First-Year Program
All courses in the First-Year Program are restricted to Gallatin first-year students only.
FYS: Migration and American Culture
K10.0024 FYS, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Michael Dinwiddie
This course will examine both the immigrant and migrant experiences of varied racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as immigrants from Europe, Asia, the Caribbean and migrants from the American South redefined the ethnic makeup of the United States. What changes in identity and in political, social, and economic status did they experience? What were the newcomers’ expectations of their new environment, and what reality did they encounter? Our study will look at the coping mechanisms, the forging of intra-tribal identities, the sociology of survival, and the concept of ‘otherness.’ Students will be encouraged to explore New York City’s unique archives, museums, and neighborhoods in relation to the immigrant and migrant experiences. Readings include Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, Riis's How the Other Half Lives, Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, and Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis.
FYS: The Social Construction of Reality
K10.0032 FYS, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 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, 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: 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: Travel Fictions
K10.0043 FYS, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Steve Hutkins
The American novelist John Gardner once said there were only two plots to all of the stories ever told: a stranger comes to town, and someone goes on a journey. There may be other plots, but the encounter between those who are settled and those who are on the move is one of the most intriguing and compelling of literary themes. This course focuses on novels and short stories and asks what happens when travelers and tourists come into contact with the locals and native-born. It examines the way travelers preconceive and apprehend foreign places, the problematic search for the “authentic” and “essential,” and the view of tourism as a form of neo-colonialism, involving issues of power and possession, race and class, exoticism, and Otherness. Supplemental readings explore the history, sociology, politics, and economics of travel and tourism. Readings may include works by Twain, Verne, Conrad, Forster, Bowles, Maugham, Greene, Llosa, Naipaul, and Tyler.
FYS: Exile
K10.0048 FYS, 4 CRW 9:30-12:15 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 exilic communities in modern times. 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, Rushdie, 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’s The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein), and philosophical essays on the ethics of the call of the Other (Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas). We will look at how extreme forms of suffering can be understood as a breakdown in the connection between the Self and the Other, reading essays by experts in trauma studies (Cathy Caruth and Susan Brison), and consider ways in which colonialism and empire shape conceptions of Self and Other, reading novels (E.M. Forster's A Passage To India) and theory (Edward Said and 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 and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.
FYS: The City and the Grassroots
K10.0050 FYS, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 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’s 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 11:00-12:15 Eve Meltzer
This course engages a seemingly simple question: what is an object? Relatedly, what is a thing? As a means of illuminating these questions, we will consult everyday objects, theories of various object forms (from our very first loved objects, to commodities, fetishes, even lost things) and literary and artistic representations (including the work of Marcel Duchamp, William Morris, Jasper Johns, and Rachel Whiteread). One of our challenges will be to learn to read objects both by having them at hand, and by understanding how economic, psychic, and social values shape their visual and material properties. In this process, we will engage the popular view that objects tell us something, first and foremost, about the people who create and use them. We will also encounter the taboo proposition that objects may have an intentionality of their own, and that humans do not dictate the meaning of all things. Readings include Donald Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”; Karl Marx, “Commodities”; Kaja Silverman, “The Language of Things”; Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750.
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.
FYS: Genetic Enhancement: Dreams, Nightmares, and Realities
K10.0054 FYS, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis
Contemporary work in genetics has brought humanity greater power over life and biology than has ever been imagined. Our birth, our longevity, our bodily capacities, and our food supply are all now (or will soon be) sites of genetic manipulation and engineering. This class introduces the basics of genetic science (no prior background in biology required) and puts the science in the context of work in social and cultural construction of science. In addition, we look at two contemporary novels devoted to genetic engineering—Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go—and we follow the shadows of these novels back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Enlightenment, and the classical myth of Prometheus.
FYS: Encountering Race
K10.0055 FYS, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Justin Lorts
Since ancient times, initial encounters with difference have evoked feelings of amazement, fear, curiosity, and contempt. Early European explorers variously described the Native Americans and Africans they encountered on their voyages as sensuous, monstrous, and savage. These encounters helped shape modern ideas of race, a construct that continues to have a powerful effect on our cultural interactions, social relations, and our own self-identity. Thus, when African-American activist W.E.B. DuBois first encountered his own racial identity he suddenly felt shut out from the white world by “a vast veil.” This seminar will explore the ways that our encounters with racial difference define and are defined by modern notions of race relations, self-identity, popular culture and race itself. We will examine this relationship from a variety of historical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives, by drawing upon the work of novelists, playwrights, historians, visual artists, film makers, anthropologists and scientists. Assigned readings may include Virgil’s Aeneid, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as well as writings by Pliny, Marco Polo, Edward Said, Margaret Mead, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
FYS: Incivility in the Age of Civil Society
K10.0057 FYS, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Alejandro Velasco
In Cameroon women farmers defecate before state officials to protest endemic corruption. In India villagers forced to relocate to make way for dams risk death by squatting on slowly-flooding lands. In Venezuela men jailed for years before seeing trial sew shut their lips to demand justice. As international development agendas peg the spread of democracy to the rise of global ‘civil society,’ how do we make sense of these ‘uncivil’ acts? This course examines the function of incivility in modern political thought and practice, drawing from the works of Machiavelli and Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Thoureau and Tocqueville, Putnam and Fukuyama, Chartejee and Žižek. The goal is to trace how ‘civil society’ has come to define what constitutes legitimate political action in democracy, in the process marginalizing as illegitimate forms of action that appear uncivil. Then, by examining contemporary case studies, we will assess how culture and history blur the boundaries between civility and incivility in the pursuit of effective government, asking: What currents of social capital underlay the exercise of incivility, and how might they be incorporated into a common language of democratization for the twenty first century? Is there a place for incivility in modern democracy, or has irreverence become irrelevant?
