FYS Spring 2024 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 BC1336
WITCHES
Wendy Schor-Haim
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
From ancient Greece to "Wicked," the figure of the witch has fascinated and frightened, compelled and repulsed. In this seminar, we'll analyze written and visual texts from Homer to The Brothers Grimm and beyond to develop a deeper understanding of the witch and the anxieties about gender and power that she represents.

FYS BC1337
FEMINISM & THE POLITICS OF ANGER
Meredith 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 BC1421
CROSSING BORDERS: AMERICAS
Linn C. Mehta
MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
This course cuts across the borders between North, South and Central America and the Caribbean, in a search for the ways in which literature illuminates different aspects of American identity. We see the Americas as active historical and aesthetic agents, acting and interacting with each other. We might even say that modernity, in the sense of freedom from tradition, first developed in the Americas; as a result, the literatures of the Americas are characterized by diversity and innovation from their beginning. We will devote particular attention to the roots of Modernism in North and South America at the end of the 19th century, and the development of modernism, post-modernism and post-colonialism in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

FYS BC1601.001
REACTING TO THE PAST
Jennifer Worth
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
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FYS BC1601.002
REACTING TO THE PAST
Jennifer Worth
TR 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 BC1715
ARTFUL ADAPTATIONS
Monica F. 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 BC1731
FROM EPIC HERO TO SUPERHERO
Benjamin Breyer
TR 8:40 am – 9:55 am
The enormous box office success of recent moves like Avengers: Endgame, Wonder Woman and the Batman franchise attests to our present societal fascination with heroes. Yet this fascination is a millennia-old phenomena. Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving literary works in the world, tells the story of a great hero and his accomplishments. What accounts for the enduring appeal of heroes throughout history, across cultures and in different forms of media? What connects ancient epic heroes like Gilgamesh to modern superheroes like Batman? This seminar will seek answers to these questions by comparatively studying a range of artistic texts depicting heroes. Course readings will include Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Gladiator, The Dark Knight Returns, as well as studies by Marco Arnaudo, Joseph Campbell and Grant Morrison, among others.

FYS BC1739
DEAD AND UNDEAD (WORKSHOP)
Penelope Usher
MW 2:40 pm - 3:55 pm
What does it mean to be dead? Why the fascination—across time and culture—with conceiving of ways in which the dead can become un-dead? And how is being undead different from being alive? To investigate and trouble the boundaries between life and death (and un-death), we will analyze works from various genres and media, discussing near-death experiences, beating-heart cadavers, and a range of figures including zombies, ghosts, and other revenants. Objects of study include texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Ovid, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Nalo Hopkinson, and Mary Shelley; music by Camille Saint-Saëns; artwork by Hans Holbein and Breughel; television and film (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie); and more.
NOTE: This 4-credit version of First-Year Seminar (FYS)—FYS “Workshop”—is specially designed for students who believe they would benefit from extra support with their critical reading and academic writing skills. In addition to regular seminar meetings twice per week, students are assigned a Writing Fellow who they meet with for one hour every other week. APPLICATION IS REQUIRED BY 11/3 @ 5PM -- please fill out this form.

FYS BC1751
CREATIVITY AND INSPIRATION
Christopher R. Prodoehl
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
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 BC1754
BORDER STORIES (WORKSHOP)
Francesca E. Austin Ochoa
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
The topic of this Seminar course takes an interdisciplinary approach to thinking about, and traversing, the constructs of the border. The U.S.- Mexico border delimits more than nations; it is both a political and a social geography, marked by bodies of water, mountains, walls, ideologies, repression, and resistance. The crisis currently taking place at the border is an unfolding story with many narrators. We will study literary texts: fiction, poetry, and memoir written by those who know the border, and borderlands, intimately. We will also engage histories, social movement doctrine, and media coverage to mine the stories they tell.
NOTE: This 4-credit version of First-Year Seminar (FYS)—FYS “Workshop”—is specially designed for students who believe they would benefit from extra support with their critical reading and academic writing skills. In addition to regular seminar meetings twice per week, students are assigned a Writing Fellow who they meet with for one hour every other week. APPLICATION IS REQUIRED BY 11/3 @ 5PM -- please fill out this form.

FYS BC1758
THE SECRET LIFE OF STUFF
Camilla Sturm
TR 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
“It has a mind of its own,” we shriek as the TV channels change without our input or the garage door opens when no one is home. Things can spark joy, grant authority, lead to our demise, and reveal our deepest secrets. They mediate social relationships, define political alliances, and provide economic opportunities. Sometimes it is not the presence of things but their absence – a misplaced phone, an expired passport, a childhood home – that more keenly shapes our reality. While people make objects, objects also make people. This class will investigate the secret life of stuff, from maps to cups and buildings to body parts, to explore how inanimate objects can be seen to have an agency and power of their own. Our discussions will draw on a wide array of authors from a variety of fields, including Bill Brown, Martin Heidigger, Anni Albers, Neel Ahuja, Katherine Ott, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing. To accompany these texts, we will also turn to other, less traditional sources of information, from podcasts to museum exhibits and our own personal histories with things.

