fit with our evolving understanding of the goals for collegiate study
ICSM-HNR 11000-04 Lethal Girls and Lady Knights: Fighting Females in Fantasy and Science Fiction (3a)
Instructor: Katherine Kittridge
TuTh 1:10-2:35, W 12:00-12:50
CRN: 22888
This course looks at the history of the depiction of strong women in science fiction and fantasy literature. The course will place fictional texts, comics, films and television shows alongside contemporary feminist criticism, reading, for instance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer through the lens ofJudith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Students will read and view a wide range of materials, such as Hunger Games, Wonder Woman comics, and more serious literature by Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Ursula LeGuin as well as criticism by Mary Wollstonecraft, Andrea Dworkin, Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous and Judith Butler. This seminar will be linked with Professor Henderson’s Teenage Wasteland seminar.
ICSM-HNR 11800-01 Language and Power in Classical Athens (3a, h, g)
Instructor: David Flanagan
MWF 1:00-1:50, F 12:00-12:50
CRN: 21479
This honors seminar will combine the study of history, political philosophy, and rhetorical theory and practice. It will explore canonical texts, such as Sophocles’ Antigone and Plato’s Apology, that have generated Western traditions of literature and political philosophy and secondary sources such as Irving F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. This course will be writing-intensive and will satisfy requirements for a 100-level writing course equivalent to WRTG 10600 or WRTG 10800 (Academic Writing I).
ICSM-HNR 11800-02 Facing Nature (3a)
Instructor Marlene Kobre
TuTh 2:35-3:50, W 12:00-12:50
CRN: 21480
In this seminar we consider our human relationship with the natural world. Discussion focuses on the complex, often contradictory, ways Americans have addressed questions about nature from the days of exploration and colonization to the present. Students read works by American writers who have struggled to articulate the meaning of nature and its relation to the human experience. This course will be writing-intensive and will satisfy departmental and school requirements for a 100-level writing course equivalent to WRTG 10600 or WRTG 10800 (Academic Writing I).
Honors Special Topics Seminars (1-Credit)
IISP 21002-01 Honors Scholar: 10,000 Saints
Instructor: Eleanor Henderson
T 5:25-6:15pm (Block 2)
CRN: 23264
This seminar will be taught by Eleanor Henderson, the author of the acclaimed novel 10,000 Saints. 10,000 Saints is a powerful historical novel set in the 1980s/90s that describes the intertwined lives of alienated young people seeking purpose and family in the New York City straight-edge punk music scene. 10,000 Saints is also the Ithaca College First Year “read” for this academic year.
IISP 22000-01 Honors Design Lab: What is Fair? Designing a Federal System of Taxation
Instructor: Thomas Pfaff
M 3:00-3:50pm (Blocks 1 and 2)
CRN: 23265
This is not only a new seminar but a new kind of seminar. Design labs, of which Honors hopes to offer a number every year, don’t just examine and critique problems, they seek to offer solutions to them. In this seminar participants will orient themselves to their values in regards to social equity. They will then draw on a great variety of resources from across the campus in order to give themselves the tools they would need to create a solution. Finally, they would attempt to create a system that embodies their values (which will inevitably conflict!) in a practical way. In this way passion, ideology, creativity, and prudence come together under the notion of “design.” This will be the first of many design labs, addressing a wide range of matters, that will be scheduled in Honors.
IISP 23000-01 Why Are We Here?: Education Reform & Film
Instructor: Elizabeth Bleicher
W 5:25-6:15pm (Blocks 1 and 2)
CRN: 23266
This is not only a new seminar but a new kind of seminar. This will be a student-conducted seminar, created and facilitated by alumni of Professor Bleicher’s legendary Why Are We Here? Honors Ithaca Seminar. The seminar will continue the discussions begun Why Are We Here? Through the medium of film. The student facilitators will arrange for the viewing of a number of feature and documentary films – everything from The Social Network and The Breakfast Clubto Race to Nowhere - all of which address issues in American education. These will be followed by discussions of the films and how they might contribute to educational reform. It is intended that student-facilitated seminars will become a common feature of Honors in the future.
Intermediate Seminars (3-Credits)
BIOL 22020-01 Music, Math, and Biology (2a)
Instructor: Ian Woods
TR 10:50am-12:05pm
CRN: 23259
What is it about music that can elicit powerful emotion, visceral pleasure, and a deep sense of concord? Music is rooted in our biology, and stems from mathematical principles and the laws of physics. This seminar will explore the interface between music and the physical and biological sciences.
CMST 22000-01 American Eloquence (3a, h)
Instructor: Robert Sullivan
MWF 3:00-3:50pm
CRN: 23260
This seminar will encounter systematically the masterpieces of American rhetoric, focusing in particular on great speeches. We will encounter our history's greatest, most famous, and most infamous speeches, reading, listening to, and viewing speeches from every historical era and situation, spoken by men and women of every conceivable circumstance. The study of rhetorical discourse forces us to confront several important matters, including the historical exigency towards which such discourse is aimed, the character and position of the speaker or writer, and the rhetorical culture of the era. Accordingly, we will investigate speeches not merely as examples of aesthetic excellence but as historical artifacts. Speech texts, considered in this way, are voices in historically situated arguments, and by encountering these texts we re-engage important, and often unresolved, conflicts central to the American experience. This course then is not merely a survey of masterpieces but an entry into the American (and historical) spirit of controversia.
CNPH 21800-01 Digital Cultures (3b)
Instructor: Patricia Zimmermann
T 6:00-8:30pm
CRN: 22812
This course explores international contemporary cybercultures and digital theories across technologies, forms, platforms, genres, industries, theories, debates, policies and constituencies. It will traverse a wide range of interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, including political economy, aesthetics, social theory, music theory, and new media theory, and will investigate international digital visual cultures. In this exploration, the course will take up the history, economics, theory, and criticism of digitality across commercial, non-profit and artistic modalities.
ENGL 20002-01 Staging History (3a, 3b, h)
Instructor: Claire Gleitman
MWF 11:00-11:50am
CRN: 23261
In this course, we will examine numerous 20th century dramas that fit (with varying degrees of neatness) within the general category we will call “the history play.” It is worth admitting from the start that this category is a slippery one, and we will devote a fair bit of energy to defining and redefining its borders. The problem is surely connected to the question of how one defines “history,” a concept that is itself not static. It was not until the 19th century that historians came to regard themselves as scientists engaged in a particular discipline detached from other humanist enterprises, one dedicated to the rigorous uncovering of “facts.” And of course, the very instant that modern history was born, philosophers and artists set about rebelling against its certainty, denying the possibility that the past could be recaptured “as it really happened.”
ENGL 20004-01 American Breakdown (3a, h)
Instructor: Hugh Egan
MWF 10:00-10:50am
CRN: 23559
In this seminar, we will investigate some of America’s literature of madness and psychological instability, beginning with a Puritan sermon and proceeding more or less chronologically through the 20th century. American literature is often viewed in terms of its self-reliant and “sane” male narrators and characters (including Benjamin Franklin and the founding fathers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and others), but there is another, equally powerful and counterbalancing literary strain that records narratives of breakdown, psychosis, and suicidal descent. These two literary traditions are not mutually exclusive, and indeed might best be seen as weirdly co-dependent. A number of discrete themes will emerge in the course of our reading, including: the importance of the Puritan tradition to America’s volatile self-image; how “madness” in America is inflected in terms of race and gender; how the process of going mad is recorded in language; and how psychological interpretations of literature unearth buried assumptions about self and nation. Authors will include Jonathan Edwards, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ken Kesey, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, and Susanna Kaysen. There will be three required essays and a final project.
