First-Year Program
All courses in the First-Year Program are restricted to Gallatin first-year students only.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Imagining Identity and Difference
K10.0031 FYIS, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 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's Imagined Communities, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, Marx's "The Fetishism of the Commodity," Said's Orientalism, and Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Look."
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: The Social Construction of Reality
K10.0032 FYIS, 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 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, René Descartes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Maxine Hong Kingston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herman Melville, Walter Lippmann, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, Jonathan Lear and John Berger.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Family
K10.0035 FYIS, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Patrick McCreery
The concept of "family" is contentious: politicians seek to define it, marketers struggle to reach it, media makers attempt to represent it, and many individuals hope to transcend it. This course offers both a critical examination of family and an introduction to the academic disciplines that study it. In the United States, legal, social, and personal definitions of family are constantly being established and abandoned, expanded and limited. This fluidity exists partly because historical processes such as slavery, immigration, and demands for gay rights can re-shape popular conceptualizations of family. Likewise, academic disciplines such as history, sociology, biology, law, literature, and literary theory routinely offer new and sometimes contradictory ways of understanding family. This course will use these disciplines to illuminate the complicated ideas and emotions that can surround what arguably are our closest relationships. Works we may study include Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were, Nelkin and Lindee's DNA Mystique, and the photography of Sally Mann.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Travel Fictions
K10.0043 FYIS, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Steve Hutkins
The 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. Focusing on novels and short stories, this course 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. Readings may include James' Daisy Miller, Mann's Death in Venice Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, and McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers, as well as articles on the history, sociology, politics, and economics of travel and tourism.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: The Self and the Call of the Other
K10.0049 FYIS, 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.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: The City and the Grassroots
K10.0050 FYIS, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 René F. 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.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Incivility in the Age of Civil Society
K10.0057 FYIS, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 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?
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Sports, Race and Politics
K10.0059 FYIS, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Millery Polyné
Beyond spectacular touchdowns and walk-off grand slams, sport in the Americas remains a vital institution for analyzing the ideological/theoretical frameworks of nationalism, diplomacy, corruption, race, gender and sexuality, and aesthetics. From Joe Louis's historic fight against Max Schmeling in June 1936 to concerns of sexuality in the NFL, NBA and WNBA, sport should be understood beyond masculine bravado, violence and the joy and agony of competition, but also as a serious vehicle for conceptualizing and analyzing cultural, political and economic issues that shape society. This course examines sports (baseball, boxing, soccer, basketball and cricket), primarily from a U.S. and Latin American/Caribbean context, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In what ways do these sports reify concepts of race and gender? How is it utilized as a tool of diplomatic relations? Through primary document analysis and secondary source readings such as Adrian Burgos's Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line, and Grant Farred's Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football and C.L.R James's Beyond a Boundary this course will allow students to further assess the significance of sport in shaping culture and politics in our global society.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Ritual and Art from Prehistory to the Present
K10.0062 FYIS, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Laurin Raiken
How do we understand the origins of art? What can we mean when we use the word art? What is the continuing relationship between ritual and art? This seminar explores ritual and art among first peoples and ancient societies through major expressions of indigenous and western cultures. We follow paths of evidence from the earliest rituals evoked in archaeologist Randall White's Dark Caves, Bright Visions: Life in Ice Age Europe to Jane Harrison's study of ritual as the bridge from "lived life" into art in ancient Greece during Karl Jasper's "axial age." We note the braiding of ritual and art in Arnold van Gennep's Rites of Passage, their role in play in historian Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, and in anthropologists Paul Radin, Dorothy Lee and Edmund Carpenter's recording of American Indian ritual drama. The seminar engages ritual in modern urban life through Georg Simmel and Richard Sennett's studies of the "Metropolis and Mental Life;" in visual art through the performance life of twentieth century Dada, Jackson Pollock's attachment to Navajo ritual sand paintings, and Allan Kaprow's "Happenings." The seminar concludes with Victor Turner's From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play as a guide to the major twentieth century innovations of Jerzy Grotowski's "Poor Theatre" and Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed. Student work will explore how we continue to imagine the interplay of ritual, art and the building of community.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: The Scientific Revolution
K10.0063 FYIS, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Matthew Stanley
