First-Year Program

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

WS II: Making the Modern
K10.0617 WSII, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 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
K10.0619 WSII, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 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.

WS II: Imagining Cities
K10.0622 WSII, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Stacy Pies

This course looks at the way the modern and post-modern city has been—and is being—imagined by writers, artists, urban planners, architects, philosophers, and historians. Our focus will be on concepts of the city and theories of urban experience, especially in relation to ideas about modernity. We will read, discuss and write about urban environments of the past, present, and future, including real cities like New York, Paris, and L.A., and cities dreamed up by urbanists like Paolo Soleri and Le Corbusier. We will consider the urban phenomena of the crowd, the neighborhood, notions of public and private space, and the cultural mix of the modern city. Students will conduct research projects on cities in their areas of interest. Texts may include essays by writers and philosophers Poe, Baudelaire, Barthes, and Benjamin; by urbanists Jacobs, Mumford, Mike Davis, and Matt Gandy, as well as films and photographs.

WS II: Writing About Popular Music
K10.0628 WSII, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Stephen Wetta

There has been no other cultural trend in history with the kind of widespread style-forming, ideology-shaping power that American popular music holds. Yet pop emerged from a folk culture that is, and has been, more or less common to most nations and most people for centuries. It shows a pronounced tendency to disregard color and national languages, to cross social and cultural boundaries that are otherwise closed, and to evolve with amazing rapidity into new forms and styles. The writing in this course may engage in the politics and social forces involved in particular kinds of music as treated by particular performers. The research may focus on the history of a style of music in general or as represented by a particular performer. Readings may include Country: The Biggest Music in America by Nick Tosches, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom by Peter Guralnick, and critical essays by Gordon and Bangs.

WS II: Creative Minds
K10.0630 WSII, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Ellen Blaney

What sparks the creative mind? How is the artist’s vision developed and sustained? What factors determine one’s reception and reputation over time? In this course, we will consider the influences that have shaped the works of writers and other artists and the ways their creative projects, in turn, become influential. Our inquiry will focus on the evolution of an artist’s vision as we examine early and later works along with their critical reception. Readings will include studies on the creative mind across disciplines. Students will write several critical essays that prepare them for a research paper on a particular artist’s development and achievement. Our inquiry may include selections from John Berger, Jane Campion, T.S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Alice Walker.

WS II: Writing About Africa: Colonial Discourse and African Literature
K10.0633 WSII, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Hedy Kalikoff

Given the history of colonialist writing about Africa—from Hegel’s “dark continent” to the “noble savages” of well-meaning travelers—it can be daunting for newcomers to the subject to write about Africa. Is it possible to avoid reproducing the rhetoric of empire, or does our status as outsiders—college students and faculty in New York—automatically place us in the awkward position of trying to represent people who have historically been objects of study rather than subjects? How do African writers treat this history of representation? We will read works by authors from West and Central Africa and by European and American authors writing about Africa. We‘ll discuss some recent debates in African culture such as African versus European languages, gender relations, the Negritude movement, and the problems of civil war and genocide. Authors will include Emmanuel Dongala, Ferdinand Oyono, Ama Ata Aidoo, Léopold Senghor, Colin Turnbull, Kate Crehan and Philip Gourevitch. The wide scope of readings will allow students to pursue their own research interests.

WS II: Truth or Fiction? Memory and Storytelling
K10.0634 WSII, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Judith Greenberg

How do we shape the stories we tell ourselves about our lives? And, conversely, how do the stories we tell ourselves about our lives shape us? At the interface of what lies on the printed page and what lies within individual memory lies a process of interpretation and manipulation—the process of writing. This course will explore how memories are “written” in order to help students sharpen their own critical writing. The process of writing a series of papers over the course of the semester will serve as background for the final research paper. Readings and film will include Plato, Kurosawa, Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and Italo Calvino.

WS II: Writing from the Margins
K10.0637 WSII, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Christopher Packard

The outsider, the banished, the reviled have much to say to the cultures that exclude them, and this writing seminar will explore what marginalized voices have to say about their status. Students’ own experiences of displacement and exclusion will form the basis for exploration of the effects of marginalization. Students will also develop critical thinking and persuasive skills by writing traditional academic essays exploring how exiled voices have been treated, or ignored, by elites in the past. Readings about the theory of power and oppression will serve as springboards for students’ own statements of principles. Readings in literature will serve as creative inspiration and source material for critical thinking. Students can expect to read texts by Frederick Douglass, Jamaica Kincaid, Paul Monette, Allen Ginsberg, and Richard Rodriguez.

