University Seminars Fall 2006


	anthropology art history economics film, tv & theatre history literature music philosophy political science psychology sociology theology

University Seminars Fall 2007

University Seminars are designed to foster intense interaction between first-year students and faculty in small settings. These courses, designated by the "1318_" number, are offered by departments within the College of Arts and Letters and will satisfy the relevant University requirement in history, literature, fine arts, social science, and the first course of the philosophy or theology requirement. These seminars include a significant writing component and require a minimum of 24 pages with at least one re-write of a corrected paper. Each first-year student will be required to complete one University Seminar.

There are University Seminars in the following areas:

Anthropology (ANTH)
Art History (ARHI)
Economics (ECON)
Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT)
History (HIST)
Literature (LIT)
Music (MUS)
Philosophy (PHIL)
Political Science (POLS)
Psychology (PSY)
Sociology (SOC)
Theology (THEO)

ANTHROPOLOGY UNIVERSITY SEMINAR

ANTH 13181 01 – Anthropological Approaches to Identity, Memory and Culture Taught by: Ian Kuijt
This seminar explores the social and cultural context of identity in literature. In this class we explore four very different cultural contexts in which identity are actively defined in highly complex ways, and with multiple social, economic, religions, and political foundations. The exploration of these topics facilitates a new understanding of other worlds, people, cultures, and places. Through discussion and readings, students will be introduced to a wide range of topics germane to Anthropology, including the social and political context of identity, the links between social identity, leadership and authority, and our place within these constructs.

ANTH 13181 02– Global Media and Migration
Taught by: Maurizio Albahari

From YouTube to Al Jazeera and CNN, the global mass media industry plays a fundamental role in the production, circulation, and consumption of identities, meanings, representations, and regulations. This course investigates the mass media coverage of the topic of "immigration," focusing on the complex practices and issues involving the producers, consumers, and subjects of media representation. Among the latter, we will focus on the cases of "Mexican," "Muslim," and refugee migration, with an eye to the 2007 Notre Dame Forum and problems of religion, gender, language, race, terrorism, sovereignty and borders. To this end, we will examine, discuss, and evaluate documentary and feature films, newspapers and magazines, ads, the Internet, TV and radio talk shows. Deploying a comparative approach and mainly examining the US arena alongside the European one, we will be able to appreciate both global and distinctive trends in the coverage of migration. In addition to building our expertise on media and migration through lectures, discussions, and hands-on analyses, we will work with mass media professionals and collectively produce a "white paper" with recommendations and practical tools toward a more empirically-based coverage of migration.

ART HISTORY UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

ARHI 13182 01 - Rembrandt and his contemporaries
Taught by: Charles Rosenberg
This seminar will focus on the life and art of one of the most universally acknowledged masters of Baroque painting, Rembrandt van Rijn. A detailed consideration of his paintings, drawings and prints will give students an opportunity not only to acquire a deep understanding of the artist and his art, but also to consider broader aesthetic, technical, social, political, and theological questions. In addition to looking at the work of Rembrandt, the art of the great portraitist Frans Hals and of genre painter Jan Vermeer, will also be considered.

ARHI 13182 02 - Critical Moments in Classical Art & Culture
Taught by: Robin Rhodes
A history of art in the Greco-Roman world will be illustrated and discussed through the analysis of a series of artistic and cultural crises. An overall view of cultural and artistic evolution will be constructed through an understanding of these key points of transition. Among the critical moments to be examined will be the meeting of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, renewed contacts with East following the Greek Dark Age, the Persian Wars, the fall of Athens, the coming of the Etruscans, the Roman conquest of Greece, the invention of concrete, and the death of the Roman Republic.

ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

ECON 13181 01 – Knowledge for Sale?
Taught by: Philip Mirowski
With the withdrawal of the state from its commitment to funding science and higher education, scientists and universities have turned ever increasingly to corporations for support. Far from being insulated from the operation of intellectual inquiry, the commercialization of the university has influenced everything from the way in which classes are taught to the types of research pursued to the very bedrock notions of the purpose of the university. We explore these changes from both an economic and philosophical viewpoint, and then participants will themselves research some aspect of the "marketplace of ideas" here at Notre Dame.

ECON 13181 02 – Economics and Society
Taught by: William Leahy
This seminar will examine past and current American economic challenges and problems through reading, analyzing and discussing the major works of significant economists and other writers on the subject of economics. Emphasis will be place on economics as a social science and its effect on the overall society as well as on communities, families and individuals.

