FYS Fall 2022 Course Descriptions
Please note that this schedule may be subject to change, and student are encouraged not only to revisit this page but also to confirm the course listings in the online Directory of Classes.
FYS BC1189
THE ENCHANTED IMAGINATION
John J. Pagano
MW 11:40 am - 12:55 pm
A survey of fantasy works that examines the transformative role of the Imagination in aesthetic and creative experience, challenges accepted boundaries between the imagined and the real, and celebrates Otherness and Magicality in a disenchanted world. Readings will be selected from fairy tales, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest; Romantic poetry by Blake, Coleridge, Keats, and Dickinson; Romantic art by Friedrich, Waterhouse, and Dore; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Lewis Carroll's Alice books, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings; Magical Realist works by Borges, Garcia Marquez, and Allende; Sondheim & Lapine's Into the Woods, Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
FYS BC1196
MODERNISM IN THE CITY
Jennifer L. Rosenthal
TR 6:10 pm – 7:25 pm
In this course, we explore Modernism in literature, art, architecture, music and dance. How do these different disciplines express the explosive and jarring experiences of twentieth-century life? Primary sources will include the cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes, Bebop and Boogie Woogie jazz, Igor Stravinsky’s classical music “The Rite of Spring,” International Style architecture, and Alvin Ailey’s dance. Our classwork will be enriched by excursions throughout New York City.
FYS BC1294
ART, SEX AND AMERICAN CULTURE
Pamela Cobrin
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 pm
Sex is the ultimate forbidden public topic and yet from the New England Puritans' sermons to Bill Clinton's (in)famous affair, sex has often been publicly staged in dramatic, literary, religious, political, legal and social forums. In this seminar, we will explore how issues of sex and sexuality have insinuated themselves into the formation of American identity. We will examine texts from the seventeenth century to the present with a particular emphasis on the arts, politics and sex. Texts include Puritan sermons, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, literature from Margaret Sanger's birth control movement, and theoretical works by Michel Foucault, Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler.
FYS BC1469
LIBERATION
Manu Karuka
TR 6:10 pm - 7:25 pm
Liberation can be defined as freedom from limits on thought or behavior. More specifically, it can be defined as setting someone (or oneself) free from imprisonment, slavery, or oppression. This seminar examines political, philosophical, aesthetic, and theological traditions and movements for liberation, with an emphasis on collective liberation.
FYS BC1598
BUILDING UTOPIA
Ralph Ghoche
TR 10:10 am - 11:25 am
Building Utopia examines the rich tradition of utopian thinking in literature, social philosophy, architecture, and the visual arts. Here, utopia is explored in its modern form: as a call to transform the world through human planning and ingenuity. Aside from an important excursus on Thomas More’s pivotal novel Utopia (1516), the course centers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers whose often wild and idealistic imaginings profoundly affected the shape of the real world. We’ll read and explore the works of Charles Fourier, Edward Bellamy, the Italian Futurists, and Le Corbusier, among many others. The purpose of the course is to better understand the role that the utopian imagination has played in the construction of power.
FYS BC1601.001
REACTING TO THE PAST
Mark C. Carnes
MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
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FYS BC1601.002
REACTING TO THE PAST
Kristin Milnor
TR 8:40 am – 9:55 am
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FYS BC1601.003
REACTING TO THE PAST
Jennifer L. Worth
TR 4:10 pm - 5:25 pm
In these seminars, students play complex historical role-playing games informed by classic texts. After an initial set-up phase, class sessions are run by students. These seminars are speaking- and writing-intensive, as students pursue their assigned roles objectives by convincing classmates of their views. Examples of games played in First-Year Seminar Reacting class include: 1) The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C. explores a pivotal moment following the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, when democrats sought to restore democracy while critics, including the supporters of Socrates, proposed alternatives. The key text is Plato's Republic. 2) Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor examines a dispute between Confucian purists and pragmatists within the Hanlin Academy, the highest echelon of the Ming bureaucracy, taking Analects of Confucius as the central text. 3) The Trial of Anne Hutchinson revisits a conflict that pitted Puritan dissenter Anne Hutchinson and her supporters against Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop and the orthodox ministers of New England. Students work with testimony from Hutchinsons trial as well as the Bible and other texts. 4) Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor and the New Woman investigates the struggle between radical labor activists and woman suffragists for the hearts and minds of Bohemians, drawing on foundational works by Marx, Freud, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others.
FYS BC1709
DRAMA, THEATRE, AND ART
Patricia D. Denison
TR 11:40 am - 12:55 pm
Drama, Theatre, and Art will consider the ways in which the performing arts and the visual arts help change the ways we see art and life. Beginning with reimagined classics and Shakespeare’s plays, we will move to the 18th-21st centuries and note how views of individual agency, social justice, and collective responsibility have changed over time. We will also ask what the performing arts and visual arts of the past have to say about issues confronted in the arts of the present. This will help us to understand how evolving aesthetic movements such as realism, impressionism, and modernism promote and critique our cultural perspectives and our social values. Plays include Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs, and Yasmina Rez’s Art; novels include Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; musicals include Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George and Rachel Chavkin’s Hadestown. Art from The Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and other sites will promote student engagement with visual and verbal interactions and cross disciplinary conversations.