WS II: Writing About Film
K10.0638 WSII, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Jessica Brent

Many of us have seen numerous films and have strong opinions about them. In this course we will transform those immediate reactions into a more analytical language by learning how to write critical essays about film. In order to write about films, however, we will also need to learn how to “read” them, or how to interpret the successive images on the screen as if they were a kind of text. We will work on developing a critical vocabulary that will help us identify and appreciate different aspects of film form, such as montage, camera movement, and the language of shots. We will also explore a variety of critical approaches to film, including formal, historical, psychological, and ideological. Students will write several short papers that will culminate in a longer research project.

WS II: The Critical Essay and the Contemporary Moment
K10.0640 WSII, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Lisa Goldfarb

While Montaigne envisioned the essay as elastic and flexible, later writers would come to divide it into categories. In this course, we will explore the essay as Montaigne would have hoped it would be: an evolving form into which writers pour their reflections, and explore their responses to and critiques of their world. We will read some classic expressions of the essay form, and look to them as models for our own writing, but we will focus on the essay in the twentieth century into our own. A significant component of the course will consider how essayists in the present day use the form to think about our most pressing contemporary issues: the current elections, health care and education, as well as issues of war and peace. Students will write a research essay on a topic of their choice, perhaps inspired by class readings or the events of the day. Readings may include works by Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, William James, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Adrienne Rich, Joyce Carol Oates, among others.

WS II: Gender and Identity
K10.0642 WSII, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Susan Weisser

This course will examine gender as a category of identity, investigating how we see ourselves or are seen through the lens of gender. How does being coded “male” or “female” affect how we live our lives ? We will look at gender from various angles: representations in literature, in film, in popular culture, and in social practices and behaviors, as well as in theory. Discussion will be based on readings such Simone de Beauvoir, Sherry Ortner, Robert Bly and Susan Faludi, films such as Paris Is Burning, and observations of cultural practices. Students will select a research topic investigating an aspect of gender in a particular field, e.g. psychology, sociology, history, literary theory, film studies.

WS II: Imagining Childhood
K10.0643 WSII, 4 CR Tr 3:30-4:45 Mark Desiderio

There have always been children, of course, but has there always been such a thing as childhood? The historian Phillipe Aries provocatively argued that in the Middle Ages, “the idea of childhood did not exist.” In fact, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that something like our notion of childhood began to appear in treatises on education and moral philosophy, and not until the nineteenth century that children assumed the special place in the adult imagination that they enjoy today. This course invites students to enter into questions regarding the nature of childhood and to think critically about the ways in which our conception of childhood reflects broader cultural values. Critical responses to a wide range of texts will culminate in a research paper on some aspect of the cultural construction of childhood. Texts may include writing by Locke, Blake, Freud, Alger, James, Dillard, Twain, Dickens, Postman; selections from Mother Goose, The New England Primer and The McGuffey Reader; and images of children in film, photography and advertising.

WS II: American Food and Foodways
K10.0644 WSII, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Audrey Raden

The earliest accounts of the territories that would become known as the United States were full of reports of the extraordinary bounty of the land—a new and fruitful Eden. As the centuries have passed, food culture has been a nexus for how we understand our American culture. This fascination—indeed obsession—with how and what we eat has been of great importance in our literature, sociology, history, science, and culture. In this course we will read and examine American perceptions of food from the earliest accounts of Native American cookery to Fast Food Nation and the current low fat/low carb conflict. We will examine regionalism, immigrant food culture, and several centuries of diet fads. We will keep food journals, and will write short papers on our own emotional responses to cooking and eating, and work toward a final research project in which each student will trace in a pivotal work of American literature either the history and influence of a particular ethnic approach to food, a food reform movement, a pseudo-science approach to eating, or the significance of food preparation and consumption.

WS II: Writing Peace in Times of War
K10.0645 WSII, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Rebecca Wisor

It is paradoxical, but true, that periods of war often generate inspired meditations on the nature of peace and how it might be achieved. Such writing may be revolutionary, cathartic, or utopian in its intent, form, and content, but it will always reflect the specific historical moment and conflict during which it was written. Using wartime texts from past and present that contemplate peace, we will consider the power of writing as a tool for achieving positive social and political ends. The writing component of this class will include informal journal writing, formal analytical and argumentative essays, and a final research essay. Texts may include works by Grace Paley, Virginia Woolf, Helena Swanwick, Kate Millett, Bertrand Russell, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

WS II: Migration, Displacement, and Exile
K10.0646 WSII, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Ifeona Fulani

This writing course will explore the themes of migration, displacement and exile in works drawn from Asian, Caribbean, Latin American and European cultures. Students will read, view and analyze narratives presented in a diverse selection of literature and films by immigrants to America. We will examine the impact of American culture and society on identities formed elsewhere, with attention to the differing experiences of male and female migrants. The course will also lead students through an exploration of the various stages of the process of writing a research essay. We will explore strategies for generating and developing arguments and organizing them into logical and persuasive essays. We will draft, revise and edit essays that address both the readings and students’ own experiences, and the final essay will incorporate library research. Materials for the course include Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Chou, Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez, and Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee.