First-Year Program
All courses in the First-Year Program are restricted to Gallatin first-year students only.
FYS: Imagining Identity and Difference
K10.0031 FYS, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 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, Imagined Communities, Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Marx, “The Fetishism of the Commodity,” Said, Orientalism, Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Look.”
FYS: The Social Construction of Reality
K10.0032 FYS, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Stephen Duncombe
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.
FYS: Globalization
K10.0039 FYS, 4 CR F 2:00-4:45 Asale Angel-Ajani
“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.
FYS: Capitalism and Democracy
K10.0042 FYS, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Kim Phillips-Fein
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 capitalism 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 Upton Sinclair, Max Weber, Milton Friedman and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.
FYS: Hamlet in the Afterlife: Characters, Conflict and Criticism
K10.0047 FYS, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Alycia Smith-Howard
Edward Vining (1881): “Hamlet is a woman.” William Hazlitt (1906): “It is we, who are Hamlet.” G. Wilson Knight (1930): “It is Hamlet, not Claudius, who is the villain of the piece.” Steven Berkoff (1989): “Hamlet is a quest for the most perfect we can make ourselves.” Throughout time scholars, theorists, directors, performers, and writers have wrestled with Shakespeare’s most famous and influential work. In this course we will follow in the footsteps of such thinkers as Goëthe, Freud, Eliot, and Laing to investigate the major interpretative puzzles posed by the play and its elusive principal characters. The central aim of this course is to introduce students to the methods and materials of bibliographic and archival research as they develop and support their own theoretic arguments about this pivotal work. Written assignments (papers, research journal and final project) will be generated from responses to Shakespeare’s text(s), critical theories, dramatic interpretations, individual literary analysis and secondary research. Course readings may also include such works as Aristotle's Poetics, Bacon's “On Revenge,” Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Updike's Gertrude and Claudius.
FYS: Exile
K10.0048 FYS, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Sinan Antoon
Exile, as a mode of being and representation, is by no means a recent phenomenon. However, the upheavals of the last century resulted in unprecedented mass displacement leading some to claim that exile is the defining condition of our times, especially for intellectuals. We will start by exploring the trope of exile in selected pre-modern texts, then we will focus on representative figures from two exilic communities in modern times: the German-Jewish writers exiled to the U.S in the 1930¹s and 40¹s, and Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals and poets displaced into various exiles by the Arab-Israeli conflict and its aftermath. We will explore how the trauma of exile and loss is theorized and represented in various forms and genres of cultural production. What are the salient rhetorical strategies of encountering displacement and loss? How do writers position themselves in a foreign cultural landscape, or, at times, a foreign language? How are homelands re-imagined or even transcended? How do exilic writings negotiate and problematize nationalism and the very concept of home? What forms of hybrid cultural and transnational identities are produced in exile? Do we all, as subjects, inhabit different degrees of exile? In addition to three documentary films, readings may include Homer, Ovid, The Bible, Adorno, Freud, Brecht, Said, Derrida, Shammas, Shohat and Darwish.
FYS: The Self and the Call of the Other
K10.0049 FYS, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Judith Greenberg
Ovid ’s story of Echo and Narcissus from the Metamorphoses portrays the dangers of refusing to heed the call of the Other. Absorbed by his own image, Narcissus ignores the calls of the nymph Echo, who relies upon his words to speak. His solipsism leads to both of their deaths. This class takes Ovid’s story as a model for investigating how the Self is shaped in relation to the Other, a question considered by psychologists, writers, philosophers, filmmakers and literary critics. We will read psychological discussions of object relations theory and the formative role of the mother as original Other (Sigmund Freud, D.W. Winnicott, Jessica Benjamin), literary portrayals of the Self as dependent upon or isolated from others (Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Marguerite Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein), and philosophical essays on the ethics of the call of the other (Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas). We will look at how extreme forms of suffering can be understood as a break down in the connection between the Self and the Other, reading essays by experts in trauma studies (Cathy Caruth, and Susan Brison) and will consider ways in which colonialism and Empire shape conceptions of Self and Other, reading novels (E.M. Forster, A Passage To India) and theory (Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak). We will also ask what problems arise specifically when women speak—how Echo finds a voice—viewing films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.
