University Seminars Spring 2006

University Seminars are designed to foster intense interaction between first-year students and faculty in small settings. These courses are offered by departments within the College of Arts and Letters and will satisfy the relevant University requirement in fine arts, history, literature, 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.

This page includes descriptions of the University Seminars for Spring 2006. The following links will take you to specific seminars or you can scroll through the entire list to find the information that you need.

ARHI 13182 - 01: Critical Moments in Classical Art and Culture
Taught by: Robin Rhodes
This seminar will examine three critical moments in the history of classical Greek art and culture: the meeting of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures in the mid second millennium B.C; the emergence of Greece from the Dark Age in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. and the consequent birth of monumental art and architecture; and the generation of the Persian Wars, when Athens is established as the political and cultural center of the Greek world. Our goal will be to develop a methodology for the analysis of primary historical sources, particularly visual ones, and for drawing synthetic conclusions based upon them.

FTT 13182 01: Language of Dance
Taught by: Kevin Dreyer
The Language of Dance looks at dance as an art form and as a dialogue with society. Looking primarily at 20th Century dance we will examine its evolution and growth in light of pure artistic development and societal commentary. Through viewing live and recorded performances, documentaries on the role of dance, readings, discussions and their own critical writings, students will begin to develop their own language of dance. The Language of Dance has as an additional goal to establish the unique connection between the fine and performing arts and society, which will lead to a greater understanding of art as a medium of societal growth and cultural communication.

FTT 13182 02: Drama & Values
Taught by: Mark Pilkinton
Drama & Values deals with dramatic literature from many historical periods and the relationship of drama to the constant (and changing) values societies hold over time. Students will think, discuss, and write critically about drama (plays) and theatre (the realization of plays in performance), especially as drama and theatre relate to larger societal issues, such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, politics, and religion. Drama & Values attempts to instill a greater appreciation for the fine and performing arts in general, and theatre specifically, with the hope that students will become both more knowledgeable and critical audience members of theatre, film, & television.

HIST 13184- 01: The World of Thomas Jefferson
Taught by: Thomas Slaughter
Thomas Jefferson lent his name to the age in which he lived, in part because he was a man of incredibly diverse interests and talents. We will read about Jefferson and his times as well as some of Jefferson's own writings and his correspondence with others. We will use his life to explore aspects of philosophy, art, architecture, politics, and science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Students will write a paper on their personal connection to Jefferson and his world.

HIST 13184- 02: Pirates in History
Taught by: Dian Murray
University Seminars are designed to foster intense interaction between first-year students and faculty in small settings where class discussion is the dominant mode of instruction in introducing the paradigms of a given academic discipline. These are to be writing intensive courses in which students will write and read simultaneously and continuously throughout the semester. In this particular course you will use piracy as the means to engage in 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- 03: Civil Rights & Civil Liberties
Taught by: Marc Rodriguez
Although the Declaration of Independence is highly regarded for its famous phrase, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" issues of equality, liberty, and happiness have not been self-evident for many groups in the United States. Primarily focused on the 20th century, this seminar seeks to examine the tensions between theory and practice over the course of American history as we explore the ways a variety of American individuals and groups have sought to compel the United States to abide by its own stated commitment to liberty and civil rights as citizens, minority group members, women, workers, immigrants, and others. Since this is a seminar course, each student will be expected to contribute wholeheartedly to the weekly discussions.

HIST 13184 - 04: Daily Life in the Italian Renaissance
Taught by: Margaret Meserve
This course explores the history of everyday life in Renaissance Italy (ca 1350-1650), a period of intense economic, political, and social change. Topics will include: private and public life in the Renaissance city-state; sexual mores, the marriage market, and the Italian culture of honor; vendettas, witch hunts, and blood libels; food, wine, and popular celebrations; religious devotion, heresy, and political protest and dissent. Along the way we will investigate the larger question of what social history is and how it is done; how individual lives are shaped by larger political and economic forces; and how individuals and communities resist those same pressures, often in creative and culturally expressive ways. In addition to regular writing assignments, students will make several oral presentations and write a final research paper.