HIST 26900-01 America through Travelers’ Eyes: Europeans Encounter the United States (1, h)
Instructor: Pearl Ponce
MWF 9:00-9:50am
CRN: 23263
In the first century after independence, America served as a beacon of liberty and innovation. As a result, many astute European observers came to the United States to investigate the results of our revolution. What did democracy look like in practice? How did a country where the people were paramount function? How well did Americans adhere to the principles articulated during our struggle for independence? From 1815 to 1860, hundreds of travelers published accounts of their travels. They came not just to answer these questions, but to learn as well. America in the 19thcentury was in the midst of an exciting revolution both democratic, in terms of the expansion of suffrage, and societal, from social reform to religious awakenings. This course will look why Europeans were drawn to the Unites States and how we can understand our own history by learning how others see us. Through an investigation of visitors’ reports from Charles Dickens, Alexis Toqueville, Michel Chevalier, Fanny Trollope, Harriet Martineau, and Fanny Kemble, we will draw the contours of this exciting American era.
JOUR 20200-01 Theory and Praxis of Graphic Non-Fiction Narrative (3a pending)
Instructor: Todd Schack
MW 2:00-3:15pm
CRN: 23606
Over the past two decades, a new form of journalism has arisen: the use of the graphic novel medium as a viable genre for non-fiction reportage and narrative. First seen in Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, this genre has grown beyond a focus on memoir and historical narrative to include works of a high journalistic standard, best represented by the work of Joe Sacco. Writing in the introduction to Sacco’s Palestine, Edward Said describes the power of the genre: “In ways that I still find fascinating to decode, comics in their relentless foregrounding…seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be said, perhaps what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and re-shaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures” (ii). This is certainly the promise of this new form of ‘comics journalism,’ and when executed properly, this genre is able to, in the words of another social theorist: “…expand and enrich the literature of journalism…comics journalists achieve layers of meaning inaccessible to prose journalism alone because of comics’ graphic language that blends words and images” (Versaci p. 111). It is precisely these questions that we will be dealing with: how does the blending of words and images achieve these ‘layers of meaning inaccessible to prose journalism,’ and how are they able to ‘defy the ordinary processes of thought’ that conventional journalism so often fails to do?
POLT 22003-01 The Wire (1)
Instructor: Thomas Shevory
TR 10:50am-12:05pm
CRN: 20612
The course involves critical analysis of the first season (13 episodes) of the acclaimed HBO series, The Wire. The series focuses on Baltimore's drug trade and the police department that attempts to control it. The series has been labled as the best television program ever produced. It raises a set of interconnected, interdisciplinary issues, related not just to the drug trade and the "war on drugs," but also to poverty, crime, violence, legal rights, bureaucracy, free markets, social and economic class, and race, and gender equality. Such issues will be considered in the context of the program, but will also be explored through a variety of supplemental readings. Course includes screenings and discussion. Critical papers (4), readings, and class participation.
PSYC 23701-01 Sex, Gender, & Desire (1)
Instructor: Carla Golden
TR 1:10-2:25pm
CRN: 23267
The question posed by this seminar is one that many people never bother to ask because they assume they know. But answering the question “what is gender?” and considering the implications of living in the world as gendered beings, is not as straightforward as it might seem. In this seminar, we will explore gender and its relation to biological sex and to sexual desire. We will consider whether there are only two genders, and look at the functions and consequences of adherence to binary conceptualizations of sex and gender. We will look at how other cultures conceptualize gender, as well as how gender has been constructed across historical time. Are there only two sexes? Is sex itself a social construction? How is sexual desire produced and constrained by culture? What does sexual desire have to do with biological sex and with gender? What does resistance to sex and gender categorization look like? What is the contemporary transgender movement about? What are the implications of thinking about genders and sexualities as fluid rather than fixed? In sum, this seminar will examine gender and its multiple expressions, and consider the implications for individuals, relationships, and culture.
