FYS Spring 2021 Course Descriptions
FULL-TERM COURSES
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 BC1107
RACE, SCIENCE, & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE (WKSHOP)
Cecelia Lie-Spahn
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
This course is about reproduction—a biological and social process that is often the target of deep-seated ideas about nation, culture, conflict, and definitions of life. With an emphasis on the reproductive justice movement in the United States, which centers the experiences and leadership of BIPOC women and LGBTQ people, we will explore a variety of literary works, films, journalism, public health studies, and policy/legal texts, all of which differently narrate, debate, script, and theorize about reproduction. Questions we will explore include: what is reproduction—scientifically, culturally, politically, and rhetorically? What is reproductive justice, and how is it distinct from reproductive rights and health? How have recent innovations in medicine and reproductive technologies both empowered and harmed reproductive experiences? And what kind of world does the reproductive justice movement urge us to imagine and create?
Please note that the material for this class discusses obstetric violence; this material is important for understanding the relationships between race, science, and reproductive justice. Throughout the semester, we will discuss as a class how to work through this difficult material in respectful and inclusive ways.
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 also required to participate in six Friday “writing labs” over the course of the semester. The writing labs for this section will take place on the following Fridays, 11:40am-12:55pm: 1/15, 1/22, 1/29, 2/5, 2/12, and 3/26. These dates are for the Spring 2021 semester only.
FYS BC1113
FEMINIST FUTURES
Alexander Pittman
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
This course uses feminist and queer anti-racist engagements with science fiction as a starting point for considering speculation as a mode of inquiry and practice more generally. How and why do feminist authors, artists, activists, and theorists invoke the future in order to analyze and contest gendered inequalities and dominations that are experienced in the present? What are the consequences of speculation in the context of platform design and reproductive technologies? What is the role of imagination in dealing with archival documents? By posing these and other questions throughout the semester, we will explore numerous issues about the role of speculation, imagination, and forecasting in the everyday practice of feminist critique. The seminar meetings, readings, and assignments in this class all serve the larger goal of helping students cultivate intersectional approaches to the study of power.
FYS BC1196
MODERNISM IN THE CITY
Jennifer Rosenthal
TR 11:40 am – 12:55 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 BC1200
BANNED! DANGEROUS ART
Karen Santos Da Silva
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 am
In this course we will engage with various forms of artistic production (literary, cinematic, pictorial, musical) that have been banned or censored by religious authority, governmental institutions, or by public opinion. While discussing these primary texts we will investigate who gets to censor art, to what ends, and according to which criteria. Who is protected from tasteless, subversive, or obscene art? How do these categories change with time, and from culture to culture?
FYS BC1294
ART, SEX AND AMERICAN CULTURE
Pamela Cobrin
TR 11:40 am – 12:55 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 BC1336
WITCHES
Wendy Schor-Haim
TR 8:40 am – 9:55 am
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 & 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 BC1339
BURIED PAST: OBJECT & HISTORY
Jue Guo
MW 7:40 pm – 8:55 pm
This course takes an object-centered approach to explore the meaning of gender, power, and identity of women in Bronze Age China, whose names are unsurprisingly omitted and lives are unfortunately stereotyped through the patriarchal prism of the written history. Thanks to modern archaeology, we have been afforded the opportunity to see the complexity and richness of the material and ritual life of ancient women long hidden underground. We focus on such a woman named Fu Hao and rediscovery her extraordinary life as a queen, a mother, a high priestess, and a royal military commander of the Late Shang Dynasty (ca. 1300-1045 B.C.E.). Through examining the life histories of the objects buried in her tomb and their interactions with Fu Hao, in life and in death, we delineate and analyze the ways that gender roles, political power, and cultural identity were and are still entangled in women’s life.
FYS BC1421
CROSSING BORDERS: AMERICAS
Linn Cary Mehta
MW 7:40 pm – 8:55 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 BC1572
ANIMALS IN TEXT AND SOCIETY
Timea Szell
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
Interdisciplinary examination of the intimate and fraught connections between animals and humans in literature, philosophy and culture. We will consider topics such as the historical constructions of species boundaries and of the multiple meanings and uses of animals in human life; animal and human identity; emotions evoked by animals; and conceptualizations of animals as colonized "others." Readings include Aesop, Edward Albee, Angela Carter, John Coetzee, Geoffrey Chaucer, Gustave Flaubert, Jean LeFontaine, Marie de France, Michael Pollan, Ovid, selections from Genesis (in the Hebrew Bible), and Virginia Woolf.