Science is today one of the most powerful ways to understand the world. But there was a time when all the foundations of modern science—experiments, theories, mathematics, scientific instruments—were considered radical, unreliable, and unjustified. The period when these foundations came to be accepted is known as the Scientific Revolution. This was the era of Copernicus, Newton, and Galileo pioneering dramatically new ways of thinking about the universe and humanity's place in it, and this course explores how these new ways came to be accepted. We will look at not just the great achievements of the Scientific Revolution, but also how those achievements were crucially interdependent on the contemporary context of society, politics, religion, printing, and art. We will discuss why science appeared when and where it did, how science impacted society, and how we can retain the power of science while also acknowledging that it is fundamentally a human enterprise. Readings include works by Aristotle, Copernicus, Descartes, Boyle, Vesalius, William Harvey, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Pascal, Newton, and Leibniz, as well as selections from Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump, Adrian John's Nature of the Book, Daston and Park's Wonders and the Order of Nature, Shapin's Social History of Truth, Ginzburg's The cheese and the Worms, and T.S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Globalization: Promises and Discontents
K10.0064 FYIS, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Ritty Lukose
In popular and scholarly discourse, the term "globalization" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, "globalization" references the sense that we are now living in a deeply and ever-increasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization. Running through the course are three central concerns: 1) exploring claims about the "new-ness" of globalization from historical perspectives, 2) examining how a variety of social and cultural worlds mediate globalization and 3) analyzing a contested politics of globalization in which the opportunities for social mobility and transformation are pitted against renewed intensifications of exploitation and vulnerability along long-standing vectors of difference and inequality. While "globalization" is often touted as a "flattening" of the world, this course moves beyond such clichés to understand the intersection between large-scale transformations in political economy and culture and multiple cultural worlds situated unevenly on the world's map.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Beyond Language: The Surreal, the Monstrous, and the Mystical
K10.0065 FYIS, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Gregory Erickson
Texts of the surreal, the monstrous, and the mystical are portrayals of experiences that, while they may be outside traditional logic, are clearly central to the human imagination. The texts studied in this course will reveal these experiences as metaphors of anxiety, depictions of radical subjectivity, and as manifestations of our unconscious fears and desires. Students are presented with the fascinating but difficult project of researching, interpreting, and describing irrational mental states often said to be “beyond language,” yet existing within language. Through discussion, informal writing, and experiential activities, we will take various approaches to understanding depictions of these experiences as well as their surrounding discourse. We will focus on issues of order vs. chaos, logic vs. irrationality, chance and fate, immanence and transcendence, self and other, and the concepts of nothingness, the uncanny, and the posthuman. Readings will include essays from diverse fields such as psychology (Freud, Lacan), science (Hawking, Sagan, Gleick), and literary and cultural theory (Haraway, Beal, Kurzweil), as well as surrealistic poetry, literary monster narratives from the Bible to Dracula, mystical and devotional texts, and testimonies of paranormal encounters. We will also look at visual art, installation art, film, and television.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: War and Peace
K10.0066 FYIS, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Hannah Gurman
“We make war that we may live in peace.” Thus did Aristotle justify war in his time. This explanation has since been echoed, adapted, and refuted by many who have grappled with the brutality and devastation of war in their own time. Ben Franklin argued that, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” And John F. Kennedy pronounced it an “unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.” Explanations of war and peace have been especially important in the last one hundred years, the bloodiest in human history. All told, as many as 170 million people died in wars in the twentieth century. In addition to the dead, there are the wounded and survivors, who struggle with the loss and destruction left in war’s wake. The sheer pervasiveness and devastation of armed conflict in our time prompts fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of war. Why do countries go to war? Is there such a thing as a good war? Can war be prevented, and if so, how? We will explore these and related questions through classical as well as modern texts in political theory, history, and literature. Readings will include Thucydides, Grotius, Kant, Sassoon, Morgenthau, Heller, Ehrenreich, and Ghandi.
First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: The Poverty of Literature
K10.0067 FYIS, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Amy Huber
Literature can offer a window into the experience of being poor, but it also shapes and enacts cultural assumptions about the causes, nature, and phenomenology of poverty. In this seminar we will attend to poverty as it has been constituted in American literature, mindful of the ways that literary discourses on poverty have been central to debates about social justice, citizenship, political reform, and racial and gender identities. Considerations of class are often introduced as part of the critical triumvirate of race/ gender/ class, but a critical engagement with poverty can also confound these categories and expose some of the blind spots and hierarchies that inform conventional notions of social difference and identity. Does poverty pose a unique representational and ideological crisis for the United States, where profound structural inequality and pervasive doctrines of social equality converge? Our primary readings will focus on American authors—Herman Melville, Tillie Olsen, Richard Wright, James Agee, Dorothy Allison—who are particularly self-conscious about the problems poverty poses for aesthetics as well as politics. What if anything can the literary say about poverty that the literal cannot?