FILM, TELEVISION, AND THEATRE SEMINAR

FTT 13182 01 - The American Musical: what are they, how are they made and what is wrong with them now.
Taught by: Kevin Dreyer
In this class we will look at the history of the American musical which has become synonymous with Broadway, we will also look at what goes into the creation of a musical and who is involved. We will study the reasons for the decline of the American musical and students will research and write about a self-selected topic related to these examinations.

Material will be presented in a combination of in class videos, readings and attendance at live performances. Attention will also be paid to the craft of writing.

HISTORY UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

AMST 13184 01 – American Men, American Women
Taught by: Heidi Ardizzone
What does it mean to be male or female in America? How different are our ideas about gender from those of other cultures? This course will focus on the 20th century and look at the origins and development of masculine and feminine roles in the United States. How much have they changed over time and what aspects have been retained? We will explore the ways that cultural images, political changes, and economic needs have shaped the definition of acceptable behavior and life choices based on gender. Topics will range from Victorian ideals through the Jazz Age and war literature to movie Westerns, '50s television families, and '60s youth culture; and into recent shifts with women's rights, extreme sports, and talk shows.

HIST 13184 01 - Pirates in History
Taught by: Dian Murray
In this particular course you will use piracy as the means to engage the work of historians. Each unit will be built around particular textual problems that historians face in their endeavors to recount the past. You will experience how historians reconstruct fragmented texts, how they use various kinds of primary sources to corroborate one another, and how they establish and disagree about the authorship of given texts. You will also see how historians and creative writers differ in their portrayal of piracy and what it means to their understanding of life around them. Since there will be no examinations in this course, the goal will be not to memorize dates and facts, but instead to marshal textual evidence in support of the arguments you will make in the course of your written reflection papers and essays.

HIST 13184 02 - The Canadian Alternative
Taught by: Mark Noll
Although Canadians are welcomed in this course, it is designed as an introduction to the history of Canada studied as an alternative to the history of the United States. Canadian history resembles the history of the United States in many ways, even as, in many other ways, it is quite different. Why, as examples of differences with the United States, has Canada possessed a national system of universal health care for at least two generations? Why does every Canadian province provide some kind of financial support for private schools, including religious schools? Why were Canadians much more likely than Americans to be regular church goers until about 1965, but since 1965 much less likely? These and other questions will be explored historically through readings in books and Canadian periodicals, through some viewing of Canadian media, and through student writing and discussion.

HIST 13184 03 – History and Biography
Taught by: Jon Coleman
This history university seminar explores the intersection of history and biography by looking at several persons from the American past -- the famous, infamous, obscure, and forgotten -- and the ways that their life stories either constitute, complement, or challenge conventional narratives of our national identity.

HIST 13184 04 - Religious Belief and the Dawn of Modernity
Taught by: Alexander Martin
From the Reformation to the mid-19th century, the religious traditions of Christians and Jews in Europe and Russia were shaken by new intellectual currents, political upheavals, and a changing social order. Reading biographies, autobiographies, and some scholarly works, we will examine the diversity of responses to these challenges-including mysticism and freemasonry, secularization and religious skepticism, as well as changing ideas about education, family, class, nationality, and gender.

HIST 13184 05 - The Idea of India
Taught by: Jayanta Sengupta
Land of spirituality, or land of widow-burning? Land of fabulous wealth, or land of dire poverty, the caste system, and untouchability? Western literature has reflected stereotypical and contradictory images of India since antiquity. This course examines the impact of foreign perceptions of India on both the foreigners and the people of India. Unpacking the complex interplay of indigenous Indian culture with Islamic and western civilizations, this course seeks to train students in the idea that Indian civilization is not a fixed residue handed down from the past, but rather an enduring structure with adaptive mechanisms that permit it to be both a historically determined and continuously creative force. Students in this course will make an in-depth analysis of assigned readings, and write several short papers.

HIST 13184 06 - Revolution in Mexico
Taught by: Edward Beatty
Between 1910 and the 1920s cycles of revolution and civil war brought tremendous upheaval to Mexican society, yet few Mexicans and fewer historians agree on just what the revolution meant for the country. We will examine the revolution and its meaning for Mexico by reconstructing the major events and issues, by untangling the various strands of revolution and its aftermath, and by examining diverse efforts to describe and interpret the revolution. We will use prose, art, and film to portray central individuals and ideas, and we will use writing assignments and class discussions to analyze and evaluate those portrayals.