WS I: Reading and Writing Everyday Life
K10.0313 WSI, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Cori Gabbard
By most people’s definition, the “everyday” is diametrically opposed to the “unexpected” and “remarkable.” In this course, students will write several essays—culminating in a literary critical paper—that examine our notions of the mundane and the exceptional. Considering, say, a summer day in a public garden or the death of a moth or the perspective of a very young child, we will examine the extent to which the boundary between the commonplace and the extraordinary holds true and the implications of this division or its disappearance. Texts may include selections from Victor Shklovsky, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, and Muriel Spark, among others.
WS I: Aesthetics on Trial
K10.0319 WSI, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 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 such as 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: The Artist in Context
K10.0323 WSI, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Ellen Blaney
In this writing seminar, we will 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. Is art a direct response to these conditions, a rebellion, an act of resistance? Does it reflect or reject the spirit of the times? Students will be encouraged to consider their own creative endeavors as they write descriptive, persuasive, and analytical essays on the output of artists affected by revolutionary movements, world events, and a variety of social discourses. Texts may include selections from Jean-Luc Godard, Primo Levi, Maya Lin, Alice Walker, and Virginia Woolf.
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: Visual Texts
K10.0336 WSI, 4 CR TR 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 may include Cha, Foer, Satrapi, Sebald, and Spiegelman, as well as Barthes, Sontag, and others.
WS I: Writing Justice
K10.0342 WSI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Catherine Siemann
In this course we will read and write about issues of justice, persuasion and representation. Students will write several short essays and one longer literary-critical essay. Our writings may explore conflicts that arise between the concept of justice and a law, trial, or legal system; how the writer might become a witness and the kinds of responsibilities he or she bears; and how the writer might operate in the position of judge and jury or even attorney. Authors considered may include Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Katha Pollitt, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault, as well as various journalists and jurists.
WS I: Writers on Writing
K10.0343 WSI, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 June Foley
George Orwell named four reasons for writing: “egoism,” “aesthetic enthusiasm,” “historical impulse,” and “political purpose.” Franz Kafka stressed the emotional power of writing in calling it “an ax for the frozen sea within us.” Mario Vargas Lhosa claimed the secret reason for the literary vocation is the questioning of real life. In this course, students write critical essays that are inspired by writing about writing. Our texts, exemplary works in several genres, include essays by Orwell, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, and Chang-Rae Lee; selections from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist; Lillian Ross’s New Yorker “profile” of Hemingway; short stories about the writing life by E.L. Doctorow, Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro, and James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Student writing will culminate in a literary-critical essay.
WS I: Forms of Love
K10.0345 WSI, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Susan Weisser
All you need is love, love makes the world go around, and love is a battlefield, so the songs tell us. What kinds of love are essential to our well-being, and why does love so often go wrong? This course will examine friendship, romance and marriage, and parenthood as forms of love that are very personal and yet have social rules of their own, sometimes unspoken. We will use a selection of philosophical, sociological and literary texts to see what they contribute to our understanding of these important relationships. We will read selections from Aristotle on friendship, Stephanie Koontz’s History of Marriage, Eric Fromm’s The Art of Loving, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex ; literary texts include drama by Eugene O’Neill, and Neil LaBute, memoir by Anne Lamott, fiction by Jamaica Kincaid and Ray Bradbury, and poetry by George Meredith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Carson. Discussing what we think and feel about these representations of love will serve as the springboard for developing students’ writing on the subject. Students will compose descriptive and critical essays.
WS I: Writing Peace
K10.0346 WSI, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Rebecca Wisor
Willing herself to believe that it was possible to “think peace into existence,” Virginia Woolf memorably expressed, in response to the escalating violence of the 1930s, that her thinking was to be her fighting. Whether revolutionary, cathartic, polemical, or utopian in nature, all writing that takes resistance to war—or the imagining of peace—as its primary subject matter participates in this kind of intellectual fight. In this course, we will explore how writers have variously resisted war and/or imagined peace through the act of writing, and examine the subtly shifting discourses that surround the notions of war, peace, and nonviolence in their works. Students will write descriptive and critical essays, as well as a literary-critical paper. Readings will include Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and “Resistance to Civil Government,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “War,” Emma Goldman’s “The Promoters of the War Mania,” Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, and excerpts from Louis Fischer’s The Essential Gandhi and The Dalai Lama’s Ethics for the New Millennium.
