First-Year Program

All courses in the First-Year Program are restricted to Gallatin first-year students only.

K10.0023 FYS: Social Criticism
M 12:30-3:15 George Shulman FYS, 4 CR

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.

K10.0025 FYS: Creativity
W 12:30-3:15 Don White FYS, 4 CR

This course is an introduction to the act of creation, of bringing into the world new existence in literature, art, music, philosophy, mathematics, psychology, and education. What is the source of creativity for a writer, a painter, a composer, or a scientist? The goal of the course is to provide a symposium where all who aspire to work in various fields may stimulate their individual creativity. We will examine explanations of creativity by some of the world’s great geniuses who have sought to reveal how they began and completed their creative work—the questions they raised, the knowledge they gained, and the techniques they mastered. We will experience in the class some outstanding examples of the art and music of these great creators, tour monumental New York City landmarks exemplifying technological advances, and visit an art museum. Readings may include Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, da Vinci’s Notebooks, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Freud’s An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, as well as selected writings by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Amy Lowell, Mozart, Van Gogh, Einstein, Jung, and others.

K10.0030 FYS: Power, Ritual, and Society
MW 4:55-6:10 Alejandro Cañeque FYS, 4 CR

This course explores the nature of power in society by examining the complex relation that exists between politics and ritual. For any society, in any age, the study of politics ultimately comes down to one elemental question: how are people persuaded to acquiesce in a polity where the distribution of power is manifestly unequal, as it invariably is? This course aims at answering this fundamental question by grounding the study of power and resistance in two premises: that each society has its own mythology detailing its origins and sanctifying its norms, ritual practices being a major means for propagating these political myths; and that rites can represent one of the most potent expressions of resistance to power of the powerless. Readings will include Aristotle, Seneca, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Lope de Vega, Rousseau, Marx, D. H. Lawrence, Clifford Geertz, and Michel Foucault.

K10.0031 FYS: Imagining Identity and Difference
TR 4:55-6:10 Nina Cornyetz FYS, 4 CR

Generally, people identify themselves as belonging to a certain community. We will ask, how are these communities constructed and imagined? How are images of community disseminated through popular culture, media, film, literature, and politics? Exploring various representations of community in Japan, China, and the United States, we will consider what people mean when they talk about "belonging" to a nation, an ethnic group, a culture. Conversely, how do we imagine outsiders, foreigners, outcasts, that is, the “Other”? Combining anthropological, psychoanalytic, and historical treatments of race, community, and ethnicity, we will question where an idea of community comes from, and ultimately whose interests, nationally and culturally, it serves. Readings may include Benedict Anderson, Freud, Marx, Edward Said.

K10.0032 FYS: The Social Construction of Reality
TR 11:00-12:15 Stephen Duncombe FYS, 4 CR

How do we know what is real and what is illusion? From the philosophy of the Ancient Greeks to contemporary movies like 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 storyteller today is 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, Rene Descartes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Maxine Hong Kingston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herman Melville, Walter Lippmann, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and John Berger.

K10.0034 FYS: Making Sense:The Discovery and Invention of Meaning
MW 2:00-3:15 Karen Hornick FYS, 4 CR

Whether defined as the search for meaning, translation, or creation, all “interpretation” attempts to “make sense.” In this class we will apply to a number of texts the interpretative methods and questions used in a number of disciplines, including literary criticism, political science, anthropology, and the performing arts. We’ll encounter questions such as these: How did ancient people interpret their world through myth and ritual? When, in interpreting, is it best to employ the rational, linear process (like that used by Sherlock Holmes to solve crimes) and when the nonlinear, more imaginative method of a dream unraveled, such as that of Sigmund Freud? What role does interpretation play in everyday life? What do we do if it turns out we live in a world in which things are open to multiple interpretations, if one thing can make sense in a variety of ways? Readings may include texts by Sophocles, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud, and Kafka.

K10.0037 FYS: Law and Order
MW 11:00-12:15 Angela Dillard FYS, 4 CR

Law and order are generally regarded as the twin pillars supporting and structuring society and, indeed, civilization. This seminar considers the various ways in which concepts of law (from God’s covenant with the Hebrew people to the construction of the U. S. Constitution) and ideas of order (including religious and secular authority, socialization, education and policing) have been formulated and reformulated. Throughout, we will also explore questions having to do with our obligation to obey the law and the conditions under which civil disobedience might be justified; the relationship between freedom, liberty, and order as well as how some concepts of order presuppose and rely on patterns of exclusion, discrimination and suppression. Possible readings include Plato’s Crito, Exodus, The Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution, and the writings of Thoreau, King, and Foucault.