FYS BC1599
TIPPING POINTS
Margaret Vandenburg
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
The printing press helped pave the way for the scientific revolution and the invention of human rights. What will transpire in the digital age of artificial intelligence and globalization? This seminar questions whether intellectual, economic, technological, and ethical tipping points transform what it means to be human. Authors include Locke, Jefferson, Shelley, Freud, Rushdie, Ishiguro, McLuhan, Lyotard, and Offill.
FYS BC1601.001
REACTING TO THE PAST
Daniela Kempf
TR 2.40 pm - 3:55 pm
Athens in 403 B.C.E., Ming China 1587
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FYS BC1601.003
REACTING TO THE PAST
Kate A. Glasner
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
Athens in 403 B.C.E., Greenwich Village 1913
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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
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 BC1729
AMERICA’S SOCIAL DIVIDE
Debra Minkoff
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
This first year seminar explores some of the central cleavages dividing American society today, along such lines as social class, region, race, and political ideology. We will focus how social divisions are constituted, experienced, questioned, and bridged. Most of the assigned material will be based on primary research in the social sciences, along with a small number of documentaries, novels, and/or memoirs. Assigned books may include Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land; Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People; Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter; Rachel Sherman, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence; and Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility.
FYS BC1731
FROM EPIC HERO TO SUPER HERO
Benjamin Breyer
MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
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, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, as well as studies by Marco Arnaudo, Joseph Campbell and Grant Morrison, among others. Students in this seminar will have the option of taking part in a class excursion to see Marvel’s upcoming Black Widow movie.
FYS BC1733
WOMEN & COMEDY
Nina Sharma
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
This course focuses on the intersection between comedy and gender, race, class and sexuality. We will explore laughter as a subversive act and how the identity of a “funny woman” can be both dangerous and liberating. As Margo Jefferson writes, “Given the history of social restriction and sexual regulation, how many women have been in a position to -- or been willing to -- take these risks?” We will explore how the tools of comedy can be used to make mischief, to transgress the bounds of genre and form and to contest popular ideas about difference and power. How can humor be illuminating? How can humor be feminist? How can humor be intersectional? How can humor help us tell the hard truths? Can we laugh at oppression without laughing it off? At every step, we will put our inquiry into action – trying our hand at satire, sketch and storytelling to explore our own intersections. Readings may include Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Samantha Chanse’s Lydia’s Funeral Video and Patricia Lockwood’s Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
FYS BC1739
DEAD AND UNDEAD
Penelope Meyer Usher
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 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 than being alive? To investigate and trouble the boundaries between life and death (and un-death), we will analyze works across genres—among them horror, comedy, myth, folklore, and medicine—discussing near-death experiences, beating-heart cadavers, and a range of figures including zombies, ghosts, and other revenants. Readings will likely include texts and excerpts from Montaigne, Shakespeare, Zora Neale Hurston, Ovid, Toni Morrison, Carmen Maria Machado, Edgar Allen Poe, Nalo Hopkinson, and Mary Shelley, along with Japanese death poems, the Netflix series Russian Doll, and Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.
NOTE: Several of the readings for this class involve references to or representations of violence, sometimes explicit.
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 also required to participate in six Friday “writing labs” over the course of the semester. The writing labs for this section will take place on the following Fridays, 1:10 pm-2:25 pm: 1/15, 1/22, 1/29, 2/5, 2/12, and 4/2. These dates are for the Spring 2021 semester only.
FYS BC1740
APPROACHING TRAUMA
Nicholas Bartlett
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
Trauma today is evoked in a variety of contexts. But what precisely are we referring to when we use this term? Drawing on psychoanalytic and anthropological approaches, our seminar will interrogate the politics of diagnosing, treating and healing from disturbing past events. We will watch films and read case histories of hysteria, studies of infants, and attempts to integrate mind, brain and body. The course will also examine the rise of PTSD, attend to questions of intergenerational transmission, and learn about responses to national and racial trauma. Featured authors include Sigmund Freud, Beatrice Beebe, Allan Young, Marilyn Ivy and Resmaa Menakem.