First-Year Writing Seminar: Aesthetics on Trial
K10.0319 FYWS, 4 CR TR 6:20-7:35 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.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Artists' Lives, Artists' Work
K10.0323 FYWS, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Yevgeniya Traps
What is the relationship between art and life, between the luxury of creating and the necessity of surviving? In this writing seminar, we will explore the many ways artists' experiences and the circumstances of creation influence artists' work. How are artists shaped by the societies in which they live? How do family background, historical events, political movements, social disruptions, and celebrity influence our creations? How do artists, in turn, shape their societies' attitudes and values? Focusing on how art and writing reveal the effects of race, gender, sexuality, and politics in the second half of the 20th century, we will consider a number of works in their contexts. Using writing as a way of thinking critically, students will produce descriptive, analytical, and literary-critical essays. Readings may include works by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Writing Twentieth-Century Music and Culture
K10.0333 FYWS, 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 writing seminar 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, analytical essays and a literary-critical essay. 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, Amiri Baraka and others.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Writers on Writing
K10.0343 FYWS, 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 words in describing writing as "an ax for the frozen sea within us." Mario Vargas Llosa claimed the secret reason for the literary vocation is the questioning of real life. Gustave Flaubert stressed the limitations of language, as "a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the while we long to move the stars to pity." In this course, students write critical essays that are inspired by writing about writing. Our texts, exemplary works in various genres, include essays by Orwell, Joan Didion and Carlos Fuentes; selections from the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Witold Gombrowicz; Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Lhosa's Letters to a Young Novelist and selected letters by Sor Juana de la Cruz; Lillian Ross's New Yorker "profile" of Ernest Hemingway; short stories about the writing life by E.L. Doctorow, Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore; and James Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Student writing will culminate in a literary-critical essay.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Forms of Love
K10.0345 FYWS, 4 CR TR 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, Dan Savage on parental love, Stephanie Koontz's History of Marriage, and Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse; literary texts include drama by Neil LaBute, memoir by Jamaica Kincaid, fiction by Jane Smiley and Yukio Mishima, and poetry by Emily Bronte 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.
First-Year Writing Seminar: The Faith Between Us
K10.0353 FYWS, 4 CR MW 8:00-9:15 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.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Wilderness and Civilization
K10.0357 FYWS, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Andrew Libby
The ruin of the environment begins with agriculture. With this assertion Paul Shepard sharpens a modern tradition of radical environmental thinking that ranges from Rousseau to Elizabeth Kolbert. In this course, we will consider some of the basic issues behind our urges to protect, and squander, the environment. If the environment includes wilderness, how does such wildness relate to our own sense of who we are? How wild, how civilized, are we? Is homo sapiens hard-wired for violence? To what extent do our current forms of economic and social organization allow or prohibit us from accommodating ourselves to the world around us? In this seminar, we will write about these issues and imagine realistic alternative futures. Authors may include Matsuo Basho, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, Black Elk, Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Abbey, Paul Shepard, Elizabeth Kolbert, Alice Walker, and Cormac McCarthy.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Collage: From Art to Life and Back
K10.0361 FYWS, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Eugene Vydrin
This writing seminar will explore the implications of making the new from the ready-made, of constructing one's own from what was—and remains—somebody else's. By definition, collage aims at reintegrating art and life, so we will also examine how collage-work models a new society, an alternative system of human relations, and demands that our current life be remade. We will work with examples of both visual and verbal collage, discuss some classic works of theory, and explore instances of collage in contemporary urban life. Readings may include essays by Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss, and Marjorie Perloff. Our canon of literary collage will include works by Tristan Tzara, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe. We will examine visual collage in the work of Picasso, Rauschenberg, Cornell, and Godard.
First-Year Writing Seminar: What is the Avant-Garde?