FYS BC1760.001
STORYTELLING
Michael Shelichach
MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
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FYS BC1760.002
STORYTELLING
Michael Shelichach
MW 4:10 pm – 5:25 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
POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SORCERY
Quincy Jones
MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 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
ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN
Elizabeth Weybright
MW 4:10 pm – 5:25 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 BC1766
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Kristi-Lynn Cassaro
TR 11:40 am – 12:55 pm

In this course we probe the ideology of American "exceptionalism." We treat the literary history of this idea as a transtemporal conversation involving its founding architects, ardent critics, and experimental reformers, concerned with the question of what should be valued on the American continents and within American experience. We become cartographers of this conversation and interlocutors within it, as we explore how habits of conceiving truth, power, and the relationship of human beings to the natural world have controlled what counts as exceptional and what ordinary. Where should we direct our awe? Readings will include James Baldwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, bell hooks, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, Henry David Thoreau and William Carlos Williams.

FYS BC1767.001
THE END OF THE WORLD
Nathan Gorelick
TR 10:10 am – 11:25 am
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FYS BC1767.002
THE END OF THE WORLD
Nathan Gorelick
TR 11:40 am – 12:55 pm

According to the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” What, then, is the world? Is it an object? An interpretation? An inheritance? A point of view? Is the world a social and linguistic construct? If so, how many worlds are there? If Wittgenstein is right and every world ends at the limits of its language, then what lies beyond? What happens after the end? This course will consider these questions by investigating the end of the world in a variety of texts and contexts from the fourteenth century to the present: as a recurrent literary theme, religious fixation, philosophical conundrum, source of endless entertainment, and spring of existential anxiety. Contrary to what the phrase portends, we will find that there is no singular “end” of the world. Worlds end all the time. We therefore will approach the idea of the end as a question of ruins and remnants, an encounter with the void at the end of history, but also as a site of new beginnings, of futures we have yet to imagine—or can only imagine, if this means to glimpse what might be beyond the patterns of thought, belief, and action, the terms and conditions, the very language of the decaying world we inhabit. Authors, texts, and other materials will include fiction by Giovanni Boccaccio, Octavia Butler, Daniel Defoe, and Jeff VanderMeer; plays by Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett; films including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Aniara, Bombay Beach, and Manufactured Landscapes; and studies in cultural anthropology, environmental humanities and radical ecologies.

FYS BC1770
ANGER
Melanie Heydari
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 am

This course is a transcultural exploration of anger through significant works of contemporary literature, with a particular focus on situations inflected by gender, sexuality and race. Students will reflect on the representation and role of anger, what S. Ngai has called a dysphoric, “ugly” affect at the border between internal feeling and objective reality, affective consciousness and material political conditions, by reading a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, short stories and poetry, and by viewing films. Authors will include Svlvia Plath. Toni Morrison. Virainie Despentes. ElenaFerrante. Nawal El Saadawi and Taveb Salin.

FYS BC1772
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM
Elsa Stephan
MW 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
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 BC1776
CULTS
Gale Kenny
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm

As a former member of one so-called cult said (and many others have repeated): "Nobody joins a cult." What, then, does this designation mean and how has it been used in the past? How has "cult" become a way to demarcate "good" and "bad" religion, to condemn communities and practices that defy established norms, and what are the consequences of the “cult” label for marginalized groups? In this First-Year Seminar, we will evaluate the history of the term "cult" and its varied uses in the US and elsewhere. We will consider a variety of groups that have been labeled "cults," as we ask how the members of such New Religious Movements (NRMs) responded to and revealed the fractures of modern economic, political, gender, racial, and social relations.

FYS BC1777
ÉMIGRÉ VOICES
John C. Wright
TR 5:40 pm – 6:55 pm

The central goal of this course is to provide first-year students with an opportunity to learn from the émigré experience in literature, with attendant questions of nationality and identity coming to the foreground. For example: What happens to language and identity in immigration? To what degree can a "lost" home culture continue to affect its carriers in their new cultural matrix? To this end, readings have been chosen to form an overview of the last century of émigré literature written by authors from the former Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union, primarily from places located in present-day Russia and Ukraine. Students will choose an assigned work of their liking and write original explorations of their selected topics (to be chosen from a list or created in consultation with the instructor). Naturally, these authors are a varied group. They come from various places and generations and have varied overarching concerns, such as fractured identity, survival techniques that look unusual within their new cultures, and the necessity of conscious self-fashioning. While the central readings assigned for the course are works of literary fiction (some artworks and publications based on diaries will also be included), the instructor will provide the necessary historical and cultural context for each work during class meetings.

FYS BC1778
ADULTERY: REALISM AND DESIRE
Andrew Lynn
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm

"Rising from the most basic human needs, marriage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations." So writes the United States Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), finding in marriage the "keystone of our social order" -- the means by which individual desire is stably fixed within the family unit and, thereby, linked to civility and law. This course studies a rich counter-tradition of film and literature interested in adultery. These works suggest ways in which human desire and identity exceed social bounds; they also examine ways in which private desire is not only limited but formed by social forces.