TVR 29000-01 Media and Change (3a)
Instructor: Wenmouth Williams
TR 10:50am-12: 05pm
CRN: 23605
The social media have transformed the process of social change and what can be changed not only in the United States, but also around the world. Key to this transformation is the tremendous growth of cell phones and other mobile media. The growth of the social media (broadly defined as any content that can be obtained or sent via a “smart phone”) in the United States over the past five years has been astronomic. Accordingly, this seminar will investigate “new media” as agents of social and cultural change in everything from the Internest to the ‘Arab Spring.’
WRTG 27001-01 2012 (3a)
Instructor: Ron Denson
TuTh 10:50-12:05
CRN: 23562
This seminar examines the phenomenon of Americans’ fascination with what is purported to be the Mayan prediction of the end of the current creation on Dec. 21, 2012, the date that marks the end of their “great” calendar cycle of 5,126 years. The flurry of books, articles, and big-budget Hollywood films, the proliferation of sites devoted to the “Y12” question on the internet, the bemused curiosity of even self-professedly “rational” people, all attest to the interest that the end of the Mayan Long Count has generated in recent years. The seminar addresses the various kinds of significance—and nonsignificance—attached to the event by orthodox and dissenting scholars, scientific popularizers, religious leaders, and activists intent on hastening the collapse of the American empire and ushering in a new age. It pursues this inquiry in a historical context that takes into account Christian millenarian movements of the last 2000 years as well as more recent technological fantasies such as the Y2K meltdown.
WRTG 27002-01 Women & Fairy Tales (3a)
Instructor: Katharyn Machan
MWF 2:00-2:50
CRN: 23563
Steady reading and discussion/workshop will inform scholarly and creative writing, culminating in a final portfolio and a 20-minute oral presentation. Each student will be encouraged to enter into the study of fairy tales from his or her own career perspective and to contribute openly to classmates’ understanding of the material from diverse points of view.
This course combines lecture, discussion, and workshop. Letter grades based on reading (quizzes), four papers, one formal oral presentation, and attentive attendance/participation.
WRTG 27005-01 Slam It! (3a)
Instructor: Mary Beth O’Connor
MW 4:00-5:15pm
CRN: 23268
In this seminar, we’ll investigate the contemporary spoken word phenomenon and place it within the longstanding tradition of oral presentation, which extends back to well before the era of Classical Antiquity. Along the way, we’ll consider the Beat movement, the emergence and continuing vitality of the Nuyorican Café, spoken word at the Dodge Festival, and more. We will write and perform our own poems in slam and literary deathmatch fashion, as well as study the poems and performances of slam masters and mistresses like Sekou Sundiata, Saul Williams, Rives and Def Jam, Andrea Gibson, Rachel McKibbens, Alix Olson, Taylor Mali, Beau Sia. and Ithaca College’s own alumna Lenelle Moise. We’ll invite IC’s performance troupe Spit That to our class to perform and discuss spoken word. In addition to writing and performing poems, each student will choose an aspect of the movement/genre to research and present. Other requirements include analysis and response essays, as well as a research essay based on the presentation.
Senior Seminar (3-Credits)
IISP 40000-01 Human Nature & Culture
Instructor: Carla Golden
MW 4:00-5:15pm
CRN: 20404
Can human nature be defined, and what does culture have to do with who we are? This course is designed to offer an extended look at the relationships between human nature and human culture. We will read a series of engaging and highly provocative books, roughly one each week, to lay the basis for active exchange and debate. The books are by diverse authors, and are not strictly “academic” texts; they will include Anne Fadiman (1997) The spirit catches you and you fall down; Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003) Random Family: Love, drugs, trouble, and coming of age in the Bronx; Frans de Waal (2005) Our inner ape: A leading primatologist explains why we are who we are; Judith Rich Harris (2006) No two alike: Human nature and human individuality; and Ishmeal Beah (2007) A long way gone: Memoirs of a boy soldier.