K10.0363 FYWS, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Jenelle Troxell
Perhaps the most famous piece of avant-garde art is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which was just a regular urinal displayed as art. This intentional transgression of the "normal" boundaries of art, literature, and film is at the heart of the avant-garde. But what exactly are these boundaries, how do they get established and what does it mean to transgress them? In analytical essays and a literary-critical essay, we will explore the avant-garde aesthetic in literature and film, focusing on the avant-garde's rhetoric of shock as well as its critical stance towards the culture industry. Course materials may include manifestos and other work by Karl Marx, Filippo Tommasso Marinetti, Mina Loy, Tristan Tzara, and André Breton; theory by Peter Burger, Clement Greenberg, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno; films by Germaine Dulac, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Maya Deren, and other media.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Utopic/Dystopic America
K10.0365 FYWS, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Hannah Gurman
“In the beginning, all the world was America,” proclaimed John Locke in 1690. Since its “discovery” by the Europeans, “America” has stereotypically been portrayed as the closest thing to utopia on earth—a land of freedom, democracy, and plenty, so resplendent as to be almost unreal. This utopian vision has made the more sobering struggle for freedom, equality, and wealth in America and in the world shaped by its influence and ideals all the more unsettling. Dystopic visions of life in America and under its influence are as charged and powerful as their utopian counterparts. Through a combination of informal response papers and analytical essays, students will explore the social and political implications of mythical and nightmarish invocations of America in the twentieth century as well as in earlier periods. Texts will include essays and speeches of Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hannah Arendt, Malcolm X, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Marge Piercy, films of Stanley Kubrick and Michael Moore, as well as presidential speeches and official government documents.
First-Year Writing Seminar: American War Stories
K10.0366 FYWS, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Morgan Schulz
Ernest Hemingway wrote, “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” Yet war ironically has produced some of the most compelling and humane narratives the world over, and certainly American war writing is no exception. American war writing varies across genres from Walt Whitman’s Civil War diary and the letters of Clara Barton to Tim O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried and Susan Sontag’s editorial, “Regarding the Pain of Others.” In this course, we will look through multiple lenses at the American experience of war since the Civil War. As we consider and analyze what we read, and through our own writing, we will explore various modes in our writing, including the use of narration, description, reportage, and argument. We will practice strategies of the writing process—freewriting, multiple drafting, and editing. Requirements include three essays and a literary critical essay. Readings may also include works by Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, Frances Fitzgerald, Michael Herr, and Anthony Swofford.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Visual Texts
K10.0367 FYWS, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Amy Huber
The force of the familiar claim that a picture is worth a thousand words is curiously undercut by the reliance on words to deliver that news. Is there a way for us to apprehend an image without thinking it through language, or to read a text without conjuring our own visuals? Why do we so often think of the tensions between image and text as a contest in which one form is necessarily more accurate, immediate or capable of encouraging us to see, to feel or to know what we did not before? In this course we will read a number of theoretical essays on politics and aesthetics to orient our work, but we will focus on modern or contemporary texts that offer some form of collaboration between images and text, in the form of fiction, documentary, novel, or graphic novel. These readings will be drawn from authors as diverse as W.G. Sebald, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, James Agee, Susan Sontag and Joe Sacco. Students will write, revise, and workshop a series of analytical essays that culminate in a final, extended critical reading that considers texts and images in concert, as forms that tend to rely on one another, even when they assert their own specificity.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Science on the Margins
K10.0368 FYWS, 4 CR TR 6:20-7:35 José Perillán
Is the "scientific method" a myth—an illusion propagated by the scientific establishment to maintain an aura of logic, objectivity, and inevitability? Science is a human enterprise, so it shouldn’t shock us to realize that there is a good deal of politics that infuse our national and international scientific policies and agendas. In reality, how extensive is this ‘human’ influence? This writing seminar will look at the advancement of science in the modern world and tensions between innovation and orthodoxy. Students will write, workshop and revise three essays and a literary critical essay. Readings may include: essays by Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Albert Einstein, David Bohm, Rachel Carson, and Erwin Schrodinger; excerpts from fiction by Mary Shelley and Carl Sagan; a memoir by James Watson; and Evelyn Fox Keller's biography of Barbara McClintock.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Popular Music and Identity
K10.0369 FYWS, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Gregory Erickson
Recent decades have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of critical attention given to the study of popular music. More than just entertainment for the young, popular music has been established as an important cultural force, especially its role in the creation, negotiation, and articulation of cultural, ethnic and geographical identities. In this course, we will think and write about the various effects popular music can have on identity: as a link to one’s past, as part of defining a subculture or creating an imagined community, as an expression of sexuality, gender, nation, or race, and as a form of resistance to dominant ideologies. Genres of music studied may include minstrel shows, jazz, blues, R&B, pop, punk, metal, disco, hip hop, and electronica. We will also study Latino and South Asian genres such as bachata and bhangra in exploring issues of diasporic and post-colonial identities. Students will be responsible for online postings and discussions, informal reaction papers, three short essays, collaborative workshopping, an oral presentation, and a final literary-critical essay on a subject of the student’s choice. Theoretical readings will include works of cultural studies scholars, social theorists, and musicologists such as Robert Walser, Tricia Rose, George Lipsitz, Susan McClary, Tia DeNora, Richard Middleton, Simon Frith, Kevin Dettmar, Greil Marcus, Chuck Klosterman, and Dick Hebdige.