K10.0039 FYS: Globalization
T 2:00-4:45 Asale Angel-Ajani FYS, 4 CR

“Globalization” is the leitmotif of our times. While globalization is often understood as a contemporary process, we will explore the historical trajectory of events that are global in scope: the formation of Western, Eastern and pre-modern empires, migrations, and slave trading. We will query what is and is not new about globalization. Rather than simply focus on questions of capitalist production and colonial expansion, we will explore how art, culture, and scholarship traverse borders. Finally, we will survey the varying points of view on globalization put forth by scholars, activists, artists and policy makers in an attempt to understand how local communities are impacted by and help shape the global order. Ethical and methodological questions play a central role in our deliberations throughout the course, with the ultimate aim of bringing our information and understandings to bear on practical action toward understanding global processes today. Readings may include Memmi, The Colonizer and The Colonized; Cervantes, Don Quixote; Said, Orientalism; and Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents.

K10.0041 FYS: Learning from Experience
TR 3:30-4:45 David Moore FYS, 4 CR

If “experience is the best teacher,” why do we need schools? If Plato thinks experience can’t be trusted as a source of knowledge, why does Dewey rely on it? In this class, we grapple with debates in philosophy, psychology and social theory over what and how people learn from experience: How do context and activity shape thinking and learning? How is knowledge defined, distributed and used in different situations? Is experience-based knowledge more valuable than academic theory, or less? We examine learning processes in families, communities and workplaces – including our own – and maybe even in schools, developing tools of inquiry and analysis; and we explore representations of learning from experience in novels and films. Readings may include: Plato, Meno; Locke On Human Understanding; Dewey, Experience and Education; Rogoff and Lave, Everyday Cognition; Steinbeck, The Red Pony.

K10.0042 FYS: Corporations and Democracy
MW 3:30-4:45 Kim Phillips-Fein FYS, 4 CR

For many political and economic thinkers, the free market and the private economy are the fundamental building blocks of democratic political systems. Yet activist movements of the past twenty years have been increasingly critical of the ways that private corporations and the inequality of wealth negatively affect our democracy. This first-year seminar will interrogate the relationship between corporations and democracy, exploring the relationship between economy and politics in the United States and possibly other countries. What are corporations, and what are the philosophical, economic, historical and political justifications for their existence? What are the essential characteristics of American democracy, and how does our political system cope-or fail to-with large concentrations of private power and wealth? Possible readings may include Henry Adams, Upton Sinclair, C. Wright Mills, Milton Friedman and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

K10.0301 WS I: The Urban Muse
TR 11:00-12:15 Lisa Goldfarb WSI, 4 CR

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.

K10.0302 WS I: The Journey
TR 9:30-10:45 Judith Greenberg WSI, 4 CR

Because we move from birth through maturity to death, the journey has imprinted itself on human consciousness as an essential theme in myth, literature, travel writing, psychology and autobiography. In this course we will read, discuss and write about the journey as a longing to escape, a need for adventure, a process of immigration or forced displacement, and finally as the desire to expand one’s understanding of our world by discovering it either literally or through actual travel or imaginatively through journeys of the mind. Readings may include: the story of Exodus (The Bible),Virginia Woolf, Orlando, E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, Marguerite Duras, The Lover, Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder, Christoper Vogler, Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, and Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem.

K10.0305 WS I: Gender and Romance
MW 9:30-10:45 Susan Weisser WSI, 4 CR

In the contemporary media—film, television, theater, magazines and novels—we are barraged with images of romance that seem to have no relation to reality. Why is that we cling so stubbornly to an idealized version of erotic love? How does gender affect our view of the meaning and importance of romance? Readings will be both historical and contemporary, and will include essays and imaginative literature, such as the medieval tale of Tristan and Isolde, the feminist theory of Simone de Beauvoir, and a selection of poetry and short fiction by both male and female authors.

K10.0310 WS I: Life, Stories, Culture
MW 3:30-4:45 Stacy Pies WSI, 4 CR

While we commonly think of storytelling as creating fiction, narrative plays a part in all kinds of writing. It has even been said that we think in narratives. This class will focus on the stories that people tell about their individual lives, their families and their cultures. We will write about how point of view affects our understanding, and about how stories form both personal and cultural identities. Readings may include essays by James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Ralph Ellison, Ursula LeGuin, Audre Lorde, Walker Percy, Adrienne Rich, and John Edgar Wideman.