FYS: The Aura: Production, Re-Production and Authenticity
K10.0052 FYS, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Patricia Lennox
What happens to the arts and society in an age of transition that includes radically new technologies that alter the production, presentation, and distribution of art works, literature, and performance? Who decides what has the “aura of the real” and what is merely a lifeless reproduction? The question of authenticity is as ancient as prophecy and folk tales, but it is also a contemporary concern as modern cities build upon the past to produce new urban identities and as debates rage over intellectual property. In this seminar we will concentrate on a number of literary, dramatic, and other texts that explore these issues. Readings may include selections from Frazer, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Žižek, Barthes, Klinger, Debord, Plato, Mallory, Spenser, Shakespeare, Woolf,Borges, Proust, Burroughs and Kerouac. Film selections may include work by Chaplin, Lang, Fellini, Cocteau, Busby Berkley, and Monty Python. There will be field trips to art museums and to New York buildings that attempt to reproduce a “lost” past.
FYS: The City and the Grassroots
K10.0050 FYS, 4 CR R 2:00-4:45 René Francisco Poitevin
This course uses literature, social theory, and walking tours to explore the role of “urban space” in mediating social movements and everyday life. We’ll address the following questions: what makes a “city”? What does “urban” mean? Is “urban consciousness” a necessary condition for understanding how society works and who modern people are? How can we understand the city as an object of social conflict and social change, and yet also as a political community seeking to shape its own destiny? Readings will include Saskia Sassen’s The Global City, Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Manuel Castells’ The City and the Grassroots, Doreen Massey’s Space, Place, and Gender, Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution, and Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love.
FYS: The Thingliness of Things
K10.0051 FYS, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Eve Meltzer
This course examines the forms that objects assume in our culture, from those things that we consider invaluable to the most mundane ephemera of daily life. We will look closely at the systems of representation though which we create objects—for example, how an object becomes a commodity, a fetish, gift, or work of art—as well as the effects that various forms of economic, psychic, and social value have upon the visual and material properties of things. As a part of course requirements students will adopt an object for the semester and write regular written accounts of it in light of our readings. Those readings may include: Appadurai, Baudrillard, Fanon, Forty, Freud, Heidegger, Irigaray, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Marx, Mauss, Proust, Simmel, and Stewart.
FYS: Novel Freedoms
K10.0053 FYS, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Nicole Parisier
Novels create whole worlds, for characters and readers alike. This course will investigate the relationship between the frameworks that writers build, and the freedoms that they imagine. Some novels record journeys, others focus on realized or unrequited love, still others are stories of individual growth. Whatever the subject, we will ask how the world within the novel is imagined in order to understand the freedoms at stake in particular narrative designs. What freedom does narrative uncertainty provide for a reader, and what freedom does a fictional narrator (omniscient, limited, or unreliable) suggest? Together we will consider how the elements of the novel—its structure, narrative style and voice—imagine freedom, making the world inside and outside the novel new. Although the novel will provide our main focus, we will also examine other texts including film, Greek tragedy, and personal essays. Authors will include Sophocles, Plato, Edith Wharton, Marguerite Duras, Octavia Butler, Chang-Rae Lee and David Sedaris
WS I: The Urban Muse
K10.0301 WSI, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 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 Writer's Journey
K10.0302 WSI, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 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, Marguerite Duras, The Lover, Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder and Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, as well as a class “journey” in Manhattan.
