FYS Fall 2023 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
TR 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 BC1337
FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF ANGER
Meredith A. Benjamin
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
Of late, much attention has been given to the political role of feminist anger. However, not all feminist anger is received or interpreted in the same way; not all women have had the same freedom to express or represent anger. This course asks us to think critically about expressions and perceptions of anger. How do race, sexuality, gender identity, class, and ethnicity shape who is perceived as “angry” and whose anger is taken seriously? What other affects circulate and interact with anger: from rage and irritation to wonder and joy? We’ll begin with the figure of the “feminist killjoy,” as theorized by Sara Ahmed and will consider texts by authors including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Susan Stryker, and Nella Larsen, alongside manifestos, comics, film, visual art, and zines.
FYS BC1601.001
REACTING TO THE PAST
Marc C. Carnes
MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
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FYS BC1601.002
REACTING TO THE PAST
Kate A. Glasner
MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 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 (Note new course description)
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 Twelfth Night, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, Elizabeth Baker’s Partnership, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs, Yasmina Reza’s Art; novels include Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; musicals include Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. Art from the Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and other sites will promote student engagement, visual and verbal interactions, and cross disciplinary conversations
FYS BC1715
ARTFUL ADAPTATIONS (Note new course title and description)
Monica F. Cohen
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
Can the violent fantasies of a fairytale shape romantic comedy? Can dance tell the same story as classical tragedy? What does Bollywood have to do with Renaissance England? Can ancient mythology animate American slave narrative? As biologists ask why does life appear in such a dazzling array of forms, this class asks why do certain stories get told and retold in such a dazzling array of varieties? Using as possible textual anchors Snow White, Medea, and Romeo and Juliet, this course will explore poems, short stories, plays, novels, paintings, films, musicals, dance, illustration, advertisement, song, memes, and other cultural objects to consider the accretion of meaning that results when stories cross, historical, cultural, and generic borders.
FYS BC1722
WRITING AMERICAN LIVES
Kristin Carter
MW 8:40 am – 9:55 am
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 BC1736
TECH & SOCIETY: GOOD, BAD & OTHER
Emily Black
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 am
Computing and information technology has improved our lives in many ways, contributing to significant advances in science and medicine; making it easy and efficient to communicate with people across the world; and enabling online business and recreational activities; and more. However, the same technologies can also have negative impacts, such as the move to a surveillance society and surveillance capitalism; major disruptions in the workforce of the future as automation becomes more widespread; and social media contributing to depression in young people and the weaponization of disinformation. This seminar will explore technical, cultural, legal, and economic factors that can impact how computing technology is used, while raising the question of how to encourage and ensure that these technologies are used for good, while eliminating or mitigating the potential negative impacts.
FYS BC1738
PERFORMING PUBLICS & POLITICAL ACTIVISM
Shayoni Mitra
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 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 BC1751
CREATIVITY AND INSPIRATION
Christopher R. Prodoehl
TR 10:10 am - 11:25 am
Where do creative ideas come from? The Muses, according to Plato. The unconscious, according to some later thinkers. One thing both answers share is the thought that creative ideas come from something “other than” or “not controlled by” the creator – or, as we’ll put it, that creativity requires inspiration. In this class, we will explore this and related ideas in Western thinking about creativity. In doing so, we’ll examine how creative people themselves, from painters to mathematicians, have described their own creative process and experiences. We’ll examine approaches to creativity from the Taoist tradition, comparing them with the Western approaches that will be our main focus. At the end of the class, we’ll think about whether computer programs can be creative, and what it might mean for claims about inspiration if they can be. Readings will include selections from James Baldwin, Margaret Boden, Chung-yuan Chang, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, bell hooks, Immanuel Kant, Henri Poincaré, Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Robinson, and others.
FYS BC1752
DREAMSTORIES
Eugene A. Petracca
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
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.
FYS BC1760
STORYTELLING
Michael Shelichach
MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 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 will include works by Henry James, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, and Carmen Maria Machado. Critical and theoretical texts will include works by Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion.
FYS BC1762.001
POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SORCERY
Quincy Jones
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
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FYS BC1762.002
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.
FYS BC1764.001
ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN
Elizabeth Weybright
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
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FYS BC1764.002
ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN
Elizabeth Weybright
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 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.
FYS BC1765
THE ETHICS OF IDENTITY
Christina Van Dyke
MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 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.