PLS 13184 01 – The Extraterrestrial Life Debate: A Historical Perspective Taught by: Michael Crowe
The goals of this seminar, which will be interdisciplinary in character, are simultaneously to provide students with an introduction to the intellectual history of the West from the Greeks to the present and to focus on one issue widely debated from antiquity to the present: the question of the existence, nature, and possible significance of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Authors whose writing will be read in the course include Aristotle, Lucretius, Aquinas, Cusa, Bruno, Kepler, Pascal, Newton, Huygens, Fontenelle, Pope, Voltaire, Franklin, Kant, Swedenborg, Paine, the Herschels, Wordsworth, Shelley, Comte, Emerson, Tennyson, Whewell, and Twain as well as various twentieth-century authors. Scientific, religious, philosophical, and literary aspects of the debate will all be discussed.

LITERATURE UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

ENGL 13186 01 – Reading and Writing Dreams in the Middle Ages
Taught by: Dolores Frese
In this University Seminar, featuring a selection of writings from the pre-modern world, we will focus on the textual record of dreams as central human events. All readings are in Modern English translation. For the shorter selections, there will be a Course Packet [CP] for purchase in the Bookstore, to supplement required texts, marked below with an asterisk [*]. We will begin our investigation of medieval dreaming with selections from Macrobius’ famous Commentary on the Dream of Scipio [CP]--a virtual handbook for the Middle Ages that lays out a classification of dream types and a theoretical account of their interpretive import--comparing and contrasting these medieval taxonomies of dreaming with Freud’s later 20 th century theorizing in The Interpretation of Dreams*.
Subsequent readings will include:
1. personal dreams recorded by saints & martyrs (Perpetua, Jerome, Augustine) [CP]; 2. dreams from legendary and church historians (Geoffrey of Monmouth, St. Bede) [CP]; 3. an early Anglo-Saxon religious poem (“Dream of the Rood”) representing the literary genre of ‘dream vision’ [CP]; 4. a famous French chanson de geste, or ‘song of deeds’ [The Song of Roland*] celebrating male bonding, military prowess and chivalric loyalty; + a variety of poetic & prose fictions from France, England and Wales featuring romance adventures associated with King Arthur and the men and women of his mythic court; 5. Quest of the Holy Grail* [from the French ‘Prose Launcelot’]; 6. & 7. The alliterative and stanzaic English poems describing The Death of Arthur*; 8. “Rhonabwy’s Dream,” [CP], a little-known, late medieval Welsh tale whose poignant historical fiction features a nostalgic/elegiac vision of Arthur as an ancient war lord; 9. Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” [CP], a mock-heroic beast fable that brings us full circle, back to Macrobius. with the allegorical adventures of a cock & fox which Chaucer interlaces with heavy doses of often-tongue-in-cheek medieval dream lore, pronounced by the barnyard beaks of chief-cock Chaunteclere, and Pertelote, his red-eyed, #1 chick.

In the course of the semester, we will work together on 3 academic skills: close reading; critical writing, exercised through a series of graded essays in textual analysis & literary critique; and the building of intellectual communityvia the full participation of every seminar member in daily class discussion of the assigned readings.

ENGL 13186 02 – Self and Society in American Poetry
Taught by: Stephen Fredman
This course looks at a central dilemma within American culture—the relationship of the individual to the social body—through the lens of seven major American poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Susan Howe. The poetry we will read covers the time period from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century and it ranges in scope from the short lyrics of Dickinson and Williams to Whitman’s epic “Song of Myself” and the vernacular rant of Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

ENGL 13186 03 – The Child in British Literature
Taught by: James Walton
Beginning with a consideration of traditional uses of the child in the myths of antiquity and European religious painting, the course will proceed to a close study of the child-as-hero/ heroine in the Romantic (Blake, Wordsworth), Victorian (Dickens Charlotte Bronte, Lewis Carroll) and early Modern period (Joyce). Students will be able to observe howthe oldest conventions for representing the child and childhood fade in the course of cultural history, become partly submerged, undergo continuous revision or transformation, but never disappear. They will be invited to compare the works covered in class with current treatments of the subject, with which they will prove better acquainted than the instructor.