SPRING 2012
1-Credit Special Topics Seminars
BLOCK I
IISP 21000-08 C.P. Snow Seminar: Evolution & Creation
CRN: 41746
Instructor: Jack Rossen
W 5:25-7:00pm
For nearly 50 years Ithaca College has been the site of the C.P. Snow speakers series. C.P. Snow was a brilliant British scientist who presciently warned that the modern world was splitting into two separate intellectual cultures, the humanistic and the scientific, that were increasingly incapable of communicating with each other. For the last several years Honors has mounted 1-credit seminars that address the careers and ideas of the C.P. Snow speakers, major intellectuals who attempt to bridge the sciences and the humanities. In spring 2012 Professor Eugenie Scott, a prominent physical anthropologist and author, will be the C.P. Snow Speaker at Ithaca College. Since 1987 she has been executive director of the National Center for Science Education. She is a leading critic of “young earth creationism” and “intelligent design” theories of species differentiation, and particularly the teaching of those theories in American public schools. Professor Jack Rossen (Anthropology) will lead this Block I investigation of creationism and evolution in American intellectual life and public policy. When Professor Scott comes to IC as this year's C. P. Snow speaker, she will lead the seminar.
BLOCK II
IISP 21001-09 The Ring Cycle
CRN: 41747
Instructor: Brian Demaris
W 6:00-8:00pm
Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen) is one of the great monuments of Western European culture. Dauntingly complex and emotionally draining, The Ring has excercised a powerful thrall over audiences ever since its first performance in 1876. The cycle is a work of extraordinary scale – the four operas that comprise it have a total performance time of nearly 15 hours. Professor Brian DeMaris (Music), opera conductor at Ithaca College, will lead this seminar into the world of The Ring. The seminar will focus on experiencing this masterpiece, by listening to recordings, viewing filmed performances, and by attending live performances. The New York Metropolitan Opera is performing the Ring this spring and this seminar will attend a performance of Das Rheingold at Lincoln Center.
Intermediate Seminars (3-Credits)
IISP 15000-01 Cultural Encounter with Ithaca College
CRN: 42525
Instructor: James Pfrehm
MWF 1:00-1:50pm
Open only to First-year students in the Honors Program, this seminar will immerse its participants in the amazing array of cultural events being offered at Ithaca College during the spring semester. The seminar will meet in a classroom to contextualize and discuss the events that they will attend. The heart of the seminar, however, will take place in attending the events themselves, theatrical productions, musical performances, poetry readings, film viewings, art openings, and anything and everything that happens this spring. Participants should be aware that they will need to attend a number of events during the evening hours.
BIOL 22040-01 Evolution of Evolution: Society and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (2a, NS)
CRN: 43124
Instructor: Leann Kanda
MWF 10:00-10:50am
We will address both the theory of evolution by natural selection as an explanation of the natural world and as a concept that has shaped and been shaped by society. Students will learn about what the theory entails, and a brief history of the social reactions to the concept, including the long-standing conflict with western religion. We will explore how our understanding of evolution has, and has not, itself evolved from Darwin's formulations. Finally, the application of evolutionary theory in modern society will be considered, from its relevance to racism to its role in the internet.
Requirements and Grading: Essays, midterm and final papers, and participation.
ENGL 20005-01 Dickens & London CRN: 43368
Instructor: Elizabeth Bleicher
TR 2:35-3:50pm 3a, h, HU
As part of Ithaca College’s celebration of Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday, we will be reading works that both celebrated and created the city of London. Dickens wrote in a style that is at times quite cinematic, and directors from D.W. Griffith to David Lean have cited Dickens as the source for the vision of London that has been handed down to contemporary audiences. In addition to reading shorter works from Sketches by Boz, we will tackle two novels in their entirety. Class members will vote on reading Nicholas Nickelby, Great Expectations, Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend as the two anchor texts, which will be supplemented with excerpts from the other two. Secondary readings include film and literary criticism, in addition to cultural studies of London itself, including analyses of the intersections between literature and industrialization, poverty and education. Co-curricular programming for the Dickens Bicentenary celebration offers ample volunteer opportunities for course members to gain academic and professional experience. Course members also receive admissions priority for the Honors London trip in May.