FYS BC1771
FREEDOM & CAPTIVITY
Andrew S. Anastasi
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
How has freedom been conceptualized and practiced across time and space? How have forms of captivity challenged and constrained pursuits of liberation? In this interdisciplinary first-year seminar, students will examine a broad range of texts, including activist manifestoes, audio podcasts, graphic novels, memoirs and letters, moving-image media, and works of political theory. We will study processes of industrial change, political revolution, and social upheaval, and we will analyze freedom and captivity from the vantage point of the colony and the liberated territory, the factory and the office, the home and the school, the farm and the prison, the dinner party and the moving train. We will consider works by the Attica Liberation Faction, Héctor Babenco, Simone de Beauvoir, Bong Joon-ho, Luis Buñuel, Aimé Césaire, the Combahee River Collective, Critical Resistance, Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Rebecca Hall, George Jackson, Joy James, Robin D. G. Kelley, Laleh Khalili, Andreas Malm, Karl Marx, the New York City Black Panther 21, Kwame Nkrumah, Jacques Rancière, Joe Sacco, Ousmane Sembène, Baruch Spinoza, Sunaura Taylor, Ernest Wamba Dia Wamba, Lea Ypi, and others.
FYS BC1772
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM
Elsa Stephan
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 am
What does it mean to be a feminist? In this course, we will examine the link between feminist activism and social policies from the eighteenth-century to the postMeToo era through the example of the UK, Iran, Argentina, and France. How does activism influence law making and how do social policies influence feminism? How does activism differ from one country to another? What do these differences reveal about our own culture? We will focus on issues such as the history of women’s suffrage, the fight for political representation, access to child care and education, reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, parental leave policies, and gender-based violence. We will examine these matters through novels, scholarly works, newspaper articles, political pamphlets as well as comics and street art.
FYS BC1773
VOTE COUNTING COUNTS
Lindsay C. Piechnik
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
Elections have always had controversy. Campaign advice going back to Cicero has encouraged lies, bribes, and buttering up. And today there are more opportunities to vote than ever, be it for “American Idol” or New York State Governor. You know you can’t be counted if you don’t vote. In this class, the question is how will you— or should you, be counted when you do. How we count votes, from any type of ballot, reflects the goals of the process and impacts strategy for both candidates and voters. We consider counting options and their impacts, while executing an election of our own.
FYS BC1774.001
QUEER TIMES (Note new course description)
Duygu Ula
TR 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
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FYS BC1774.002
QUEER TIMES (Note new course description)
Duygu Ula
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
This first-year seminar brings together poems, fiction, films, contemporary art, and nonfiction (essays, op-eds and critical theory) that focus on expressions of queer identities across different historical moments and cultural contexts. We will explore how understandings of queerness have shifted across times and cultures, how queer subjects (now and in the past) have negotiated dominant discourses of sexuality and gender, and how narratives of queerness in our course texts intersect with other positionalities such as race, ethnicity, religion, and citizenship.
Organized around three sections (queer pasts, queer presents and queer futures), the course will consider the following questions: How has queerness been articulated and defined at various points in the past, especially outside of Western Europe and North America, and how does this inform or change the way we view it today? What are some of the key preoccupations of queer writers and activists in our present day and how might we participate in their conversations? How do we envision queer futures, and how can queer imaginings of the future allow us to think critically about our presents today?
Readings are subject to change but will likely include a selection from the following and more: fiction and poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Akwaeke Emezi, Irena Klepfisz, Alexis Pauline Gumbs; memoirs and essays by Carmen Maria Machado, Edafe Okporo, Kazim Ali; artwork by Zanele Muholi, Salman Toor and Nilbar Gures, films and documentaries on various course topics, as well as critical theory by Michel Foucault, Heather Love and others.
FYS BC1775
IMPOSTORS AND IMPERSONATORS
Vrinda Condillac
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
In this class, we will look at the fascination and the fear we have about impostors who construct false identities and impersonators who take on the identity of someone else—from folk and fairy tales to popular shows like Inventing Anna and the Tinder Swindler to conversations about identity deception in deep fakes and ChatGPT. We will examine the stories of con artists, doppelgängers, catfishers, identity theft fraudsters and those with impostor syndrome to understand: How do we construct what is real and what is fake? How do we determine what is deceptive and what is authentic? We will also look at current advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning and interrogate legal rulings on identity deception to understand how we authenticate and determine the originality of the self. Texts will include The Impostor by Silvina Ocampo, The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith and and Passing by Nella Larsen among others. Visual media will include Parasite, The Return of Martin Guerre, Kagemusha, and Orphan Black.