WS I: Writing the Self
K10.0347 WSI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Andrew Libby
Not all autobiographies begin at the beginning: a Roman would begin his Life when he first spoke in the forum; Jean-Paul Sartre ends his autobiography at age 11. In autobiography the lies one tells and the style one uses are just as revealing as the truth about what happened. How would you write about your life? Can you shape your own life as you wish or are you merely a product of your time and place? In this course, we consider how writers tell the story of themselves by selecting certain events and images, how writers use their writing to come to self-awareness and how writers cover up or omit important facts. Students will write and revise three to four essays, including a literary-critical essay. Readings may include selections from the works of Augustine, Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, Malcolm X, Bill Clinton, and Tina Turner.
WS I: New York Stories
K10.0349 WSI, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Andrea Scott
Almost every American writer undergoes a New York phase. In this writing course students explore how the experience of dwelling in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities has shaped modern literature. Students use their writing as a tool to ask questions such as: How do the city’s rhythms and ways enter the syntax of literary speech? What is the relationship between urban space and literary representation? A range of “New York” experiences will be scrutinized, including the democratic vistas of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the detached flaneur of Frank O’Hara’s midtown “lunch poems,” the Renaissance personae of Ralph Ellison’s fiction, the subway underworld of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Man-Moth,” and the intellectual milieu of Joan Didion’s Upper West Side. Students will compose a series of essays that may include descriptive, analytical, and comparative writing. The course will culminate in a literary critical paper.
WS I: Writing for the Sciences, Writing for the Arts
K10.0350 WSI, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Benedick Turner
We often think of art and science as opposites. We use the designations “scientist” and “artist” (or “student of the arts”) to divide our studies and our careers, perhaps even our personalities. But is the definition between these two fields as clear as we think? Artists examine evidence and form hypotheses, and scientists rely on inspiration and creativity to make their discoveries. How would Leonardo da Vinci classify himself? Would he even understand the distinction? In this course we will explore the common ground between art and science, think about the reasons we conceive of them as opposites, and attempt to understand the differences between writing in the sciences and writing in the arts. Students will write a series of essays, progressing from the informal and exploratory to the formal and critical. Texts will include essays by Francis Bacon, E.M. Forster, Jacob Bronowski, Dianne Ackerman, Evelyn Fox Keller, Matthew Goulish, and Alan Lightman.
WS I: Writing in Times of Historical Crisis
K10.0351 WSI, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Joseph Rezek
One of the most lasting rules of culture remains that crises in history provoke literary expression. When the structures of society are threatened, writers, essayists, novelists, dramatists, and poets often try to shape the world around them through the power of their language. In this course, we will examine the relationship between literature and political or social upheaval. We will examine writing inspired by events such as the French Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, and contemporary conflicts. Through journal responses, several short essays and one longer literary critical essay, we will investigate historical crises and the writing that came out of them. Readings may include essays by Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Carlyle, Thoreau, Edward Said, Susan Sontag and Katha Pollitt; narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs; and fiction by Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and John Updike.
WS I: America the Multicultural
K10.0352 WSI, 4 CR F 11:00-1:45 Manu Chander
In this course we read and write about questions of identity, immigration, ethnicity, and race as they figure in a range of American texts. Students will write and revise a series of essays of increasing complexity while critically reading “minority writers” who comprise an emerging multicultural canon. Among our questions: What is the usefulness, what are the limitations of various cultural categories? How does our own writing reflect our relationship to culture? How can our personal experiences of culture shape our critical investigations into the complexity of American identity/identities? Authors considered may include James Baldwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jamaica Kincaid, Ito Romo, Frank Chin, and Yusef Komunyakaa.
WS I: The Faith Between Us
K10.0353 WSI, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Scott Korb
Look at the headlines, flip through a magazine, or click the link to your favorite blog, and increasingly you’ll find that whether faith comes between us, separating one believer from another, or lives between us, forming the glue that holds communities together, is a question we all must face. Through a consideration of a variety of contemporary religion writing—mostly from newspapers, popular magazines, journals, and websites—this course will ask students to take their own excursions into faith and faithlessness, and through a process of writing, workshopping, and the all-important rewriting, create the stories that, in Joan Didion’s words, “we tell ourselves in order to live.” Readings will include pairings of essays by writers including Reza Aslan and Karen Armstrong, Paul Elie and Marilynne Robinson, Peter Manseau and Darcey Steinke, Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges, Sam Harris, and Irshad Manji.
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.