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Courses of Instruction COURSES OF INSTRUCTION FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS genesis in France and its development as an Each fall every first-year student partici- international movement) and magic realism (as developed mainly in Latin America in the last pates in a First-Year Seminar, offered by a few decades). Students reflect on various images faculty member in his or her field of from these diverse sources and media (painting, expertise. The seminar topics offered each literature, cinema) while analyzing their power to reveal multiple levels of experience. Along with a year vary, as do the faculty members number of written assignments, the course teaching these courses. Examples of First- requires a multimedia computer project. Year Seminar courses include the follow- (Paiewonsky-Conde) ing: Typical readings: Freud, Dreams in Folklore, The Themes of the Three Caskets, Belief In Chance and Superstition; Jung, The Soul and Death, Dream 010 Bicultural America Biculturalism looms Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy; Buchowski, The large in America. Given the enormous Controversy Concerning The Rationality of Magic; immigration of people from all corners of the Apuleius, The Story of Psyche and Love; tales from world and the recent strengthening of ethnic Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Boccaccio’s identities, many Americans now live bicultural Decameron; Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism; lives. At the same time, mono-cultural paintings by Ernst, Magritte, Picasso, Dali, Miro; individuals are forced to rethink their own poetry by Eluard, Aragon, Desnos, Lorca, concepts of American society, as they live, work, Neruda; stories by Bombal, Borges, Cortazar, and and marry with bicultural partners. In this course, novels by Rulfo and Fuentes students explore the personal experience of biculturalism through several in-depth cases from 018 Genocide and the Modern Age The 20th biography and literature. Social scientific analysis century can aptly be described as the “Age of also helps students to understand all that it Genocide”—a century in which mass murder means to live “facing two ways.” (Dillon) and mass death marked the convergence of Typical readings: J. Kogawa, Obasan; N.S. modern organization, modern technology and Momaday, House Made of Dawn; W.E.B. DuBois, human propensities for violence and indifference Souls of Black Folk; some short stories by Puerto to violence. Students in this course examine the Rican-Americans; and selected brief history of genocide and its impact on culture, anthropological texts politics and religion. (Salter) Typical readings: Wiesel, Night; Hirsch, 017 Multiple Reality: The Unconscious in Genocide and the Politics of Memory; Camus, The Myth, Literature, and Art Death, dreams, desire Plague; Gourevitch, Stories from Rwanda; Homer, and the workings of chance: in this course students The Iliad; Dobkowski, Genocide and the Modern explore the use of the aesthetic image to delve Age; Chang, The Rape of Nanking; Balakian, Sad into these dimensions of reality usually out of Days of Light; and films and other media reach to our waking consciousness. Against a theoretical background that draws from 025 Odyssey and Enlightenment “Odyssey” is anthropological, psychoanalytic, linguistic and often defined as a long voyage, usually marked aesthetic sources, the journey begins with tales by changes in fortune or, in a figurative sense, it from antiquity, passes through the imagistic can be an intellectual or spiritual wandering. thinking of pre-scientific Renaissance physics and This first-year seminar is a voyage, or odyssey. cosmology, and arrives at two main artistic Students begin by reflecting on their own movements of the 20th century: surrealism (its experiences, trips, journeys and learning to date, 69 FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS and further consider these topics through fiction. Writing projects include critical essays, a viewing and discussing the film The Wizard of “create your own episode” exercise, and an Oz. Students then read, analyze, and discuss analytical final paper. (Rainville) works as seemingly diverse as an ancient Greek Typical readings: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter epic (Homer’s Odyssey); a medieval chivalric series published to date: Harry Potter and the romance (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight); an Sorcerer’s Stone; Harry Potter and the Chamber of end-of-the-nineteenth century novella set Secrets; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; primarily in Central Africa (Joseph Conrad’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; Harry Potter Heart of Darkness); a supposed children’s book set and the Order of the Phoenix; Harry Potter and the in an invented world and time (J.R.R. Tolkien’s Half Blood Prince; Elizabeth Heilman’s Harry The Hobbit); and a product of the 1950s and ’60s Potter’s World American Beat Movement (Jack Kerouac’s On the Road). These are complemented with films 038 Class and Gender Through the Lens of such as Apocalypse Now, Willow, and Thelma and Mozart’s Da Ponte Operas As a genre, 18th- Louise, as well as with Christopher