First-Year Program
All courses in the First-Year Program are restricted to Gallatin first-year students only.
WS II: The Lure of Beauty
K10.0619 WSII, 4 CR TR 6:20-7:45 Christopher Trogan
Why is beauty so powerful? What attracts us to someone or something beautiful? In this course, we will begin with the most fundamental question of all: What is beauty? To explore this question, we will contemplate how artists, philosophers, psychologists, and writers have understood the term cross-culturally. We will then consider the fate of beauty in the twentieth century leading up to the present. Of critical importance is the question of how beauty fits into our lives and whether beauty is an objective feature of things or a feature determined by context. In addition to museum and gallery trips, students will compose essays and work on a research project. Texts may include works from Plato, Kant, Baudelaire, Thomas Mann, Arthur Danto, and Nancy Etcoff.
WS II: Imagining Cities
K10.0622 WSII, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Stacy Pies
This course looks at the way the modern and post-modern city has been - and is being - imagined by writers, artists, urban planners, architects, philosophers, and historians. Our focus will be on concepts of the city and theories of urban experience, especially in relation to ideas about modernity. We will read, discuss and write about urban environments of the past, present, and future, including real cities like New York, Paris, and L.A., and cities dreamed up by urbanists like Paolo Soleri and Le Corbusier. We will consider the urban phenomena of the crowd, the neighborhood, notions of public and private space, and the cultural mix of the modern city. Students will conduct research projects on cities in their areas of interest. Texts may include essays by writers and philosophers Poe, Baudelaire, Barthes, and Benjamin; by urbanists Jacobs, Mumford, Mike Davis, and Matt Gandy, as well as films and photographs.
WS II: Writing Beyond Language: The Surreal, the Monstrous, and the Mystical
K10.0648 WSII, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 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. Students of these texts are presented with the fascinating but difficult project of researching, interpreting, and describing irrational mental states often said to be “beyond language.” This course will focus on writing about these texts, addressing the task of producing clear, logical prose about experiences that challenge this possibility. Through discussion, informal writing, and a series of essays we will take various approaches to understanding depictions of these experiences as well as the surrounding discourse. Writing projects will focus on description, explication, comparison, and analysis, and will culminate in a research essay. Readings will include essays in psychology (Freud), science (Hawking, Sagan), and literary and cultural theory (Haraway, Beal), as well as surrealistic poetry, mystical and devotional texts, and testimonies of paranormal encounters.
WS II: Coming Home: Contemporary Narratives of Return
K10.0652 WSII, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Jennifer Lemberg
The enormous and often violent upheavals of the twentieth century have led to massive shifts in human populations through immigration and displacement, experiences that have come to be central to contemporary narratives. In particular, the theme of returning to places from which one's family or ethnic group originated has emerged as an important topic in recent literature and theory. In this course, contemporary depictions of going home in the aftermath of personal upheavals and major historical events will serve as the impetus for the development of critical reading, writing, and research skills. Through exploratory writing and formal assignments culminating in a research paper, we will interrogate the notion of "home" and consider the possible meanings of return. Our close readings and essays will consider how the concept of home encompasses spaces known briefly or well, deeply familiar or merely imagined, and how our understanding of home reflects our ideas about our personal and collective identities. We will read essays, memoir, and fiction by authors who may include Tim O'Brien, Sherman Alexie, Eva Hoffman, and Jonathan Safran Foer, among others.
WS II: Writing About the American South
K10.0654 WSII, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Stephen Wetta
In this class we will read and write about the influence of the south, through its musical, literary and religious styles, on American culture at large. Students will write and revise several papers leading to a longer research project. Topics will include southern musical idioms such as blues, jazz, country, rock and roll, and soul; the powerful right-wing evangelism of Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson; the regional literary genius of William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Ishmael Reed, Zora Neale Hurston and Charles Chesnutt; and the populist politics of George Wallace (later refined by Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes), with its grasp of blue-collar values and suburban anxieties. Readings may include selections from Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, the essay collection I’ll Take My Stand, H. L. Mencken’s “The Sahara of the Bozarts,” and brief samples from fiction writers and poets.
WSII: Writing the Environment
K10.0662 WSII, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Catherine Siemann
In this class, we will look at ways of imagining and approaching the natural environment through writing. Beginning with the Romantic engagement with the natural sublime, we will examine writing about nature in its various manifestations, from travelogue to activism. Topics for reading and writing might include global warming, ecofeminism, sustainable engineering and architecture, and species extinction. Readings will include Wordsworth, Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, and Al Gore, as well as other contemporary nature and environmental writing. Papers will center on description and criticial analysis, and the final research paper will be on a related topic of the student’s own choosing.
