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 interdisciplinary seminar and two writing seminars. The First-Year Interdisciplinary 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.
First-Year Writing Seminars and First-Year Reseach Seminars 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. Usually, the writing seminar begins with personal and descriptive essays and proceeds to focus on the critical essay. A significant portion of the research seminar is devoted to working on a long research paper, with attention to formulating key questions, choosing and evaluating sources, developing a thesis, structuring the argument as a whole, and revising and polishing the final paper.
Examples of courses include
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Imagining Identity and Difference
Nina Cornyetz
Generally, people identify themselves as individuals, and yet also as belonging to a certain community. We will ask, how do we define and understand ourselves as individuals? What is a “subject”? How are communities constructed and imagined? What does it mean to “belong” to a nation, an ethnic group, or a culture? Conversely, how do we imagine outsiders, foreigners, outcasts, that is, the “Other”? We will combine philosophic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and historical treatments of subjectivity, race, community, and ethnicity, to address these questions. Readings will include: Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, Marx’s “The Fetishism of the Commodity,” Said's Orientalism, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Look.”
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: The Social Construction of Reality
Stephen Duncombe
How do we know what is real and what is illusion? From the philosophy of the ancient Greeks to contemporary movies such as The Matrix, this question has haunted humankind. This course begins with the premise that "the real" is something we construct. We create reality through the stories we tell and the stories told to us. Since the most powerful storytellers today are the commercial media, we will pay special attention to the role of entertainment, advertising, and public relations in constructing our reality. Texts for the course include works by Plato, René Descartes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Maxine Hong Kingston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herman Melville, Walter Lippmann, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, Jonathan Lear and John Berger.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Aesthetics on Trial
Christopher Trogan
While cultures often like to see themselves reflected in the arts, groundbreaking art is frequently accompanied by controversy. In literature, Nabokov was faced with charges of obscenity. In the visual arts, controversies surrounding "public art" have helped to determine what art can be and do from a social perspective. In photography, people like Mapplethorpe have challenged the role of the visual arts as innocent representation. In film, Reifenstahl blurred the line between aesthetics and politics by directing for Hitler. Through critical writing we will investigate such questions as: How do we define art? What constitutes obscenity in the arts? Is art inherently political? Three shorter essays and a longer literary-critical paper are required. Texts may include selections from Danto, Lin, Nabokov, Plato, and Riefenstahl.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Writers on Writing
June Foley
George Orwell named four reasons for writing: "egoism," "aesthetic enthusiasm," "historical impulse" and "political purpose." Franz Kafka stressed the emotional power of words in describing writing as "an ax for the frozen sea within us." Mario Vargas Llosa claimed the secret reason for the literary vocation is the questioning of real life. Gustave Flaubert stressed the limitations of language, as "a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the while we long to move the stars to pity." In this course, students write critical essays that are inspired by writing about writing. Our texts, exemplary works in various genres, include essays by Orwell, Joan Didion and Carlos Fuentes; selections from the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Witold Gombrowicz; Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Lhosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist and selected letters by Sor Juana de la Cruz; Lillian Ross’s New Yorker "profile" of Ernest Hemingway; short stories about the writing life by E.L. Doctorow, Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore; and James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Student writing will culminate in a literary-critical essay.
First-Year Research Seminar: 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.
First-Year Research Seminar: 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.
