FYS Fall 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 BC1294
ART, SEX & AMERICAN CULTURE
Pamela Cobrin
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 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 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 BC1598
BUILDING UTOPIA
Ralph Ghoche
MW 10:10 am – 11:25 am
Building Utopia explores the rich tradition of utopian thinking across literature, social philosophy, architecture, and the visual arts. Here, utopia is examined in its modern form: as a call to transform the world through human planning and ingenuity. Aside from a vital excursion on Thomas More's pivotal novel Utopia (1516), the course focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers whose often wild and idealistic imaginings profoundly affected the shape of the real world. Students will delve into the works of Marie Howland, 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
Marc C. Carnes
MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
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FYS BC1601.003
REACTING TO THE PAST
Ellen Morris
TR 11:40 am – 12:25 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 may include Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, 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, Suzan-Lori Parks' Fucking A; 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
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 BC1738
ACTIVISM, PERFORMANCE, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Shayoni Mitra
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
This seminar examines how activism shapes the political process through performance, and how social movements often spread by theatrical means. 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 look at both how elected representatives use theatrical tropes to shape their public personas, and also 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? How do we assess the success or failure of a tactic in a social movement?
We will draw heavily on the works of feminist scholars like bell hooks, Judith Butler, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Peggy Phelan, to discuss movements such as ACT UP, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo. Equally, we will look at histories of student activism such as the 1968 Morningside Park gym construction, campus anti-apartheid actions, Carry That Weight at Columbia and Barnard, and Friday School Climate Strike and March for our Lives. Students reflect on their own histories or experiences with activism, as personal involvement and/or politics of the places they come from. Through the semester students are exposed to various techniques of protest performance including zines, podcasts, art campaigns and poetry circles. Based on shared interests and affinities, students work in groups to class devise activist performances as a final project.
FYS BC1740
APPROACHING TRAUMA
Nicholas A. 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 BC1744
HERE/THERE; MIGRANT NARRATIVES
Duygu Ula
TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 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, 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?
Texts are subject to change but will likely include authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Kazim Ali, Fatimah Asghar, Ocean Vuong, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Masha Gessen, Viet Thanh Nguyen, as well as selected films, documentaries, visual art and other media.
FYS BC1751
CREATIVITY AND INSPIRATION
Christopher R. Prodoehl
TR 11:40 am - 12:55 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 Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Boden, Chung-yuan Chang, bell hooks, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and others.
FYS BC1756
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.
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 may include works by Henry James, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, Haruki Murakami, and Carmen Maria Machado. Critical and theoretical texts may include works by Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion.
FYS BC1762.001
POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SORCERY
Quincy Jones
TR 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm.
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FYS BC1762.002
POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SORCERY
Quincy Jones
TR 1:10 pm – 2:25 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 BC1763
WRITING AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Linn C. 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
FYS BC1764.001
ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN
Elizabeth Weybright
MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
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FYS BC1764.002
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, Kamila Shamsie, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Jean Chen Ho, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Anahit Behrooz, Roxane Gay, 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 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—both in the past and in our current moment. 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 BC1772
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM
Elsa Stephan
MW 5:40 pm – 6:55 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 BC1775
IMPOSTORS AND IMPERSONATORS
Vrinda Condillac
MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 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 may include Fantomina by Eliza Haywood, Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, Passing by Nella Larsen, and The Fraud by Zadie Smith. Visual media may include Parasite, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Kagemusha.
FYS BC1778
ADULTERY; REALISM AND DESIRE
Andrew L. 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.
FYS BC1779
THE FAMILY
Caroline Bowman
MW 1:10 pm - 2:25 pm
No matter our particular family histories or relationships, the family plays a central role in shaping each of our individual lives, and as an ideal the family form promises each of us a sphere of care and love. But how well does the family live up to this ideal in practice? And how might the family contribute to propping up social hierarchies along the lines of gender, race, and class? Might we imagine—and even desire—futures beyond the family? This course will consider critical engagements with the family form, spanning from Plato’s early skepticism, to 19th-century socialist utopian visions of the commune, to the rich variety of analyses offered by feminists of the 20th and 21st century. At the end of the class, we’ll consider what science/speculative fiction has to offer in its imagining of alternative possibilities for organizing care. Readings will include political writings, novels, and academic texts drawn from philosophy, sociology, critical race theory, and critical indigenous studies.