HIST 13184 - 05: Daily Life in the Italian Renaissance
Taught by: Margaret Meserve
This course explores the history of everyday life in Renaissance Italy (ca 1350-1650), a period of intense economic, political, and social change. Topics will include: private and public life in the Renaissance city-state; sexual mores, the marriage market, and the Italian culture of honor; vendettas, witch hunts, and blood libels; food, wine, and popular celebrations; religious devotion, heresy, and political protest and dissent. Along the way we will investigate the larger question of what social history is and how it is done; how individual lives are shaped by larger political and economic forces; and how individuals and communities resist those same pressures, often in creative and culturally expressive ways. In addition to regular writing assignments, students will make several oral presentations and write a final research paper.

HIST 13184 - 06: Public Memory Versus Academic History
Taught by: Linda Przybyszewsk
This course will acquaint students with the problems that arise when the
public’s memory of the past conflicts with how academic historians write and
think about history. For example, the controversy over the display planned at
the Smithsonian of the Enola Gay, the plane that was used to drop the atomic
bomb on Japan during WWII, actually caused the museum to withdraw its project from public view. Critics insisted that coverage of the civilian casualties
undermined an appreciation of the American war effort, while historians argued
that patriotic whitewashing of the past should never triumph over a depiction
of the truth. Can both of these concerns – the patriotic and the historic—be
addressed? Academics and the public also have trouble communicating with one
another. Many historians lament that the public wants simplistic versions of
history, while some scholars complain that academics write so badly that it is
no wonder they cannot find a popular audience. What is gained and what is lost
when a historical topic is covered in order to appeal to a popular audience,
whether for a magazine such as American Heritage or in a feature film? What do
academic scholars have to offer the public and how can they best offer it?

AMST 13186 - 01: Metropolitan Consciousness
Taught by: Collin Meissner
Henry James once remarked that Americans “are the only great people of the civilized world that is a pure democracy, and we are the only great people that is exclusively commercial.” For James, New York City defined the spot where everything modern and distinctly “American,” everything about money and about politics, everything about the individual and about society came together as a formed, physical identity–for good and bad. These tensions are endemic to the notion of the city itself. For many, cities such as New York and Chicago were places to despise, places of suspicion, of immigration, of ethnicity, places which were distinctly unAmerican and which challenged America’s conception of itself as a country founded upon and guided by rural principles. But the democracy and commerce James identified as specifically American is a combination which depends upon the city in all its variegated senses. Using James’s comment as a beginning, this course will examine the relationship between the development of the American city and the emergence of a metropolitan consciousness. The course will be thematically driven and will focus on the role of money, democracy, culture and politics and will examine how these forces coalesced through the process of urbanization and became embedded in the distinctively modern American identity. While the bulk of the course will deal with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we will look back to the country’s early urban development and forward to its most recent urban metamorphoses.

ENGL 13186 - 01:The Death and Return of God in Radical Poetry
Taught by Romana Huk
This course will introduce students to several of the key upheavals in twentieth-century thought that rocked spiritually-inclined poets, leaving them without easy paths back to devotional art. We will be particularly focused on those British, Irish and American poets whose cutting edge, radical ideas about themselves and culture would shake apart the very grammar of their medium – language – and cause them to write in forms that seemed very strange and even disturbing to unaccustomed eyes. At the crux of our discussions will be the fate of the idea of God in the works of “postmodern” poets whose secular, political projects and views of language – “the word” – would conflict at the deepest levels with their desire for belief in divinity. We will focus closely on the work of small-press writers like Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin, John Riley and Wendy Mulford (U.K.), Fanny Howe and Hank Lazar (U.S.) and others who have recently emerged, with the help of 21^st-century hindsight, as part of an important group of poet-thinkers engaged in this crucial project of “reconstructing God.” The course will begin with gentle introductions to the problems of reading twentieth-century philosophy, as well as to the problems of reading poetry as literary forms. During the semester students will be required to write either three short papers or substitute the final one with a creative response to what we’ve read.