FREN 22300-01 Explosion in a Shingle Factory: Experiments in French Modernism (3b, h, HU)
CRN: 43141
Instructor: Mark Hall
TR 2:35-3:50pm
Writing in a review of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, New York Times critic Julian Street describes Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase as resembling nothing so much as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” Street’s derisive quip captures the uneasy bemusement that so many felt in response to Duchamp’s splintered canvas, but perhaps more importantly, it also alludes to the real risk involved in “modern art.” As a self-consciously modern expression, Duchamp’s painting challenges conventional ways of seeing. For some, the result is a moving study of color and form. For others, it is an experiment gone comically awry. The work of art, in this view, blows up in the artist’s face. Wherever one’s sympathies may lie, the Modern is too significant an aesthetic moment not to be taken seriously. In this course, we will adopt a perspective similar to that of those New Yorkers who almost a century ago ventured to the Armory Show, as the exhibition has come to be known, hoping to discover what was so modern about the art being produced in France. Our perspective, widened to consider the verbal as well as the visual, will be further enriched with selected readings in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary theory and will be guided by three broad but bold questions: What does it mean to remember? What does it mean to dream? and What does it mean to be alive? In the end, however, we will be seeking answers to the question that haunts the reader or viewer of any work of art of any moment or medium: Who am I?
In addition to attending to a great variety of artistic materials we will read Nadja by André Breton, Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras, Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust and selections from Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Sigmund Freud’s case studies, essays, and lectures on psychoanalysis, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s collection of essays “For a New Novel.” All materials will be read in English translations.
GERM 22201-01 Imagining Hitler (3a, 3b)
Instructor: Michael Richardson
MWF 12:00-12:50
This course will examine American representations of Hitler and Nazism, from Chaplin‘s The Great Dictator to Don DeLillo‘s White Noise. In American culture, Hitler – the person and the concept – has generally stood in for terrifying and absolute evil. Yet this seems to be contradicted by the multitude of humorous representations that disempower the Nazis by turning them into evil, yet bumbling and inept clowns. This class will examine (primarily) American representations of Hitler and the Nazis and ask the following questions: What is the function of Hitler in these representations? Does it ultimately facilitate or prevent our deeper examination of the Holocaust? What sorts of identifications are at work (or not at work) in these representations? What sort of limits are there (or must there be) on representations of Hitler? What determines those limits: good taste, morality, politics, something else? Topics will include: the use of humor in representations of Hitler and the Holocaust, representations of Hitler that imagine his survival or victory, sexualized representations of Hitler and the Nazis, and the use and misuse of Hitler in contemporary public discourse.
HLTH 20400 The Architecture of Health (1)
CRN: 43464
Instructor: Stewart Auyash
TR 9:25-10:50am
This course studies the meanings and ideas that we call health and how we built and developed them. Combining history, anthropology, politics, and literary analysis with health sciences, students will embark on intellectual journey concerning all things “health.” Health will be considered as an architectonic concept: learning about the development of the ways we know and learn about health informs how we live, think, communicate, and act on it.
MATH 26502-01 Oil, Energy, and the Future of Society (2a, NS)
CRN: 43218
Instructor: Thomas Pfaff
MWF 3:00-3:50pm
This course will examine why past societies have collapsed and scientifically examine our current energy consumption, with special attention to oil, and how this consumption may impact our future. We will be using Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, to provide scientific criterion to analyze past societies and to provide some historic perspective. At the same time we will analyze our current energy consumptions with a focus on peak oil to try and decide if we are currently choosing to fail or succeed. Students will gain a scientific perspective of past societies and gain data analysis skills to understand our current energy situation.
MATH 26503-01 The Nature of Mathematics (2a)
CRN: 43219
Instructor: Aaron Weinberg
MWF 3:00-3:50pm
The goal of this course is to reflect on and find your own answer to the question: “What is Mathematics?” We will, as a class, investigate the nature of mathematics by experiencing, reading about, and discussing several aspects of mathematical thinking and learning. We will use ideas from philosophy, psychology, history, sociology, and biology to explore and gain insight into math as it has developed historically, as it is taught in schools, and as it is used in society.
