First Year Program
All students who enter Gallatin as first-year students (and all transfer students who enter with fewer than 32 credits) are required to take three courses that constitute the First-Year Program: a first-year seminar and two writing seminars. The First-Year Seminars are intended to introduce students to the goals, methods, and philosophy of university education and to the interdisciplinary, individualized approach of the Gallatin School.
Writing Seminars I and II comprise a two-semester sequence intended to help students develop their writing skills and to prepare them for the kinds of writing they will be doing in their other courses. Writing Seminar I usually begins with narrative or descriptive essays and culminates in a literary critical paper; a significant portion of Writing Seminar II is devoted to working on a long critical and/or research paper.
Examples of courses include
FYS: Social Criticism
George Shulman
It has been said that the practice of social criticism is as old as human society: some men and women always stand against the dominant conventions and ruling ideas of their world. This course examines the function of social criticism as well as examples of individual critics to explore how and why criticism happens at all, the forms it can be given, and its worldly effects. What motivates some to criticize and rebel when so many comply or obey? Or are we all critics to some degree? By what alternative authority do critics justify their dissent? Do they also question the authority they invoke? By what rhetorical and theatrical strategies do critics try to persuade their audiences to think and act differently? What differences arise from the different forms of expression—fiction, poetry, film, drama, manifestos, etc.—that critics use? We read Socrates, Jeremiah, and Jesus, More’s Utopia, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Melville’s short story “Bartleby, The Scrivener,” and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. We conclude by analyzing the cultural forms of punk and hip-hop.
FYS: Migration and American Culture
Michael Dinwiddie
This course will examine both the immigrant and migrant experiences of varied racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as immigrants from Europe, Asia, the Caribbean and migrants from the American South redefined the ethnic makeup of the United States. What changes in identity and in political, social and economic status did they experience? What were the newcomers’ expectations of their new environment, and what reality did they encounter? Our study will look at the coping mechanisms, the forging of intra-tribal identities, the sociology of survival, and the concept of ‘otherness.’ Students will be encouraged to explore New York City’s unique archives, museums, and neighborhoods in relation to the immigrant and migrant experiences. Readings include Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets, Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, Hidier’s Born Confused, Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, and Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis.
WS I: The Urban Muse
Lisa Goldfarb
New York City has entranced and inspired writers all through its history. Almost every writer who has passed through this city—essayists, historians, social thinkers, fiction writers, poets—has taken some time to reflect upon and record her or his observations and experiences. In this course, the city will become a muse that will inspire our own essay writing. We will draw from the literature of the city, and also from trips into different neighborhoods, to generate essay topics. Readings may include works by Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jacob Riis, Djuna Barnes, Jane Jacobs, and James Baldwin, among others.
WS I: The Journey
Judith Greenberg
What is it about the idea of the journey that intrigues us? Whether to a foreign land, into the underworld or as a search within, the journey plays a central role in formative stories and many religions. Quite literally, physical travel and trips away from the familiar, whether to an unknown city, country or cultural environment, can create some of the greatest opportunities for self-awareness and change. It can capture the sense of displacement or exile felt by people perpetually in a state of movement. We are also a species that understands itself through journeys of the mind, inner travels to unknown, hidden or unconscious terrains within. This course will examine how people write a variety of journeys and how that process of writing is itself a journey. Texts may include: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, Virginia Woolf, Orlando, Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder and Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, as well as a class “journey” in Manhattan.
WS II: Making the Modern
Patricia Lennox
Our postmodern digital age is the heir of the Modern, that encompassing title given to the art movement during the first half of the twentieth century. During those decades, framed by two world wars, revolution reached from the arts to politics to every aspect of our society. Poets, writers, artists, musicians, and architects invented new rules for their work. Freud gave dreams a vocabulary and the movies put them on the screen. There was a new mobility and a new sense of individual isolation. In this course we will consider a few of these rebellions and use them as springboards for our own writing. Students will write several short essays, culminating in a research paper on an aspect of the Modern in an area of their own choice. Our readings will be chosen for their brief but highly charged commentaries and will range from poets, such as Wilfred Owen and T. S. Eliot, to critics of the arts and architecture to social and political commentators.
WS II: The Lure of Beauty
Christopher Trogan
Why is beauty so powerful? What attracts us to someone or something beautiful? In this course we will begin with the most fundamental question of all: What is beauty? To explore this question, we will contemplate how artists, philosophers, psychologists, and writers have defined this term. We will then consider the fate of concepts of beauty in the twentieth century leading to the present. Of critical importance is the question of how beauty fits into our own lives and whether beauty is an objective feature of things or a function of race, gender, and class. Students will compose essays and work on a related research project. Texts will include works by Plato, Kant, Arthur Danto, and Nancy Etcoff.