WS I: Gender and Romance
K10.0305 WSI, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Susan Weisser
Romantic passion has an important place in the history of Western literature as well as in everyday life in our society. In this course we will examine traditional and contemporary ideas about the ways gender affects our view of the meaning and importance of romance. Our focus will be on reading for writing, in order to inspire material for the writing process. This course will explore the act of writing both as self-expression and as a way of thinking, using a particular theme—the connections between gender and romantic love—to experiment with personal style and give shape to thought. We will discuss romantic love in various readings, which will include both fiction and essays, historical and contemporary. Topics will include defining romantic love, considering gender differences in romantic experience and expression, and weighing the arguments of feminists who see love as a political issue. Readings include the medieval tale of Tristan and Isolde, contemporary stories by Mishima and Smiley, poetry and essays by feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir as well as historians, psychologists, and media analysts.
WS I: Life, Stories, Culture
K10.0310 WSI, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Stacy Pies
While we commonly think of storytelling as creating fictions, narrative plays a part in all kinds of writing, from imaginative literature to rhetorical argument. It has even been said that we think in narratives. As members of groups, we define ourselves through the stories we tell, tales that create a meaning for our actions, our ideas, and our desires. 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 and fiction by James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Ralph Ellison, Darcy Frey, Flannery O’Connor, J.D. Salinger, and James Joyce.
WS I: Reading and Writing Everyday Life
K10.0313 WSI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Beth Zasloff
The most ordinary details of daily life—a piece of chalk, an afternoon errand, a dying moth—often inspire the most extraordinary writing. And writing, in turn, can help to reveal the value of the everyday. In this course, we will read and write essays that observe, record and reflect on day-to-day experience. Readings may include works by Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Natalia Ginzburg, James Baldwin and others.
WS I: Aesthetics on Trial
K10.0319 WSI, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 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.
WS I: Metamorphoses
K10.0324 WSI, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 June Foley
This course explores the idea of metamorphosis, or transformation, by which humans become—among other things—stones, flowers, and stars; animals, gods, monsters; and members of the opposite sex. We read and write about some of the many varieties of metamorphosis, such as those linked with disguise and dissimulation; madness and dissolution; immigration and exile; sickness and healing; and self-creation that reflects self-knowledge. While students write academic essays that develop their own ideas in their own voices, in stages that progress from freewriting and drafting to workshopping, revising, and polishing, we reflect on writing itself as a transformation of subjective, ephemeral impressions into words fixed on paper, through which we communicate with others. Readings may include selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; fairy tales, folk tales and contemporary revisions; Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”; Nella Larsen’s Passing; Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; and essays by Adam Gopnik, Andre Aciman, Bharati Mukherjee, and Oliver Sacks.
WS I: Writing about American Faith
K10.0332 WSI, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Mark Desiderio
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 Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, William James, Annie Dillard and Flannery O'Connor, as well as writings of various faith traditions.
WS I: Writing Twentieth-century Music and Culture
K10.0333 WSI, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Gregory Erickson
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 labor songs of the 1930s, 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 Milton Babbitt, Glenn Gould, and Miles Davis, critical writings of musicologists such as Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, and Robert Walser, essays by Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and Norman Mailer, and fiction and poetry by James Joyce, James Baldwin, Wallace Stevens, Amira Baraka and others.
WS I: Writing the Body
K10.0334 WSI, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Rebecca Wisor
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 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 will include theoretical, fictional, and autobiographical texts that explore issues of pleasure, pain, confinement, and torture, among others; these may include works by Michel Foucault, Nancy Mairs, Virginia Woolf, and J.M. Coetzee.
WS I: Growing up in Africa
K10.0335 WSI, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Hedy Kalikoff
Narratives about childhood, adolescence and youth often resemble each other, regardless of where they take place. The readings for this course describe the usual episodes of exploration and mischief, school, chores, conflicts with siblings and parents, romance, and disappointment. Yet, they also portray childhoods under the shadow of colonial rule or the restrictions of patriarchy; adolescence during civil wars or independence struggles; education that involves learning the art of the blacksmith or of the mbira, and juggling several languages in the course of a day. As we read works by authors from many parts of Africa, we will ask what difference history and geography make, and how the genres of memoir and bildungsroman have been transformed. Writing assignments and classwork will help you deepen and expand skills such as close reading, analysis, argument, and revision. Authors may include Oyono (Cameroon), Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Camara (Guinea), Chraïbi (Morocco), Soyinka (Nigeria), Wicomb and Brutus (South Africa).