FYS BC1715
ARTS OF ADAPTATION
Monica Cohen
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
Can a ballet tell the same story as a Shakespeare tragedy? Do the violent fantasies of a fairytale shape romantic comedy? What does Bollywood have to do with Victorian England? Can ancient mythology animate slave narrative? Using as textual anchors Grimms’ Snow White, Ovid’s Medea, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this course will explore poems, paintings, films, musicals, dance, illustration, advertisement and song to consider the accretion of meaning that results when stories cross, historical, cultural, and generic borders.
FYS BC1722
WRITING AMERICAN LIVES
Kristin Carter
MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
This interdisciplinary course explores the problem of representing American experience, one’s own or someone else’s, in the context of a nation-state’s fraught history of self-fashioning. What motivates a person to tell his or her life story, or to investigate someone else’s, and how are these stories bound by both authors and readers to narratives of citizenship, belonging, and/or exclusion? What motivates a writer to share what she shares, and what motivates an audience to demand what it demands from her? What claims about the exemplary or excessive qualities of the life story are made, or are emulated, by the life story’s readers? In addition to critical consideration of biography and memoir in traditional media, your work in this class will include examinations of the fake memoir and the digital overshare; you will also be invited to curate a branded footprint of your own, using tools of new media.
FYS BC1725
MYSTICS: MEDIEVAL AND MODERN
Gregory Bryda
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 pm
This course will compare and contrast medieval and modern mysticism, or aspirations toward the sublime. Through careful examination of literature, art, and music, we will explore how peoples from distinct cultures and time periods engaged in various rhetorical strategies to express their union with God. We will discuss how mystics of all stripes, from Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century German nun, and Rebecca Cox Jackson, a formerly enslaved person in antebellum Philadelphia, to Kazimir Malevich, the founder of Soviet Suprematism, enlisted the written word, bodily gesture, vocalized song, and painted form in their attempts to convey the transcendent. Museum visits are required.
FYS BC1738
PERFORMING PUBLICS & POLITICAL ACTIVISM
Shayoni Mitra
TR 2:40 pm - 3:55 pm
This seminar examines how different publics engage in the political process through performance. We start our exploration with the notion of "the publics" as introduced by the twentieth-century German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and then expand our view of this concept to the contemporary political setting. We will look at both how elected representatives use theatrical tropes to shape their public personas, and equally at how popular protests stage large scale public interventions. How might performance as a series of citational strategies allow us to think about the political process? We will draw heavily on the works of feminist performance scholars like Judith Butler, Shannon Jackson and Peggy Phelan, who discuss the different ways in which gendered bodies navigate public space. In this seminar students will be required to draw on their personal experiences of public performances. This may be in the shape of their own activism, politics in their hometowns, their favorite public figures, or memorable live shows they have watched. Writing ethnographically, students will engage with the theorists we read to investigate how performance has shaped their lives. For Fall 2020 we will be focusing on public responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Different populations reacted differently to the global pandemic. From local politicians, medical professionals, frontline workers to everyday citizens, everyone reflected, in different measure, on the loss of the public sphere. We assembled in the digital commons instead. How did we deal with our own isolation from public life while at the same time thinking of keeping the collective body safe from contagion? What are the ways in which we engaged with our community to reaffirm a common humanity?
FYS BC1752
DREAMSTORIES
Eugene A. Petracca
TR 10:10 am – 11:25 am
The complex relationship between dreaming and narrative storytelling is as contemporary as it is ancient. In this first-year seminar, we will examine Greco-Roman, medieval, modern, and postmodern representations of dreaming in literature, philosophy and film - texts that range from classical epic (Homer, Virgil) through medieval allegory (Dante, Machaut) to psychoanalysis (Freud and his contemporaries), queer metafiction (Winterson, Sarduy, Lynch), and beyond. We will consider among other topics how dreams raise fundamental questions about being, memory, desire, interpretation, and Utopian politics. Students will practice critical writing and discussion, and also have the opportunity to engage their own dreams and fantasies both analytically and creatively.
FYS1756
READING DANCE
Kate A. Glasner
MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
Dance as action takes place in a variety of places and by organisms, and is represented in literature, film, the proscenium stage in just as many ways as there are forms of dance. Reading Dance will explore how authors employ movement to enrich narrative, reflect the human condition, view class and gender, experience how choreographers use text to support a silent form of communication and consider choreography itself text. Primary sources will include Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Ntozake Shange, T.S. Eliot, Zadie Smith, Martha Graham, Michael Jackson, and Brian Friel.
FYS1760
STORYTELLING
Michael Shelichach
TR 5:40 pm – 6:55 pm
Why do we tell stories? Why do we feel a need to relate the things that happen to us? Why do writers and artists make things up? In this section of First-Year Seminar, we will explore these questions as well as others connected to the fundamental practice of storytelling. We will read and discuss short stories, novels, and memoirs that reflect on or call into question the narrator’s reasons for telling the story. We will also consider essays by literary critics, psychologists, and scientists on the human impulse to narrate. Literary texts may include works by Henry James, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Lydia Davis, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, and Carmen Maria Machado. Critical and theoretical texts may include works by Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion.