WSII: Writing about the American Character
K10.0663 WSII, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Julie Bleha
We will examine the literary performance of the American character as we read works from our national literature. We use the trope of performance - as evinced in the popular drama of 19th c. New York City - to begin a dialogue on the American voice, and we apply the tenets of logic and rhetoric to develop our writing on this theme. Through frequent in-class writing exercises, several short essays, and a longer research paper, we consider the following questions: How is the idea of America constructed? How does the dramatic canon represent America? What are the different American voices we read and hear? What and how does your critical writing voice add to the dialogue? Though we begin and end in the term referring to performance and dramatic traditions, we will read in other genres such as poetry, history, and essays, and explore expressions of the American voice and character. Works may include those by Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, Rea Tajiri, Spalding Gray, and Suzan-Lori Parks.
WSII: Language and the Political
K10.0664 WSII, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Andrew Libby
Can language affect politics? How have writers and activists sought to change society through changing language? How is rhetoric used politically, in essays, oratory, propaganda, and poetry? We will read arguments about the relationship of language and the political, examine political rhetoric, and look at literary works. We will write about rhetoric’s power to form and criticize political movements, such as movements for civil rights, rights for women, human rights, workers’ rights, and animal rights. We will explore how language participates in our ideas about rights, ethics, political action, and social justice. In the course of our inquiries, students will write three papers and one longer project, in which students research an area of social justice vital to them. Our sources may include passages from Plato, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Martin Luther King, Jr., Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Spike Lee, and Ursula LeGuin.
WSII: Food Culture and Food Writing
K10.0665 WSII, 4 CR MW 8:00-9:15 Scott Korb
We love food and it haunts us. We indulge in it and abstain from it. It makes us sick and it heals us. We worry over where it comes from and serve it during our religious rituals. We pay a fortune for it and we give it away. Its preparation is a science and an art. With a major focus on crafting the research essay, this course asks students to consider the many, often contradictory, roles food has played, and continues to play, in culture. And through a process of writing, workshopping, and the all-important rewriting, students will have their own hand in the kitchen of the essay writer. Readings require a consideration of a variety of food writing - from primary sources, cookbooks, newspapers, magazines, and journals - and include works by David Foster Wallace, M.F.K. Fisher, John McPhee, Ruth Reichl, A.J. Liebling, and Michael Pollan.
WSII: Why War?
K10.0669 WSII, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz
Why has war been a constant of human societies? Why is war such an object of philosophical and aesthetic fascination? And what to do with the almost endless metaphorical extensions of the concept of war (e.g., “the war on terror,” “the war on drugs,” even Hobbes’ famous description of “the war of all against all” or Marx’s description of capitalist society as “civil war”)? In this writing class, we’ll answer these questions and others, placing a particular emphasis on the dilemmas and difficulties, at once ethical and stylistic, of writing about war. In a series of writing assignments of various genres (including literary criticism, theoretical essay, and research paper), we’ll attempt to come to terms with the “spectacle” of war; that is, the conventional aesthetic forms by which war is depicted in literature and film, and other, less familiar or relatively overlooked scenes of war. Readings may include: Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein on the psychoanalysis of war; Susan Sontag and Judith Butler on Abu Ghraib; Nicolo Machiavelli on the art of war; fiction by Virginia Woolf, John Okada, Marguerite Duras, and Tim O’Brien; poetry of civil war by Walt Whitman and Herman Melville; films (to be screened outside of class) by Errol Morris, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Gilo Pontecorvo.
WSII: Writing in Historical Crisis
K10.0670 WSII, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Joseph Rezek
Historical crises 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 consider writing inspired by the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the events of September 11, 2001. Through journal responses, several short essays and a research paper, 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, John Updike, and Don DeLillo.
WSII: Decolonization: Political Event, Personal Event
K10.0671 WSII, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Beata Potocki
In this writing seminar we will consider various efforts to undo the pervasive effects of colonialism, by examining texts and films that explore the political dimension of colonialism as well as its impact on individual psyche and culture. We will read texts spanning different genres--psychoanalytical case studies, critical theory, essays, poetry and fiction - and engage in careful examination of ideas through textual analysis. In the course of our inquiries, students will practice developing and supporting their own theses and arguments through the close examination of texts. Students will write three short critical papers and a longer research paper. Readings may include works by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Edward Said, Desmond Tutu, Toni Morrison, Aimé Césaire, Marguerite Duras, Alejo Carpentier, J.M. Coetzee, James Baldwin. We will also watch selected episodes from films, including Apocalypse Now, The Last King of Scotland, Beau Travail.