WS I: Visual Texts
K10.0336 WSI, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Jennifer Lemberg
As a contemporary cultural movement, postmodernism has been concerned with the disintegration of familiar artistic conventions. Postmodern authors often favor fragmented over linear narratives, and are highly experimental in their use of textual forms. In this course we will explore how contemporary authors utilize visual materials to create literary texts. Reading autobiography and fiction featuring a variety of visual elements, including photographs, drawings, and comix, we will employ our own writing to explore the connections between images and text. Through informal writing assignments as well as a series of descriptive, analytical, and literary critical essays, we will attempt to answer the questions: what do images communicate that words do not? What is it about our time that encourages, or requires, texts such as these? Authors we will consider may include Cha, Foer, Satrapi, Sebald, and Spiegelman, as well as Barthes, Sontag, and others.
WSI: Writing the Harlem Renaissance
K10.0340 WSI, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Alison Perry
In Home to Harlem, Claude McKay describes this neighborhood’s “brutality” and “promiscuous thickness,” while also praising “the warm accent of its composite voice,” “the fruitiness of its laughter,” and “the trailing rhythm of its ‘blues.’” Indeed, many writers from McKay’s era to the present have represented the Harlem Renaissance in myriad, and sometimes contesting and contestable, ways. Throughout this course, we will read first-person, narrative essays by Harlem Renaissance writers, literary descriptions of this distinctive Manhattan neighborhood written during the Harlem Renaissance, as well as historical and literary critical materials about this cultural movement and the writers it engendered. Students will author their own narrative, descriptive and literary critical essays on topics confluent with those addressed in the readings. We will take a process-oriented, constitutive approach to essay writing: brainstorming, freewriting, drafting, peer-reviewing, rewriting, and ultimately polishing each essay. Readings will include works by Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison.
WSI: Biography and the Self
K10.0341 WSI, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Audrey Raden
The concept of biography and the examples of particular biographies will spur both descriptive and critical student writing in this course. We will begin with a brief overview of biography’s role in Western culture, from ancient Greek funeral elegies to the first “modern” biography, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. We will then quickly move to the 21st century with our principal text, Nancy Miller’s But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives. Students keep biographical journals, recording their discoveries of the lives of people around them. Always, they ask: What does my knowledge of this person add to my knowledge of myself? There will be regular in-class writings, two papers dealing with people who have influenced them directly or indirectly, and a final literary critical essay. Readings may also include Sherwin B. Nuland’s Doctors: A Biography of Medicine and Anna Jameson’s Love of the Poets: Biographical Sketches of Women Celebrated in Ancient and Modern Poetry.
WS I: Writing Justice
K10.0342 WSI, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Catherine Siemann
In this course, issues of social justice will launch our discussions and provide inspiration for our writing. Works foregrounding problems of justice, persuasion, and representation will function as backdrops to shorter reflective essays and one longer, literary-critical essay. Each essay will focus on developing a particular skill, such as description, analysis, style, voice, or methods of argument. Our writings might explore how conflicts that arise between the concept of justice and a law, trial, or legal system open a space for a writer’s intervention. Other questions might include, how does the structure of the trial function as a model for writing? How might the writer become a witness, and what kind of responsibilities does he or she bear as such? In what ways might the writer also operate in the position of judge and jury, or even attorney? Readings may include historical, literary, journalistic, and philosophical works by authors such as Sophocles, Arendt, Zola, Mill, and Kafka.
WS II: Myths and Fables in Popular Culture
K10.0639 WSII, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Patricia Lennox
Myths, fables, folk tales, and fairy tales are universal, as old as storytelling 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.