K10.0311 WS I: Identity in a Multicultural World
TR 9:30-10:45 Vasu Varadhan WSI, 4 CR

As people have become more aware of the multicultural nature of our society, writers, too, have increasingly turned to explore their own origins and identities. In our readings and writing for this course, we will examine the concept of identity through the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality. We will also look closely at the difficulties one may encounter growing up in two or more cultural traditions. The text for this course is an anthology of cross-cultural readings which focus on identity formation. Essays by writers such as Frederick Douglass, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Richard Rodriguez will be discussed.

K10.0319 WS I: Aesthetics on Trial
MW 9:30-10:45 Christopher Trogan WSI,, 4 CR

While cultures often like to see themselves reflected in art and literature, ground-breaking art is frequently accompanied by controversy. In literature, Flaubert faced charges of immorality while Baudelaire, Lawrence, and Nabokov were faced with charges of obscenity. In the visual arts, controversies and challenges surrounding “public art” have helped to determine what art can be and do from a societal standpoint. Contemporary photographers like Mapplethorpe and Serrano have challenged the role of photography as innocent representation. Feminist painters have used politics to challenge the supposed aesthetic “autonomy” of art. Through readings, discussions, and critical writing assignments, we will investigate such questions as: How do we define art? What constitutes obscenity and immorality in the arts? Does art occupy a separate domain from politics or is it inherently political? Students will be required to write on two separate controversies: one pertaining to the visual arts and one pertaining to literature.

K10.0323 WS I: The Artist in Context
TR 2:00-3:15 Ellen Blaney WSI, 4 CR

W hat are the conditions under which an artist flourishes or languishes? Is art a direct response to these conditions, a rebellion, an affirmation, an act of preservation or survival? Does it reflect or reject the spirit of the times? In this writing seminar, we will ask these questions of others and ourselves as we examine the projects of writers, filmmakers, and visual artists and the specific social, historical, and political contexts in which they work. Our inquiry will explore the conditions that influence, inspire, and inhibit art, taking into account artists affected by cataclysmic world events, revolutionary movements, and a variety of social discourses. Students will be encouraged to consider their own challenges as artists as they write descriptive, persuasive, and critical essays on the artistic output of others. Texts may include selections from Jean-Luc Godard, Primo Levi, Maya Lin, Alice Walker, and Virginia Woolf.

K10.0327 WS I: Narrative and Visual Experience
TR 6:20-7:35 Jessica Brent WSI, 4 CR

How do we write about what we see? Is there a correlation between narrative and visual experience, or an irreconcilable gap? What is the relation between the verbal and visual arts? What is the ethical position of the observer, and how do factors such as gender, race, and sexuality play a role in shaping visual experience? In this course we’ll explore these questions both by writing essays about our own visual experiences as well as analyzing representations of visual experience in literature, critical theory, and film. Works may include writings by da Vinci, Keats, Freud, Doyle, Gilman, Ellison, Sontag, and Barthes, films by Hitchcock and Godard, and various painted or photographic images.

K10.0329 WS I: Imagined Freedoms
MW 2:00-3:15 Nicole ParisierWSI, 4 CR

Writing is hard work, a learned skill, a privilege, a process and also a vehicle for freedom.  This course focuses on the role of writing in imagining freedom, and on helping students acquire writing’s distinctive power. As we discuss the elements of good writing: word choice, description, style, structure, argument and voice, we will keep alive the connection between these skills and the possibility of imaginative freedom.  Our investigation will be organized around works that address freedoms of the body, the body politic, the mind and the soul, and the following questions: What are the properties of writing as an aesthetic form? What kinds of freedom can be represented in writing? What kind of freedom does writing itself represent? And finally, What would you write if you believed your writing had power?  Readings will include Thoreau, Lincoln, Cather, King, Didion, Cisneros and Lahiri.

K10.0331 WS I: American Nature Writing
MW 3:30-4:45 Audrey Raden WSI, 4 CR

In this course we will learn to observe nature mindfully, with all our senses, and go on to interpret our observations in our writing. Our reading will track the trajectory of the perception of nature in this country, from early, awed perceptions of its vastness, to an understanding of its vulnerability. We will draw from environments we have encountered—other cities, suburbs, and rural areas—as well as the urban environment that we now share. In our writing, we will analyze meaning in these experiences and histories and, in doing so, all of us will take our place in the exciting and ever-evolving tradition of American nature writers. We will keep journals and compose critical essays that pertain both to our experiences, and topics inspired by readings. Readings may include texts from the following authors: Bartram, Audubon, Lewis and Clark, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Muir, Wright, Olson, Carson, Eisley, Dillard, Lopez, Erlich, Hogan, Ackerman, Erdrich, Kingslover.