Vogler’s text century Italian opera buffa depended for its The Hero’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. dramatic effect on a reversal of the customary The ultimate goal is to consider how our expectations of class and gender stereotypes held personal odyssey, which is not yet over, leads us by members of the middle-class. Nowhere is this toward enlightenment, awareness of others, self- reversal clearer and more effectively used than in discovery, and freedom. (Rainville) the three comic operas composed by Mozart for Vienna in the 1780s on texts supplied by the 028 The Ghost in the Machine This course librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. Thus, study of these explores, through Western culture, the question of delightful works provides insight into attitudes what it means to be human. Since Copernicus in the about what was considered proper behavior for Renaissance recognized that the earth circles the sun men and women among the three separate classes and isn’t the center of the universe; since Darwin of Viennese society (landed aristocracy, recognized that Homo sapiens is just one evolving professional middle class, and menial domestic species among many; since Freud showed that we are servants). Many of those attitudes and not just who we seem to ourselves, the status and expectations still may be found embedded in nature of the human has been contested and re- current European and American societies. This envisioned. Is “the human” an essential concept or a seminar uses the scenarios and the verbal and constructed one? Is what makes us human a matter of musical texts as a basis for considering issues of mind or consciousness? Does the human lie in our class and gender, then and now. This seminar capacity for language or dance or tool-using? Does it requires basic reading skills in music notation. lie in behavior or individuality or social order? To Taking Music 110 Introduction to Music Theory explore this fundamental question, students examine concurrently would cover the necessary notation the boundaries of the human: where the human before scores are used in class discussion. (Myers) meets the inhuman, where it meets the more than Typical readings: scores and librettos for human, where it meets the natural and where it Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Thus do they All, and meets the mechanistic. Each of these boundaries is Don Giovanni; Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville still turbulently being pushed and tested today. and The Marriage of Figaro, Steptoe, Mozart’s Da (Weiss, Crenner) Ponte Operas; Rousseau, The Social Contract; Typical readings: Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; excerpts on 18th-century class and gender Palahniuk, Fight Club; Asimov, The Final Question; Spielberg, AI; Faulkner, The Bear; 039 Feminism, Funk, Culture and Politics in Rymer, Genie: an Abused Child’s Flight from the Seventies This course takes as its starting Silence; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Dostoevsky, point the thesis that much of what we think of as The Grand Inquisitor characteristic of contemporary America, from technology to terrorism, finds its root in the 036 Aboard the Hogwarts Express Students decade of the 1970s. Drawing on contextual enter Harry Potter’s magical world, and readings by a range of historians, students accompany him through his first six years at examine writing and cultural objects of the era to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. consider the validity of this thesis. Texts include Readings and discussions of the primary texts and novels, essays, political speeches, photographs, critical scholarship address themes that emerge music, visual art and film. (Conroy-Goldman) from these works: good and evil; gender roles; life Typical readings: Schulman, The Seventies: The in the academy; family; civic leadership; magic Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics; and technology; and the traditional hero pattern. Frum, How We Got Here: the 70s; Brownmiller, Students especially examine the poetics of fiction Memoir of a Revolution; Levin, The Stepford Wives; targeted toward young people, and the politics of Didion, The White Album; movies, albums writing, editing, publishing, and marketing such 70 FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS 042 Mirrored Histories: Racism in the U.S. and 045 Reflecting Science Science does not exist South Africa This course examines the parallel in a vacuum; it is central to our culture and our structures of segregation in the U.S. and society. This seminar explores the role science apartheid in South Africa. The basic premise is plays in our world, and gives a new perspective that through the lens of another culture we can on its impact and significance. Students first come to examine our own culture and history. examine how scientists view themselves and The causes and effects of segregation and their work, through memoirs and popular apartheid on race relations are the central focus. accounts. Then students look at the intersection How race affects gender, class, and social spaces of science and the arts, considering how writers is explored throughout the readings.
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