ENGL 13186 - 02: Novels and National Identity in the Nineteenth Century
Taught by Sara Maurer
Nineteenth century novels are best known for their fainting heroines, haunted houses, and cinematically satisfying romance plots. In taking the nineteenth-century novel as its primary object of study, the aim of this course is two-fold. First, it is designed to give students without any prior knowledge or perhaps even interest in the nineteenth-century novel a chance to gain expertise in the novel’s many forms epistolary, historical, realist, and gothic. Secondly, by examining novels from Scotland, England, and Ireland, the course is designed to explore how the novel created a sense of national identity in its readers. By the end of the course students can expect both to be more literate readers of novels and to be more savvy theorists of how the realm of fiction is involved in the so-called “real world.”

ENGL 13186 - 03: Arthurian Legends
Taught by Delores Frese
The myth, history and fiction which goes by the collective term of "Arthurian Legend" will be the object of our study as we try to understand the powerful attraction which these materials have exercised upon the imaginations of readers & writers from the l2th to the 20th century. The texts we will read have been written in Latin, French, German, Welsh, Middle & Modern English, but we will read all of them in modern English translation. The great characters--Arthur, Launcelot, Guinevere, Galahad, Gawain, Merlin, Morgan, Vivien, etc.--and the great thematic templates--the quest for the grail (holy and unholy), the fellowship of the Round Table, the sword in the stone, the fatherless child, etc.--will be studied in their various fictional forms as we try to build a broadly based sense of the textual traditions surrounding the once-and-future-king.

ENGL 13186 - 05: Crime & Detection in Popular Culture
Taught by: Susan Harris
In this course we will look at the development of crime fiction as a genre, from its origins in Victorian sensationalist fiction to the proliferation of sub-genres in contemporary American film. We will be looking specifically at the development of the two figures around which crime fiction revolves: the criminal and the detective. The discussion and the written assignments will focus on questions about what these figures do for the cultures that create them. Why does Victorian Britain love Sherlock Holmes? Why is present-day America fascinated by serial killers? How are ideas about crime and criminality linked to beliefs about death, the supernatural, justice, and morality--as well as issues involving gender, race, sexuality, and class? How do all of those concerns affect the way crime fiction evolves as a literary form?
Books:
The Moonstone. Wilkie Collins. Penguin.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Bantam Books.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Agatha Christie.
The Big Sleep. Raymond Chandler. Vintage Crime.
Shroud for a Nightingale. P.D. James. Warner Books.
Postmortem. Patricia Cornwell. Pocket Books.

ENGL 13186 - 06: 20th Century American Literature
Taught by: Jacque Brogan

In this course we will read a number of works, by both women and men, which may be accurately described as feminist fiction. In so doing, we will raise issues about the relation of aesthetics to politics, about the process of canonization, and about aesthetic integrity. Ultimately, we will also be examining the place of women within the American culture during the Twentieth-Century - how it has changed, how it has remained the same. At the end of the course, students should feel that they have discovered a new body of exciting literature, as well as new ways of reading some of our best-known literature.

ENGL 13186 - 07: Freshman Seminar
Taught by: Regina Schwartz
This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. The trial of Socrates, the trial of Jesus, biblical prophecy, tragedy in Euripides and Shakespeare, and finally more modern works will be included. Our exploration will be done in the context of theories of justice, and we will read those theories alongside the literature. But the literature offers elaborations of theories of justice, following their consequences both within legal frameworks and beyond, as they shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, how the relation between justice and law has been conceived.

ENGL 13186 - 08: Renaissance Ways of Knowing
Taught by: Graham Hammill
The Renaissance was a period during which people began to re-evaluate how humansknow who they are, what they are, and where they are. In this seminar, which will be interdisciplinary in approach, we will consider how these questions get taken up and developed by some of the great writers, artists, and philosophers of the period. In particular, we will focus on the ways in which knowledge intersects with questions concerning technology, subjectivity, gender, and race. This course will be divided into four sections: (1) the development of perspective its relation to the body as a site of knowledge; (2) the discovery of the new world; (3) the subjective experience of knowledge; and (4) the development of experimental science. Figures in the course will include Leonardo da Vince, Castiglione, Montaigne, Marlowe, Galileo, Vermeer, Donne, Cavendish, and Bacon.