First-Year Writing Seminar: Writing New York City
K10.0370 FYWS, 4 CR TR 8:00-9:15 Robert Huddleston
From the great waves of immigration in the nineteenth century all the way through the end of the millennium, New York has beckoned as a site where people come to lose or rediscover themselves, the life unfolding within what Paul Auster has called its “inexhaustible space” reflecting not only intense personal upheavals but also larger historical shifts. In this class, we will use our own writing to explore narratives about New York and to consider how individual experiences of the city intersect with broader historical conditions. Through regular informal writing as well as a series of finished essays, including a literary critical essay, we will examine stories of how New York has inspired euphoria and dejection, contentment and restlessness, exhilarating feelings of belonging or unrelenting isolation. Authors we will read may include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frederico García Lorca, Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Paul Auster, Joseph O’Neill, and others. We will pair these texts with works by photographers and filmmakers including Alfred Stieglitz, Ben Shahn, Robert Frank, and Chiara Clemente.
First-Year Writing Seminar: What is Terror? Literature and Critiques of Violence
K10.0371 FYWS, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Amy Huber
In this writing seminar we will consider both the routine violence of everyday life—what Michael Taussig has called “terror as usual”—and more monumental, episodic forms of state and organized violence. We will try to understand what comes to count as violence and why. We will also ask what literature can do that perhaps history or philosophy cannot to help us fathom or survive violence, or to better comprehend how violence travels, passes hands, and how it might be abated. This course works across disciplines and media, but close attention to language, our own and others, is at the heart of our shared project. Readings will include essays and fiction by Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, Dave Eggers, Jamaica Kincaid, Joe Sacco, Edward Said, and others. Students will write analytical essays and one longer critical literary piece to be shared, edited and resubmitted.
First-Year Writing Seminar: The Politics of Change
K10.0372 FYWS, 4 CR MW 6:20-7:35 Hannah Gurman
President Obama’s campaign motto, “Change You Can Believe In,” highlighted the need for change in American politics and in the world more broadly. At the same time, it also raised questions about what is actually meant by change and how real change is brought about. Should change be gradual or radical? Does change take place at the level of the individual or the collective? From the abolitionist and women’s movements of the nineteenth century to the anti-globalization and environmental movements of today, these questions have long divided individuals and groups who have sought to change the socio-political order on a grand scale. Through a series of informal response papers and polished analytical essays, we will explore our own conceptions of how to “change the system” today as well as examine the contours of the great debates of anti-systemic change in the past. Texts will include essays, speeches, and literature of journalists, poets, politicians, and activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, Karl Marx, Audre Lorde, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Pollan, and Barack Obama.
WS II: Myths and Fables in Popular Culture
K10.0639 WSII, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Patricia Lennox
Myths, fables, folk tales, and fairy tales are universal. Their heroes, villains, gods and monsters are as old as storytelling and as new as the latest award-winning film. In this class we will examine some of these stories and their histories, watching the shifts in emphasis as they are retold and adapted, but also considering why certain mythic figures, such as the vampire, gain greater currency in contemporary tales. Our research will focus on old and new versions of tales, their cultural construction and the critical discourse surrounding them. It will serve as the springboard for a series of exercises focused on research methods, several short writing assignments, and a major 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, Jack Zipes, and Nina Auerbach.