WSII: Art and the Dream Life
K10.0672 WSII, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Yevgeniya Traps
What is the connection between sleeping and waking life, between dream visions and creativity? Are dreams prophetic or aesthetic? Do they fulfill desire or endlessly frustrate it? Do they reveal or conceal our truest selves? Taking these issues as our starting points, we will consider a variety of texts - scientific, religious, philosophical, literary, visual, and film, as well as our own dreams - as we explore the connections between sleep and aesthetics, between nightmares and trauma, between dreams and beauty. We will think too about the possibilities art offers for reconciling the many paradoxes of dreaming. Using writing as a way of thinking and reading critically, students will produce a dream journal, three analytical and literary critical essays, and a research paper. Readings may include works by Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, André Breton, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, Luis Borges, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, and Walt Whitman. We may also consider art by Surrealists, Dadaists and Kara Walker, as well as the films of Luis Buñuel, David Cronenberg, and Alfred Hitchcock.
WSII: Abroad in America
K10.0673 WSII, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Kimberly Lewis
Throughout the past two centuries, the myth and the lure of America have led many traveling writers to our shores. Some come with preconceptions, prejudice, and skepticism, and others arrive with admiration, enthusiasm, and envy. More often than not, these writers find themselves revising their visions of America and better defining their own values and national identities in the process. Their writings - letters, essays, fiction, poetry, and travelogues - contribute to the American identity as well, creating lasting images of the America they travel, examine, and observe. Students will write responses and several critical essays, all of which will culminate in a final research paper. Readings may include writing by Federico Garcia Lorca, Margherita Sarfatti, Alexis de Tocqueville, José Martí, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Italo Calvino, Bernard Henri Lévi, Jean Baudrillard, and Luisa Valenzuela.
WSII: Immigration and Identity
K10.0674 WSII, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Lauren Walsh
In this course we will examine the complex and varying experiences of recent immigrant populations. We will explore the perspectives of immigrants who see themselves as outsiders and the experiences of immigrants who see themselves as insiders within a relocated immigrant ethnic culture. We will consider what these perspectives show us about belonging and alienation, about being part of a group or being the “Other.” This course asks: What does it mean to be an immigrant today? What logistical, legal, emotional and psychological issues does it entail? What differences are there between 20th century immigrants' experiences and the lives of 21st century transnational immigrants? We will read and discuss fictional accounts drawn from actual immigrants' experiences and will supplement these with numerous historical, anthropological, autobiographical, literary critical and journalistic works. Students will write several essays throughout the semester, which will prepare them for the final research paper. Readings may include fiction by Samuel Selvon, Jamaica Kincaid and Jhumpa Lahiri, in addition to theoretical and historical texts by Benedict Anderson and Roger Daniels, among others, as well as social criticism by Barbara Ehrenreich.
WSII: The Surreal Thing
K10.0675 WSII, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Eugene Vydrin
The Surrealist movement sought to transform the self and the world, each one by way of the other. The world was to be remodeled in the image of the liberated psyche, alienation and repression overcome by a passionate exchange between the self and its environment. Inside and outside would continually change places as the psyche discovered its own desires written in the cipher of material things and assimilated these fragments of reality into its language of dreams. Inanimate objects would come to life, speaking the language of the self, while the self would take its place among them as a fellow thing of the world. This class will explore Surrealism as a method of perceiving the material world and a model for living in it. Essays will make arguments based on close readings of literary and theoretical texts, and students will also write a research essay. Readings may include essays by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, Mary Ann Caws, and James Clifford; poetry and prose by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Aimé Césaire, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery.
WS II: Image as Argument: Writing About Photography
K10.0676 WSII, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Jenelle Troxell
In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf refers to photographs as "statement[s] of fact addressed to the eye." Because of their unique claim to realistic representation, photographs are a potent form of polemic at work in our everyday world. But what exactly is the relationship of the image to the things it seems to document? How does it indicate what has been? Through a series analytical essays and a research essay we will explore the space between images and what they represent (and evoke). We will consider works by Woolf, Breton, Kracauer, Barthes, Sontag, Debord, among others, for whom reflections on the act of looking and thinking are just as important as descriptions of images themselves.