LLEA 13186 - 01: Self and Other in Modern Japanese Fiction
Taught by: Michael Brownstein
In this course, we will study five novels by modern Japanese writers as a way of exploring formal aspects of fictional narratives and how they work to produce meaning. We will begin with Kokoro (1914) by Natsume S_seki (1867-1916). This is the story of a young college student who tries to find the key to his future in the mysterious past of his mentor, the reclusive Sensei ("teacher"), even as Japan itself entered a period of uncertainty following the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. We will then read Masks (1958) by Enchi Fumiko (1905-1986). A tale of revenge and sexual intrigue set in the 1950s, Masks requires us to look at two plays from the medieval N_ theater that are based on events in The Tale of Genji (ca. 1100 C.E.). We will then turn to the strange world of The Woman in the Dunes (1962), Abe K_b_'s (1924-1993) Kafka-esque novel about a schoolteacher from Tokyo trapped in a village built in the sand dunes of a remote sea-side village. Our fourth reading, Kitchen, was written by Yoshimoto Banana (1964-), one of Japan's most popular women writers today. We will end the semester with A Personal Matter by _e Kenzaburo (1935-), who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994.

LLEA 13186 - 02: Man and Nature in Chinese Poetry
Taught by: Xiaoshan Yang
This course introduces students with little or no knowledge of Chinese language or culture to the ways in which nature is perceived and represented in premodern Chinese poetry. We will explore nature imagery not only as rhetorical and structural devices but also as reflections of underlying Chinese worldviews. Readings are arranged roughly in chronological order to reinforce the sense of historical development. Whereas their amount and difficulty vary from week to week, the texts always demand careful and houghtful reading. Students are encouraged to bring in their experience of reading Western poetry in order to approach the Chinese texts from a comparative perspective.

LLEA 13186 03: Reading the Japanese Woman in Literature
Taught by: Heather Bowen-Struyk
The Japanese woman is a favorite site of fantasy and anxiety, both in Japan and abroad. From the famously demure Madame Chrysanthème of Pierre Loti's late 20th century novel to the sassy Modern Girl of the roaring 20s to contemporary busty battlin' babes, the Japanese Woman was been available as a site of cultural imagination, and those images often tell us less about real Japanese women than they do about the dreams and nightmares of those doing the imagining. This class focuses on important works that variously glorify, orientalize, and/or trouble the idea of the Japanese woman in literature-both in Japan and in the West-over the past centuries. Readings will also include theoretical, historical, anthropological, sociological and popular sources.

LLRO 13186 - 01: French as Booty
Taught by: Allison Rice
This introductory course to Francophone literature will focus on creative works of a variety of genres in an examination of the multiple modes of "writing the self" in French. The readings will be broad and far-reaching, and will examine the question of taking up the French language and culture as postcolonial "booty" in autobiographical texts. We will question the ways in which writing the self is often a complicated enterprise when it is undertaken in the language of the colonizer; we will also question the extent to which writing the self intersects with writing others, in the sense of family, community, society, nation, history, and tradition. We will seek to discern the differences that characterize texts composed by writers from diverse geographical locations, linguistic backgrounds, religious beliefs, social environments, and familial and communal histories. We will study five works of fiction, one play, a series of poems, and three movies. Students will be expected to make one oral presentation with another member of the class and complete four written assignments over the course of the semester.