ENGL 13186 04 – Alternative Lit.
Taught by: Steve Tomasula
Every narrative-from a letter of application to a hip-hop song-has a form, and the form of a narrative is always part of the story told. In Alternative Lit, we'll study a number of narratives written by contemporary authors who draw a reader's attention to how they write as one of the strategies they use to tell their story. That is, rather than using conventional methods that allow a reader to lose themselves in the dream of a novel, the authors and narrators of the fictions we'll be reading continually remind readers that what they are reading is made-up, i.e., constructed. Sometimes they do so to point out the fact that their stories arise from a viewpoint or position that is outside the mainstream of conventional literature, wisdom, or politics. Often, the goal of these works is to demonstrate how many of the conventions we live by are also invented, constructed, a product of a particular view point, a particular moment in history. They are, that is, an alternative to the stories and means of story telling that dominate today's literary mainstream, or today's most commonly held beliefs, and by reading them we will learn much about how all writing is composed, how meaning is made, and its implications for the web of power, history, gender, politics, and, of course, the literature we live with today. This is a reading and writing intensive course where students learn by doing, analyzing a variety of Alternative Lits-short stories, graphic novels, manga, hypertexts, multimedia and collage novels-as they try their own hands at employing the lessons learned. Main assignments include writing an analytic essay, a short fiction, a graphic novel (section); daily reaction papers and short quizzes are also required. The reading list will include works like: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers; Love in a Dead Language by Lee Siegel; The Blue Guide to Indiana by Michael Martone; Samuel Johnson is Indignant: Stories by Lydia Davis; Ranma _, Vol. 1 by Rumiko Takahashi; and other works.

ENGL 13186 05 – Everybody’s Shakespeare
Taught by: Jacqueline Brogan
In this course we will read several of Shakespeare's plays (including tragedies, comedies, and romances), as well as a number of contemporary "re-visions" of those works by authors of varying cultural, ethnic, or gender backgrounds. The purpose of this course will consequently be fourfold: first, to gain an in-depth understanding of one of our most important writers, particularly in relation to his own time period; second, to discover what qualities, vision, dilemmas, and/or artistry keep this author very much alive; third, to examine the various ways in which contemporary authors are modifying, if not codifying Shakespeare's work in their own important new works; and last, to develop the critical skills and vocabulary for discussing and writing about these issues and texts.

At the end of the course, you should have a firm grasp of several important literary works, from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, a sophisticated idea of how literature both reifies and resists seminal literature which has come before it, and finally a sense of how the issues raised in this literary "confluence" are important in the actual world and in our lives.

TEXTS: William Shakespeare--/Othello/,/ The Taming of the Shrew/,/ The Tempest/, and/ King Lear;/ Amira Baraka (Le Roi Jones)--/Dutchman and the Slave/; Richard Wright--/Native Son/; Toni Morrison--/Tar Baby/; Alice Walker--/The Color Purple/; Jane Smiley--/A Thousand Acres/.

ENGL 13186 06 – Classics of Medieval English and Old Norse Literature (or: Texts Tolkien Loved)
Taught by: Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
This course is designed to introduce students to the great genres of English literature, using works particularly loved by J. R. R. Tolkien. Using the Norton Anthology of English Literature, supplemented by texts originating in the Viking age, students will be introduced to the genres of epic, lyric, romance, comedy, saint's life, and drama. The list includes famous texts representing diverse Northern European cultures, and ranging across heroic, chivalric, spiritual, and social themes (among the latter, the roles of women, slaves and non-Christian peoples). These works inspired Tolkien both as a novelist, and as an Oxford professor of medieval literature and language (he was a philologist, meaning literally "a lover of words," a scholar of Old and Middle English, Old Norse, runes, and more). In the final weeks of the course, students will lead the class in oral presentations and discussions aimed at comparing the medieval texts with Tolkien's fictions. Having learned to analyze the medieval texts using professional literary methods, and having had access to Tolkien's own editions, glossaries, and some of his published articles, they will have an unusual chance to appreciate the sources of many of his most famous literary motifs and word coinages, in actual, historical writings.

ENGL 13186 07 – One Hundred Years of the U.S. Short Story
Taught by: Valerie Sayers
An exploration of that satisfying and surprising literary form, the short story, as practiced in the U.S. for the last one hundred years. We'll read some forty-five stories, ranging from traditional to experimental, and we’ll explore a number of critical approaches to reading short stories. We’ll do close readings of all the works and we'll examine the contexts in which they were written, published, originally read, and read today. Along the way, we'll question whether fiction can influence its age as much as the age influences fiction, and we’ll explore the future of the short story in the electronic age. As we’re discussing the work critically, we won’t forget the sheer pleasure of good storytelling, sharp language, inventive form. Expect to write about 30 pages of formal and informal criticism, including short responses, a midterm exam, two longer essays, and a rewrite.

