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Tales from Behind the Barbed Wire
Coordinated by Drs. Alexander Martin and Viviana Plotnik
Fall 2005
Participants in this seminar will read and discuss memoirs by
former political prisoners in 20th century dictatorial regimes. The
survivors’ narratives lend themselves to investigation from multiple
and interdisciplinary vantage points, including the study of human
rights, literature and the arts, political science, history,
sociology, and psychology.
Possible questions for discussion
include:
- How do survivors describe with words the indescribable?
- How
do violence and pain become aesthetic representations?
- Why and how
is State power exercised on the body?
- What motivated the
perpetrators?
- And, what are the psychological consequences of being
tortured and seeing the perpetrators go unpunished?
The Liberalism of the Liberal Arts
Coordinated by Dr. Joseph Knippenberg & Dr. Alan Woolfolk
Spring 2005
Living with Urban Sprawl
Coordinated by Drs. R. Donnelly and K. King
Fall 2004
As the world’s human population grows and urban areas attract a
greater proportion of that population, urban sprawl (i.e., low
density development) will cover more area. Sprawl has many negative
environmental and social effects, so we must develop plans that will
control sprawl. Whether we plan, the nature of the plan, and the
ultimate success of the plan depend on the state or regional
political backdrop. During this class, you will explore the links
between urban planning and politics.
The instructors will introduce
the topic, research designs (e.g., single-city focus and multi-city
comparison), and research resources before asking you to identify
group research topics. You will present your research to the class
on your allotted day. Your interest will strongly influence the
direction of the discourse in this seminar.
Zen & Mathematics
Coordinated by Dr. Jason Wirth & Dr. Philip Tiu
Spring 2004
Interrogating American Myths: Hollywood and the Western
Coordinated by Dr. Doug McFarland and Dr. Alan Woolfolk
Fall 2003
This course will analyze the Western as a medium in which social
concerns, political agendas, gender values, and cultural ideals are
represented, shaped, and criticized. Special attention will be paid
to the evolution of the Western genre and its shortcomings, the
social and cultural context of the Western, the myth of the American
frontier, and the influence of the Western on popular culture.
Gender, Race, and Science
Coordinated by Dr. Charlie Baube and
Dr. Beth Johnson
Spring 2003
The Manhattan Project
Coordinated by Dr. Michael Rulison and
Dr. Monte Wolf
Fall 2002
Text: Rhodes, Richard. 1986. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon
and Schuster.
Reading Foreign Films
Coordinated by Dr. Nick Maher and
Dr. Alan Woolfolk
Spring 2002
Discovering foreign films is, we believe, part of a good
undergraduate education. Film is, of course, an excellent form of
entertainment and familiarity with the ways in which foreign
filmmakers entertain allows us to look out to the wider world. Well
made films are multi-dimensional and offer more than just an exotic
look at weekend escapism in other countries: they offer us new
perspectives on the world, on history, and how we communicate. Film
is a medium in which word and image work together. This is obvious
and in the 21st Century we are all used to multi-media story telling
and the need for active engagement with media images. This is, of
course, true of good films as well.
Film, however, has one distinct
limitation: it exists in time. You watch for, say, two hours. Then
it is over and you know the plot. Most Americans rarely see movies
more than once. But a good movie can be like a painting. You look at
it once, then return to it, consider it and let it surprise you
again. We hope that this course will excite your interest in foreign
film and inspire you to internationalize your outlook and enjoy the
enormous wealth available in theatres and on videos (or DVD).
Musings on Science and Society
Coordinated by Dr. Michael Rulison and
Dr. Philip Tiu
Fall 2001
Text: Morowitz, Harold. 1993. Entropy and the Magic Flute. Oxford
Univ. Press
The Politics and Economics of Liberal Education
Coordinated by Dr. Joe Knippenberg and President Larry Large
Spring 2001
The Biological Basis of Human Behavior
Coordinated by Dr. Charlie
Baube and Dr. Brad Stone
Fall 2000
Texts:
- Dawkins, R. 1996. The Blind Watchmaker.
Norton.
- Ridley, M. 1996. The Origins of Virtue. Viking.
- Browne, K. 1998. Divided Labors. Yale.
The Films of Peter Greenaway
Coordinated by Dr. Nick Maher & Dr. Viviana Plotnik
Spring 2000
"If Only Film Could Do the Same" (1972)
Peter Greenaway is an painter and multi-media artists who hates
the cinema and makes films. His films have received critical acclaim
and little box-office success. The relatively little attention that
Greenaway has received in the United States is in part a result of
their complexity and rich referential allusions that often lose
casual movie-going audiences. Nonetheless, his films are enormously
gratifying to contemplate if you are willing to do the work required
to understand his image play and cultural references.
In this course we will examine the aesthetic style of Greenaway’s
direction and its relationship to the personal, political, and
artistic content of his films. We will view six of his films and
attempt to come to terms with his radical approach to visual
story-telling and the ways in which he strives to realize the
tensions between – and mutual dependence of - artistic expression
and social knowledge.
In each of the films that we will view, Greenaway structures the
story and frames his images in terms of the traditions of another
art or craft.
- The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) looks at the draughtman’s
craft/art as it utilizes realism to transform the artist’s product into legal documentation. Slavish
devotion to accuracy ends up "framing" the draughtsman, just as he
carefully frames his subjects. Against this backdrop (or, within
this "framework") Greenaway explores the transition from the old
regime’s values to a modern sensibility.
- The Belly of an Architect (1987) uses the theoretical and
practical concerns of architecture to explore the aesthetic appeal and moral/political implications of the
impressive roman/fascist architectural styles of Italy with the
utopian/democratic styles of France and the United States.
- The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1990) is a bold and
disturbing look at English politics under Thatcher against the
themes of the French Revolution. The shocking exploration of
consumption (even cannibalism) and waste are framed within the
skills and aesthetics of the culinary arts.
- Drowning by Numbers (1991) uses mathematics and numbers-games as
a framework within which to explore relations between men and women,
violence, safety and insecurity.
- Prospero's Books (1991) proves the exception to Greenaway’s focus
on a single art or craft to frame his work. This film uses the text
of The Tempest (somewhat out of order, though not altered) to
explore the themes of knowledge and documentation, magic and
science, wilderness and order.
- The Pillow Book (1996) follows Prospero’s Books with an
examination of publishing and writing and the thematic relationship
between the text and the body, memory and expression, the permanent
and impermanent.
Greenaway refers to himself as a cataloger. He collects and
orders and reorders ideas and objects. In this class we will catalog
and explore the many themes, all central to the Liberal Arts, that
are offered in his films.
Anderson’s
Imagined Communities
Coordinated by Dr. Rebecca Hyman and Dr. Nicholas Maher
Fall 1999
This course will investigate how a group of individuals come to
think of themselves as a "community." We will examine how a person
begins to conceive of his identity as based in part on his
membership in a particular community, and
conceives of that community as influenced in turn by his identity.
In this course, the "community" we will examine is that of the
nation. How, in other words, do individuals become citizens, even
nationalists? What do citizens collectively remember about their
national past and how does this history help to construct a
particular "future" or destiny of the nation state? How does the
nation state differentiate itself from other nation-states and
conceive of itself in hierarchical relation to other national
communities? This course will investigate the ways in which Benedict
Anderson’s classic book Imagined Communities attempts to pose
and answer these kinds of questions. At the same time, we will
attempt to apply our answers to these questions to the contemporary
world scene.
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