K10.0332 WS I: Writing about American Faith
TR 3:30-4:45 Mark Desiderio WSI, 4 CR

Depending on how faith is defined, America is either the most secular or most religious society in the world today. But what do Americans mean when they say they believe? If asked, many of us would say that faith is a very personal matter and hard to put into words. And yet so much American writing—from poetry to works of social protest—has come out of a deep sense of the religious or spiritual. Through written responses to a variety of classical and contemporary texts, students in this course will explore such questions as, What is the nature of religious experience in American life? Is there an American religion or attitude toward faith that is not easily reconciled with traditional belief systems? What happens to traditional faiths when imported into American culture? Readings may include works by Edwards, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, William James, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Cornel West, Harold Bloom and Karen Armstrong.

K10.0333 WS I: Writing Twentieth-century Music and Culture
MW 11:00-12:15 Gregory Erickson WSI, 4 CR

The twentieth century, in all its innovation and violence, produced forms of music that were equally radical and challenging. This course will study the ways that music reacted to, reflected, encouraged, resisted and participated in dramatic cultural shifts, ruptures, and movements of the twentieth century. Our study of music will, in turn, spur topics for writing—in journals and critical essays. We will listen to, and read and write about the noise machines of Luigi Russolo, the early jazz of New Orleans, the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg, the neo-classicism of Igor Stravinsky, the silence of John Cage, the rebellion of 1960’s rock and free jazz, and the anger of rap. Readings may include the writings of musicians like Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould, and Miles Davis, critical writings of musicologists such as Susan McClary, Leonard Meyer, and Robert Walser, essays by Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and Norman Mailer, and fiction and poetry by Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Wallace Stevens, Amira Baraka and others.

K10.0334 Writing Sem I: Writing the Body
MW 12:30-1:45 Rebecca Wisor WSI, 4 CR

Writing is, first and foremost, a physical act performed by the body. It is also, however, an art form capable of expressing physical and emotional states and sensations rooted in the body. In this seminar, we will look closely at the intimate relation between the body and writing, considering how sensations and experiences are contained in and expressed through acts of writing, as well as how writing functions as a meaning-making tool by which we come to know and understand the body. Through weekly journal writing assignments, critical essays, and a literary critical essay, we will consider the body’s impact on writing, and writing’s impact on our relation to the body. Readings may include works by Audre Lorde, Nancy Mairs, Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Dorothy Allison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Elaine Scarry.

K10.0619 WS I: Exercises in Style
TR 11:00-12:15 Steve Hutkins WSI, 4 CR

In classical times, students learned to develop their prose styles by imitating models of excellent writing. The modern era took a more romantic approach: look into your heart, discover your inner voice, express your true self. For the postmodernist, there is no “self” to express, and style is largely a matter of ironic appropriation, pastiche, and parody. In this course, we study different theories of style, as students work on their writing skills (with special attention to the academic essay) by doing various exercises, from classical imitation to the zen of free-writing to Po-Mo parody. Readings may include George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Joseph Williams’ Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style.

K10.0611 WS II: Writers on Writing
MW 3:30-4:45 June Foley WSII, 4 CR

In this course, which culminates in a literary-critical research paper, we read and write about writing. Kafka, for example, emphasized the emotional power of words when he called writing “an axe for the frozen sea within us.” Flaubert, however, stressed the limitations of language, calling it “a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” Samuel Johnson offered another view: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Readings may include excerpts from the journals of Kafka and Virginia Woolf, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Lillian Ross’s Portrait of Hemingway, Writers on Writing—brief essays by a wide range of writers—and the even briefer essays in Three Minutes or Less: Life Lessons from America’s Greatest Writers. Our writing workshop offers an open, exploratory framework, yet aims to develop methods of inquiry, analysis, and research, in order to deepen our critical thinking and writing

K10.0639 WS II: Myths and Fables in Popular Culture
MW 11:00-12:15 Patricia Lennox WSII, 4 CR

Myths, fables, folk tales, and fairy tales are universal, as old as story telling and as new as the latest award-winning films. In this class we will consider how and why certain stories continue to be revised and retold. Our research will focus on old and new versions of the tales, as well as the critical discourse surrounding them. It will serve as the springboard for a series of writing assignments that culminate in a final research paper. Sources will include, but not be limited to, selections from works by: J. R.R. Tolkien, Disney, Ovid, Apuleius, Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Angela Carter, Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, and Jack Zipes.