FYS BC1741
JOURNEYS
Najam Haider
MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
The journey is a central motif in narrative writing dating back many thousands of years. The classical example of the journey comes from the experiences of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey but journeys also feature in the narratives of the Hebrew Bible as well as the Buddha. The idea of the journey as a transformative experience has remained relevant and, indeed, become so prevalent that it is arguably the foundation of modern popular culture. This class examines the idea of the journey (and travel in a wider sense) through five primary analytic frameworks. The course begins (framework #1) with the interplay between travel and wonder as epitomized in the classical Islamic literary tradition through the travel accounts of Ibn Battuta and the famous story of Sinbad. It then turns to Jonathan Swift’s use of travel as a means for social satire in Gulliver’s Travels (framework #2) before drawing on William James’ psychological framework to consider the journey as a metaphor for conversion (framework #3) through the example of Malcolm X. The course then considers travel writing in the modern period as a performative or confessional act through representative examples from Kerouac, Didion, Krakauer, and Gilbert. This is followed by an engagement with Joseph Campbell’s notion of the monomyth as embodied by the films Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) and Spirited Away (1991). The final reading in the course centers Octavia Butler’s Kindred which depicts a series of voyages through time that demand a reckoning or confrontation with the past.
FYS BC1742
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY ON SCREEN
Logan Brenner
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 am
When we turn on TV and go to the movies we are typically looking to be entertained. When it comes to science on screen, is the purpose for entertainment or education? How do science-related movies and TV reflect but also impact society? Can movies and TV be used to discuss the complex intersection between science and society, and how are they received by the public? To discuss these questions and more, we will analyze texts, including Silent Spring and Demon Haunted World and visual media such as Hidden Figures, The Twilight Zone, and Erin Brokovich.
FYS BC1743
EXISTENTIALISM IN LIT & FILM
Taylor Carman
TR 8:40 am – 9:55 am
This seminar explores literary and cinematic depictions of themes in existential thought. The term “existentialism” was first coined to refer to German and French philosophy from (roughly) 1920 to 1950, but it also applies to writers of the previous century, especially Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Moreover, its central subjects – perennial matters of human concern such freedom, anxiety, alienation, faith, the meaning of life – can be found in fiction and cinema, from Kafka to Martin Scorsese. Authors will also include Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir, and we will watch and discuss films directed by Carol Reed, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michelangelo Antonioni.
FYS BC1744
HERE/THERE: MIGRANT NARRATIVES
Duygu Ula
MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
This first-year seminar brings together texts, films and contemporary art that focus on migrant, immigrant, refugee, expat and exile experiences. We will explore how migrant subjects negotiate dominant discourses of nationality and citizenship, and how their identities as migrants intersect with their other positionalities, with a particular emphasis on race and queerness.
Some questions we will consider: How are immigrant, migrant and refugees marginalized, racialized and queered by dominant discourses? How do Black and/or queer subjects negotiate belonging when they travel across cultural, national, linguistic and religious borders? How do these authors, filmmakers resist erasure and complicate our understanding of home, belonging and identity?
Possible texts: fiction, poetry and nonfiction by James Baldwin, Ocean Vuong, Marjane Satrapi, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Cherrie Moraga, Gayatri Gopinath, C.P. Cavafy, Masha Gessen, Kazim Ali, Nazim Hikmet; films such as Saving Face, My Brother the Devil, Mr. Gay Syria, My Beautiful Launderette; as well as contemporary visual art, podcasts and activist texts.
FYS BC1745
THE SOUL OF THE NATION?
Kristi Cassaro
TR 10:10 am – 11:25 am
One will hear from across the political spectrum references to an entity called the “soul of the nation.” But how to think about this mystified idea? This seminar explores the literary history of the idea of the soul in connection with the question of American identity. By way of interdisciplinary readings from theology, philosophy, and science in accord with readings in American prose and poetry, we come to see how the concept of the soul changes over time as scientific innovation leads culture to reassess what counts as reality. We learn to navigate the arc and contour of this literary history and sharpen our sensitivity to what’s at stake in contemporary uses of the soul’s idea, insofar as they inflect how we think about important questions as what should be valued about the nation and within our lives. Readings will include James Baldwin, St. Augustine, René Descartes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, Audre Lorde, and Antonio Damasio.
FYS BC1746
TO BOLDLY GO: WOMEN OF COLOR IN SPECULATIVE LITERATURE
Quincy Scott Jones
MW 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
“The Future is Female” except in science fiction, where it still looks pretty white and male. What happens when women of color take on such tropes as space exploration, cybernetics, superpowers, and the end of the world? How can women of color change the way we not only think of the future, but think of the present as well? In this first-year seminar, we’ll look at how speculative literature approaches the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, technology, and environmental concerns. Readings will include work from such authors as Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Sam Chanse, G Willow Wilson, and Tananarive Due with potential critical readings from Lisa Yaszek, Charlotte E Howell, and bell hooks.