FYS Spring 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 BC1114
HOT STUFF
Sedelia Rodriguez
TR 1:10 pm - 2:25 pm
Long before humans walked the earth; before dinosaurs were wiped out; before any sign of sentient life on earth; volcanoes were a feature of our planet. With the power to help create life, as well as wreak devastation and destruction, volcanoes inspire awe and terror in equal measure. This seminar will explore the science behind volcanoes, their impact on the environment and societies, as well as our enduring fascination with them through the lenses of history, arts, mythology and religion. Where and why do volcanoes erupt? How do they affect nature, climate and society? How has our understanding of these amazing natural phenomena evolved over time? Why do people stay in close proximity to volcanoes, despite the dangers? Can we predict when the next catastrophic eruption will occur? Can we harness the power of volcanic activity as alternative energy source? These are some of the many questions that students will seek to answer and will serve as a starting point for our deeper investigation into the subject throughout the semester. Students will study historical texts, case studies, current data and methods of analysis, as well as depictions of volcanoes in art and film. Group discussion, independent study and individual and group presentations. Students will research case studies and present their finding to the class.
FYS BC1200
BANNED! DANGEROUS ART
Karen Santos da Silva
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
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 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 BC1601.001
REACTING TO THE PAST
Kristina Milner
TR 8:40 am – 9:55 am
------
FYS BC1601.002
REACTING TO THE PAST
Kate A. Glasner
MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 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
ARTS OF ADAPTATION
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 BC1740
APPROACHING TRAUMA
Nicholas A. Bartlett
MW 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 BC1744.001
HERE/THERE: MIGRANT NARRATIVES
Duygu Ula
TR 1:10 pm - 2:25 pm
------
FYS BC1744.002
HERE/THERE: MIGRANT NARRATIVES
Duygu Ula
TR 10:10 am - 11:25 am
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, gender and queerness. Some questions we will consider: How are immigrant, migrant and refugees marginalized, racialized and queered by dominant discourses? How do immigrants, migrants and refugees negotiate belonging when they cross cultural, national, linguistic and religious borders? How do these authors, filmmakers and artists resist erasure and complicate our understanding of home, belonging and identity? Readings are subject to change but will likely include literary and nonfiction texts by writers such as James Baldwin, Fatimah Asghar, Ocean Vuong, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jamaica Kincaid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kazim Ali, Edward Said and Hannah Arendt; films such as Saving Face and Flee; as well as contemporary visual art, op-eds and other media.
FYS BC1751
CREATIVITY AND INSPIRATION
Christopher R. Prodoehl
MW 1:10 pm - 2:25 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 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.
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 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 Friday mornings at 10:10-11:25am: 2/3, 2/17, 3/3, 3/24, 4/7, 4/21. To be considered for this course, please fill out this required (but brief) questionnaire by MONDAY, 11/7 @ 5PM: https://forms.gle/35BpJgJwsFK6t5Tw7
FYS BC1758
THE SECRET LIFE OF STUFF
Camilla Sturm
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 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 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
------
FYS BC1760.002
STORYTELLING
Michael Shelichach
MW 5:40 pm – 6:55 pm
“What a language it is, the laughter of women, high-flying and subversive. Long before law and scripture we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.” -Lisel Mueller “I’m not funny, what I am is brave.” - Lucille Ball 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 BC1762
POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SORCERY
Quincy Jones
MW 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
ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN
Elizabeth Weybright
TR 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 BC1765
THE ETHICS OF IDENTITY
Christina Van Dyke
TR 8:40 am – 9:55 am
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 BC1766
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Kristi-Lynn Cassaro
MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 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
MW 8:40 am – 9:55 am
------
FYS BC1767.002
THE END OF THE WORLD
Nathan Gorelick
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 am
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 BC1768
GENDER OUTLAWS
Sarah Schwartz
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
This course explores literary and historical figures who challenge gender norms and contravene laws about gender and sexuality. We will encounter trans rogues, desiring women, ballroom queens, and feminist killjoys as we think through how these rules are enforced and resisted. Cultural objects we may consider include literary works by Toni Morrison, Jordy Rosenberg, and Virginia Woolf; the documentary Paris is Burning; and art from Against Our Vanishing. We will bolster our understanding with historical and critical works by Judith Butler, Saidiya Hartman, Sara Ahmed, and more.
FYS BC1769
TRACING THE MYSTIC
Safia Jama
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 am
What does it mean to be a mystic?--to follow a mystical path? This course will explore questions posed by narratives gesturing at such a path. We will expand our purview to examine how artists, writers, and thinkers have employed mystical approaches in their respective creative processes, sometimes to a surprising degree. In addition, this course will invite personal reflection, storytelling, and creative work that re-envisions the ways that our lives can be enriched when engaged in the process of tracing the mystic; i.e., viewing texts through a mystical lens. Our readings will unfold in a process of discovery and will likely include the works of William Blake, Nella Larsen, bell hooks, W.B. Yeats, Valorie D. Thomas, and others, alongside cinematic, musical, and astrological texts.
FYS BC1770
ANGER
Melanie Heydari
TR 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 Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, Virginie Despentes, Fanon, Nawal El Saadawi, Tayeb Salih and Salman Rushdie.