ENGL 13186 08 – Literacy in the Classroom and in the World
Taught by: Katherine Zieman
This course will examine what it means to read and to write, both in academic settings and in the world at large. We will learn some of the techniques of modern academic literary interpretation while studying writings by those who find salvation in literacy (The Life of Frederick Douglass) and those who wonder about the place of writing in our technological age (Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 401, William Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz), and even "literary" works produced by those who claim to be illiterate (The Book of Margery Kempe). In addition we will consult theories connecting the presence of the written word to very structure of human perception (Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy) and to the distribution of political power (Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed). Our classroom investigation will be put in larger perspective by community-service projects involving reading and literacy tutoring from preschool to adults to help up consider how reading and writing function in the "real world."

Course requirements: 2 hours per week community service (to be arranged in conjunction with the Center for Social Concern), a community service journal, participation in class discussion, and several short papers.

ENGL 13186 09 – Master Writers from Latin America
Taught by: Orlando Menes
This university seminar in English is designed to give first-year students an introduction to: (1) university writing, and (2) the reading, analysis, appreciation, and discussion of literary texts. The topic for this course is Master Writers from Latin America: Gabriel García Márquez, Julia Alvarez, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Pablo Neruda, and Alfonsina Storni. These four fiction writers and two poets are some of the most celebrated and distinguished of the region; in fact, among these world-class authors are the Nobel laureates Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda, as well as one winner, Carlos Fuentes, of Spain’s Cervantes Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel in the Hispanic world. Apart from stressing cultural and literary appreciation, this course will also teach students the concepts and terminology required for any productive discussion of literature. So as to stimulate the students’ engagement with the texts, class discussions will cover a range of universal and humanistic themes. Course Requirements include response papers, four medium-length essays, group presentations, and reports on campus literary/cultural events.

ENGL 13186 10 – The American Renaissance in Black and White
Taught by: Wilson Ivy
In a five-year span from 1850 to 1855 Emerson's Representative Men, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, Melville's Moby-Dick and Pierre, Thoreau's Walden, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass were all published. Later identified as "The American Renaissance," this flowering of literature also witnessed the publication of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin a novel that was consumed by more American-and international-readers than any of her contemporaries. This period also marked the burgeoning landscape of African American writings including Brown's Clotel, Whitfield's America and Other Poems, Harper's Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, and Douglass' My Bondage and My Freedom. This course examines the literary and aesthetic productions of The American Renaissance in the context of a shared cultural history. Major themes include individualism, Transcendentalism, slavery, and sentimentalism.

Course grade will be determined by active participation in seminar discussion and four writing assignments, one of which we will a revision of a previous paper.

ENGL 13186 11 – Biography/Autobiography: One’s Life Story
Taught by: Edward Malloy
By employing eight written documents and two films (autobiographies/biographies) we will attempt to understand the human person in all of his/her complexity. We will focus on well-known historical figures from a variety of cultural settings to learn what their stories may have to teach us about the human condition, about the uniqueness of the self and about the forces that influence our behavior.

The students in the class are expected to contribute to the seminar discussions and to write a paper on each assignment. There will also be a final paper. Attendance is expected at each class.

GE 13186 01 – Justice in the German Detective Novel
Taught by: Anita McChesney
This course will explore changing depictions of justice in some of the most prominent German Detective novels from 1786-1996. Each work will be read and discussed with careful attention to its formal characteristics as well as to the historical changes in the judicial system that are reflected in the works. Among the authors we will read are Schiller, Kleist, Hoffmann, Dürrenmatt and Schlink.

GE 13186 02 – Faust from the 16 th to the 20 th Century
Taught by: Vittorio Hosle
In connection with the Faust year at Notre Dame we will read some of the most important literary works dealing with this essential figure of modernity, whose desire for knowledge and striving for the infinite capture much of our age. In the center will be Goethe's "Faust", the greatest work of German literature, but we will begin with Marlowe's Faust drama and end with Klaus Mann's novel "Mephisto", a remarkable analysis of one artist selling his soul to the Third Reich.

IRLL 13186 01 – Imagining Ourselves: Contemporary Poetry
Taught by: Briona NicDhiarmada
This University Literature Seminar examines the various and multiple images of the nation, the state and the individual as presented in 20th century Irish poetry. This course offers a wide variety of poetic texts from across the 20th century and introduces students to the skills of interpreting poetry as a commentary of social and political forces. In this class we read key texts in the light of the national narrative, changing cultural and historical events and consider the emergence of a new multifaceted, poly-lingual national and individual identity within Ireland.

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