PHIL 27500-01 The Rules of Rules (1, HU)
CRN: 43305
Instructor: Craig Duncan
TR 4:00-5:15pm
Rules are pervasive in both our internal and external lives. Internally, rules of grammar and word usage govern the “inner voice” of our thought, while rules of logic govern (one hopes!) our reasoning and formation of beliefs. Externally, numerous sets of rules lay claim to our allegiance – for example, the rules of morality and the rules encoded in the law. (Indeed, one might even think of the laws of nature as a type of rule, a type that can never be broken!) We even voluntarily submit to rules, by getting married, say, or taking a job, or playing a sport or game. Given the ubiquitous presence of rules in life, it is natural that they should be an object of study, by philosophers, historians, social scientists, and others. In this course I propose to examine some of these studies using an interdisciplinary approach, in order to lead students to appreciate the importance of the rules we live under and subject ourselves to. More specifically, I hope to lead students to understand better the nature of rules and rule-based reasoning, to appreciate the benefits rules bring and the costs they impose, and to explore some of the ethical issues created by the “rule of rules.”
PHYS 23200-01 Quantum Physics and Relativity in Society (2a)
CRN: 43238
Instructor: Matthew Sullivan
MWF 9:00-9:50am
Special relativity and quantum mechanics are the backbone of modern physics and the basis for one-third of our current economy, yet are poorly understood and often misinterpreted by the general public. This course will examine the mathematical and physical basis for special relativity and quantum mechanics such that all students in the course have a basic understanding of the phenomena and how to use them. We will then explore how society views these phenomena: in news reports, fiction, and pseudo-scientific and neo-religious texts. However, even the mathematically and physically correct application of the theories lead to real (and unresolved) scientific and philosophic quandaries, which we will also explore in this course.
SPCM 23100-01 Troubling Masculinities: Queering/Crippling the Novel in Performance (3b)
CRN: 43417
Instructor: Bruce Henderson
TR 1:10-2:25pm
This seminar will explore what have come to be called “queer” and “crip” theory approaches to texts (literary, mediated, and performative), focusing on a set of novels (and their adaptations into film, opera, theatre, and other media) spanning the 19th century in the United States and England, preceding the articulation of either the “homosexual” or the “disabled” as distinct categories of identity and moving to the present day. We will especially interested in considering how contemporary theories shed light on the intersectionalities between various axes of identity—and how such theories may be used to explore both nonnormative positions of masculinity and ability in texts not explicitly about homosexuality or disability per se. We will begin by reading a few brief novellas/short stories that precede the late Victorian medicalization of both sexuality and ability, then proceed to read a few central theoretical texts, and survey a set of 20th century works that move in and out of various ways of juxtaposing “queerness” and “cripness.” The larger theoretical premise from which we will be working is that such categories of identity (and their intersections) are, as Judith Butler would put, it always performative—always in a process of becoming and revising, and just when they seem to be stabilized into an (apparently) “naturalized” state of being, social, cultural, and historical events and movements come along and force us to rethink and reperform these categories. Students will read many texts, either write papers or create performances based on the texts.
SPCM 23101-01 I, Too/We Two: Performing Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (3b)
Instructor: Bruce Henderson
TR 5:25-6:40pm
This is a performance-centered seminar in the major works of the two most prominent writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaisssance: Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. We will take a comparative approach, looking at the parallel careers of these two writers, considering their work in such genres as memoir, novel, and drama, as well as their singular accomplishments (Hurston as folklorist, Hughes as poet), In addition to primary texts by Hurston and Hughes, students will read other works of the time, historical studies, and theoretical texts. Students will create and present performances drawn from both writers, as well as write critical and analytical papers.