FYS1761
AMERICAN UTOPIAS
Ronald Briggs
MW 8:40 am – 9:55 am
Can the idea of an imaginary island think us out of the world we know? To what degree are all attempts at world-building doomed to repetition? Can Utopia be separated from its colonial roots? Beatriz Pastor Bodmer has defined utopia as “movement, transformation, incessant change” against the grain of history. We will read and rethink Utopia about and from the Americas. Authors include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Edward Bellamy, Luisa Capetillo, W. E. B. Du Bois, Magda Portal, Octavia Butler, and Emily St. John Mandel.
FYS1762.001
POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SORCERY
Quincy Jones
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
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FYS1762.002
POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SORCERY
Quincy Jones
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
Poetry is a very complicated series of words found in perpetually dust-covered books written by white men who died a half of century before you were born. Or is it? Poetry is archaic. Poetry is academic. Poetry is hard. Or in the words of Ntosake Shange, it’s “razzamatazz hocus pocus zippity-do-dah.” The magic of poetry is not in its mystery, but in its ability to connect with people, and to connect people with people, even across space and time. In this class we will explore how poetry speaks to identity, speaks to history, and speaks intersections of race, gender, sexuality, tragedy, triumph, and trauma. We will read poetry – mostly contemporary poets, mostly female-identified poets, mostly poets of color, and mostly poets from the margins – read theories on poetry, and maybe try our hand at a little poetry writing. Readings will include such authors as Tina Chang, Yolanda Wisher, Jillian Weise, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Tracie Morris, Audre Lorde, Laylia Long Soldier, and the word sorceress herself Sonia Sanchez.
FYS1763
WRITING AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Linn Mehta
MW 5:40 pm – 6:55 pm
Beginning with the Popol Vuh, the Mayan myth of creation, which records the first moment of contact with the Spanish conquistadors about 1555, we will explore American nature writing up to the present. Description and interpretation of nature has shaped artistic representation from the very beginning of human history. We will look at indigenous narratives, at activist texts, and at writing and images from the Americas in relation to selected European works, moving from Crevecoeur’s “Letters from an American Farmer” (1765) to excerpts from Wordsworth’s “Prelude” in England (1798), which in turn influenced Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836) and Thoreau’s writing in Walden and “Civil Disobedience” (1851). Twentieth century works include selections from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939); Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962); and John McPhee’s “Encounters with the Archdruid” (1971). Painting, photography and films will be included, with images from the Hudson River School, photographs of National Parks, and contemporary environmental films. An essential element is the study of activist organizations alongside international collaborations (COP27), the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and issues of environmental justice. Finally, we will both write and analyze contemporary environmental journalism, including Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature” and Liz Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.
FYS1764.001
ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN
Elizabeth Weybright
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
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FYS1764.002
ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN
Elizabeth Weybright
TR 5:40 pm – 6:55 pm
How do we reflect on the intimacies of friendship, and what might be particular to such intimacies between women? What makes a friendship good or bad? What tensions or correspondences might we trace between friendship and adjacent categories of relationality—’frenemies,’ sisterhood, lovers? In this course, we will apply close analytical examinations of literary and cultural texts in order to theorize the various shapes friendship may take. Throughout the semester, we will question how the friendships we encounter are situated within and/or against a variety of cultural and socioeconomic contexts. In doing so, we will explore friendship’s conceptual role in narratives of emotional development, education and intellectual life, work, community, and domesticity. Literary and theoretical texts may include works by Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Maggie Doherty, Zadie Smith, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. Selections from film and television may include the tv dramatization of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Keira Knightley’s portrayal of Georgiana Cavendish in The Duchess, among others. In discussions and writing assignments both formal and creative, we will consider how the (un)friendly relationships represented in these texts shift, break, and thrive given the conditions under which they are conducted.
FYS1765
THE ETHICS OF IDENTITY
Christina Van Dyke
TR 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
This course will explore evolving understandings of three central aspects of identity - gender, race, and disability - by focusing on their impact on contemporary ethical issues. Should pregnant people be categorized as a 'vulnerable' population in medical research, for instance, and how can race and/or disability status be factored into these discussions in ways that support rather than erase marginalized groups? Is trans-phobia the reason people were so dismissive of Rachel Dolezal's claim to be Black, or is there a difference between gender and race that makes someone's claim to be transgendered quite different from Dolezal's claim to be transracial? If we could eliminate disabilities in the womb, should we, or is that just another form of objectionable eugenics? To address these sorts of questions, we'll need to talk about different views of what gender, race, and disability are, as well as what people's experiences of how these identities intersect tells us about power, prejudice, and pride. Readings will include selections from Simone deBeauvoir's The Second Sex, Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings: an Asian-American Reckoning, Kwame Anthony Appiah's Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, the edited collection What is Race?: Four Philosophical Views, Elizabeth Barnes's The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, and Eva Kittay's Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds.