Interdisciplinary Seminars
Interdisciplinary seminars are liberal arts courses that engage a variety of themes or issues in the history of ideas. Generally, these courses focus on classic texts, great books, and significant works in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. These courses are relatively small (25 students max.) and they emphasize class discussion and thoughtful writing assignments.
Examples of courses include:
Modern American Narratives
K20.1130, George Shulman
Culture is shaped by the stories that people tell themselves about themselves, and “narratives”—at once collective and personal—are ways of understanding the world and forms of power. In every culture, too, some stories are dominant and determine who is entitled to speak, and what is defined as normal, realistic, or true, setting the very terms by which we engage in self-reflection and action. No wonder narratives are crucial in politics! Focusing on America since World War II, we will ask: How are fundamental aspects of American society—especially white supremacy, but also mass immigration, industrial capitalism, consumer culture, and the cold war—represented in stories? How is the very idea of an “American” identity created through narrative? How is civil rights activism, anti-war protest, counter-cultural revolt, feminism (and backlash against them) justified by stories about a special American nationhood? How should we now narrate the meaning of 9/11? Texts include: essays by C. Wright Mills; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; Norman Mailer, Why Are We In Vietnam?; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Barati Mukherjee, Jasmine; the movies Thelma and Louise and Lonestar; Tony Kushner, Angels in America; and Philip Roth, Human Stain.
Culture as Communication
K20.1193, Vasu Varadhan
This course examines the concept of culture through its forms of communication. The shift from orality to literacy and on to electronic processing has important consequences for the social, political, and economic structures within a culture. If we take as axiomatic that every culture wishes to preserve itself through its forms of communication, we then need to ask ourselves which forms of communication are best suited for this purpose. What happens to cultures when traditional forms of communication are forced to compete with the newer technologies? What do we mean by “knowledge” in the age of information? The impact of written narrative on orality will be discussed as well as the changes brought about by the invention of the printing press. We will examine the development of electronic media including the newer technologies such as the Internet and analyze their effects on individual and cultural levels. Readings may include Plato’s Phaedrus, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and Lessig’s The Future of Ideas.
Digital Revolution: History of Media III
K20.1042 SOC, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Stephen Duncombe
We are in the midst of a revolution: the Digital Revolution. Computers permeate nearly every aspect of our life, yet we understand relatively little about how they work, their historical development, and their impact on society and our consciousness. In this course we will explore this ever changing and rapidly expanding terrain, paying special attention to how computers and the Internet are transforming how we understand identity and community, our sense of place, and notions of authenticity. In addition, we will explore the conflict between free and open communication and information commerce, addressing the greater issue of who benefits from this digital revolution. Readings will include cyberpunk novels, historical texts, and contemporary case studies, as well as theoretical works by Plato, Lewis Mumford, Walter Benjamin, Sherry Turkle, Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway. On-line communication will be an integral component of the course.
Sound and Sense
K20.1071 HUM, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Lisa Goldfarb
In this course we study the correspondence between the world of sound and the world of words. While the analogy between poetry and music reaches back to the origins of poetry, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries poets, philosophers, writers of fiction, and composers breathed new life into the relationship between these arts. We look back to some early philosophical writings on the relations between poetry and music, and then examine how symbolist and modernist thinkers considered these arts. Our inquiry will concentrate on why there was such a rebirth of interest on the part of philosophers, poets, writers, and musicians in the expressive possibilities born of the intermingling of these art forms. Readings may include Plato’s Phaedrus, Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry and On Music, poems of Mallarmé, Valéry, Langston Hughes, Stevens, as well as Forster’s A Room with a View and Stravinsky’s The Poetics of Music.