WRTG 27000-01 Creativity & Madness: An Investigation (3a)
CRN: 43112
Instructor: Mary Beth O’Connor
MWF 10:00-10:50am
Much has been written on the apparent relationship between creativity and madness at least as far back as the Socratic Dialogue Ion, in which Plato describes the inspired artist as inhabiting a state of “divine madness.” Taking up C.G. Jung’s warnings against reductionism, specifically his admonition that we remember that “a work of art is not a disease,” we will problematize such terms as “madness,” “mental illness,” and “creativity,” and then proceed to investigate psychoanalytic theories including the following: that the artist creates in order to heal her or himself, that the mood disturbances present in a high percentage of artists and writers may be related to cognitive processes associated with certain emotional states, and even that there is no real link between creativity and madness. We’ll also view and read the works of visual artists and writers identified as having suffered from “madness,” as well as accounts by these artists and writers themselves regarding their motivations for creating art, their use of suffering in their work, and their self-destructive tendencies. The course is designed as an exploration into an issue fraught with a long history of philosophical assumptions, scientific theories, and personal narratives, as well as a rich body of artistic work. It is a necessarily interdisciplinary investigation, with important implications especially for those who wish to pursue art themselves, as well as for those interested in aesthetics, psychology, literature, and visual art.
WRTG 27001-01 2012: The End of Time? (3a)
CRN: 43113
Instructor: Ron Denson
MW 4:00-5:15pm
This seminar examines the phenomenon of Americans’ fascination with what is purported to be the Mayan prediction of the end of the current creation on Dec. 21, 2012, the date that marks the end of their “great” calendar cycle of 5,126 years. The flurry of books, articles, and big-budget Hollywood films, the proliferation of sites devoted to the “Y12” question on the internet, the bemused curiosity of even self-professedly “rational” people, all attest to the interest that the end of the Mayan Long Count has generated in recent years. The seminar addresses the various kinds of significance—and nonsignificance—attached to the event by orthodox and dissenting scholars, scientific popularizers, religious leaders, and activists intent on hastening the collapse of the American empire and ushering in a new age. It pursues this inquiry in a historical context that takes into account Christian millenarian movements of the last 2000 years as well as more recent technological fantasies such as the Y2K meltdown.
WRTG 27003-01 Highway 61 Revisited (3b, h, HU)
CRN: 42527
Instructor: David Flanagan
MWF 1:00-1:50pm
In this seminar, we will study the historical development of the quintessential American musical genre, the blues, and critically investigate scholarly reception and interpretation of that music. We will also examine how mainstream majority culture has reacted to the culture of African-Americans in the Deep South during the early 20th century. The overarching theme for the seminar will be the intersection of music, commerce, and technology. The music is an expression of individuals and their communities. Like all popular music, it is also a commercial product offered for sale to consumers. And like all popular music, the blues and its commercial dissemination are in turn influenced by technological innovation. Since this music continues to be a active area of musicological research, the seminar will critically interrogate still-controversial research issues for this music.
WRTG 27004-01 The Science and Philosophy of Sex and Love (3a)
CRN: 43114
Instructor: Cory Brown
MW 5:25-6:40pm
A critical assessment of conventional perspectives of love and sex. We will consider more progressive perspectives from the fields of history, anthropology, evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, and literature.
Senior Seminar
IISP 40000-01 Global Bodies
CRN: 41748
Instructor: Zillah Eisenstein
W 3:00-5:30pm
This course will ask students to think or re-think the static/NATURALIZED ways they think about sexes, races and genders. At the core will be attempts to de-naturalize and de-normalize the constructions of these categories to see what is known and unknown; what is historical construction and what is biological necessity; whether there is such a thing as biology or sexual and/or racial difference to `begin with’—so-to-speak. The framework of the course is to open up the newest possibilities for questioning and knowing why and what and how we see/view notions of biology, culture, politics, history, etc. In the course we travel the globe, examine the `08 election, think about the biological body and then revamp it, etc… We will read a book a week and the books cover a wide interdisciplinary spectrum. There are two required analytic papers which are based on these course readings.