MELC 13186 - 01: The Arabian Nights and World Literature
Taught by: Li Guo
Chances are we have all heard of Aladdin, Ali Baba, Genies, and Sinbad the Sailor, but how well do we really know them? Where do they come from? How did they reach us? This course has as its focal point the famous collection of tales from which these characters are taken, the Thousand and One Nights (sometimes better known as the Arabian Nights). By any title, these stories, framed by the tale of Scherazade (Shahrazad), have enjoyed a widespread and varied reputation over the centuries and across cultures. (Their role in popular American culture is well known: one need only look at the Disney Aladdin animated trilogy, or the recent syndicated TV series loosely based on the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor to see how these names and stories have permeated our entertainment medium.) In this course, we will examine these stories from a variety of academic perspectives, taking advantage of the wealth of material available (both textual and audio-visual). We will examine issues of provenance: where did these stories originate and when? We will study the stories as literary texts as well as historical documents, asking what, if anything, they tell us about the cultures they reflect and the societies in which they are set. We will examine how these tales have been interpreted by later societies, both Arab and Western, and what those interpretations tell us about the interpreters. Finally, we will use this course and its content to introduce us to the study of the Middle East, its languages, history, literature, and peoples and further ground us in the culture of higher education.

Format : This is a “seminar,” which implies the active participation of all members. There will be times when I provide you with information via the “lecture” method, but most of our class time will be spent discussing the material read for that session, along with the issues raised by that reading. Preparation in this context means a familiarity with the texts assigned. There will also be several screenings of the films selected for this purpose. You will be required to write several short essays (1-2 pages each) and a final paper (5-8 pages). There will be no exams.

PLS 13186 - 01: Pagan and Christian Antiquity
Taught by: Felicitas Munzel
In this seminar, students will read, analyze, discuss, and write about a range of the great works from ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, including Plato's Republic and Vergil's Aeneid, and works by Lucretius, Cicero, Epictetus, Augustine, and Bonaventure. In addition to offering the opportunity to consider together some of the foundational texts of Western culture, the class will also serve as an introduction to the "Great Books" approach offered by the Program of Liberal Studies, in which students develop and test their own interpretations of classic texts through thoughtful reading and discussion in which they are expected to take a leading role. This seminar counts as the second in the required seminar sequence for students who go on to major in PLS, and it fulfils the University literature requirement.

PLS 13186 - 02: Classical Greece: Texts and Themes
Taught by: Clark Power
In this seminar, students will read, analyze, discuss, and write about a range of the great works of ancient Greece, including Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Thucydides' history of the terrible war between Athens and Sparta, and the philosophical dialogues of Plato. In addition to offering the opportunity to consider together some of the foundational texts of Western culture, the class will also serve as an introduction to the "Great Books" approach offered by the Program of Liberal Studies, in which students develop and test their own interpretations of classic texts through thoughtful reading and discussion in which they are expected to take a leading role. This seminar counts as the first in the required seminar sequence for students who go on to major in PLS, and it fulfils the University literature requirement.

PLS 13186 - 03: Classical India: Texts and Themes
Taught by: Jeffrey Schneibel, C.S.C.
The seminar is an introduction to the "Great Books" approach to learning in which students develop and test their own interpretations of classic texts through thoughtful reading and discussions. Leading ideas in Buddhist and Hindu thought will be introduced, but the focus is student engagement with texts and learning the skills of seminar discussion. We will read primary sources in translation (literary, philosophical, and religious) produced in South Asia after the 5th century B.C.E., including the Bhagavadgita and other chapters from the Mahabharata. Readings from Buddhist sources will draw on the Theravada suttas from the first millennium of the tradition.

PLS 13186 - 04: Pagan and Christian Antiquity
Taught by: Felicitas Munzel
In this seminar, students will read, analyze, discuss, and write about a range of the great works from ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, including Plato's Republic and Vergil's Aeneid, and works by Lucretius, Cicero, Epictetus, Augustine, and Bonaventure. In addition to offering the opportunity to consider together some of the foundational texts of Western culture, the class will also serve as an introduction to the "Great Books" approach offered by the Program of Liberal Studies, in which students develop and test their own interpretations of classic texts through thoughtful reading and discussion in which they are expected to take a leading role. This seminar counts as the second in the required seminar sequence for students who go on to major in PLS, and it fulfils the University literature requirement.