2019-2020 Graduate Academic Catalogue [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Course Descriptions
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Liberal Studies: Creative Process |
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LS 690 - The 1970s: Ideas Have Consequences (3.00 cr.)
Examines writings and films produced during the decade in which our current culture, for better or worse, took clear shape. Most aspects of the cultural revolution of the 1960s were absorbed into mainstream culture during the 1970s, even as a conservative counter- cultural revolution began to emerge that would reach full bloom in the 1980s. Students study works that are either interesting in their own right, or that shed light on the ideas and debates that prevailed during a curious and tumultuous time associated with the rise of postmodernism, feminism, libertarianism, mass narcissism, and much more. They also consider why film historians regard the 1970s as a particularly rich decade that brought forth both the American New Wave, and the rise of the summer blockbuster-Hollywood's standard for success for years to come. Readings include Tom Wolfe's The Me Decade and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism.
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LS 691 - Writing a Life: Architecture of the Memoir (3.00 cr.)
The popularity of life-writing genres has grown extensively in the past half century. Creative nonfiction, including the memoir, has supplanted some of the literary territory previously reserved for novels and other thinly-veiled fiction. Of all nonfiction, the memoir offers perhaps the most daunting research and exploration. The process of mining one's own life for material offers an emotional challenge but also a substantial reward: a chance at fresh self-invention and self-interpretation. The memoir also offers a vision of how one's life appears in the context of a creative work. Because of the proliferation of memoir genre, much theory has been developed to assess it. Students explore these concepts while examining diverse examples of strong memoirs from the past century, along with the writing of peers. The principal written work of the course is the production of three formal sections of a personal memoir.
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LS 695 - Books in Context: The American Best Seller, 1960-1990 (3.00 cr.)
This seminar examines a series of popular American books published during a time of rapid and continuing change. It seeks to discover how these works reflected values and attitudes that prevailed when they were published, and how they may have contributed to the mass culture we live in today. Students are asked to participate in seminar-style discussions and research-based activities that help to illuminate the mental atmosphere in which these works appeared, while also showing how these works influenced continuing intellectual, artistic, and social trends. Along the way, the phenomenon of the best seller is discussed, assisted by appropriate readings from social critics and literary historians. Titles include William Lederer's A Nation of Sheep (1960), John Updike's Couples (1968), Mario Puzo's The Godfather (1969), Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970), Charles Reich's The Greening of America (1970), and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1988).
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LS 697 - Reading Television (3.00 cr.)
This course contends that, while television is primarily a visual and oral medium, anything like an adequate appreciation of its pervasive contributions to American culture requires something much more akin to mastering a unique and comprehensive literacy. Students learn how to "read" television by viewing a handful of exceptional seasons of highly successful television series and placing them in social, historical, generic, aesthetic, and theoretical contexts. Possible series include: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Dallas, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, 24, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, and Deadwood.
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LS 760 - Women on the Verge: Adventures in the Transgressive Feminine (3.00 cr.)
Who dares do all that may become a woman...and then some? What happens when the lives, loves, and accomplishments of women exceed the horizon of expectations placed upon them? From shrews to witches, sirens to saints, and madcap heiresses to femme fatales, this course explores the transgressive feminine in literature, film, and theory.
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LS 766 - The Art of the Modern Essay (3.00 cr.)
The essay today is alive and thriving, accommodating a wide range of voices and styles. Students start with Montaigne, then consider works by many more contemporary practitioners, Americans and Europeans alike. In addition to a critical essay, students submit two other carefully revised essays on topics (and in a style) of their own choosing.
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LS 770 - Relationships Between Men and Women in Literature (3.00 cr.)
In literature, trouble is interesting, and relationships between men and women certainly provide plenty of opportunity for trouble. Students examine a variety of stories, poems, and plays that deal with those relationships. Readings include texts by authors such as Chopin, Hemingway, Faulkner, Lawrence, Oates, O'Connor, Glaspell, Bishop, and Plath.
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LS 772 - The Sagas of the Seventies (3.00 cr.)
What most of us think of as the sixties happened in the early 1970s. The films, books, and pop culture of the era reflected a deepening questioning and cynicism that began with the previous decade. By the decade's end, the President would declare a "national malaise." Then again, he wouldn't be president much longer. This course examines the inquiries into order, coherence, form, and values that grew out of the cultural redefinitions underway as the 1960s drew to a semi-apocalyptic close. Texts include six novels, five films, and three television series that defined and interpreted that decade of excess.
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LS 773 - American Film and Society, 1955-1975 (3.00 cr.)
From 1955 to 1975, the American film industry released many films focusing directly on social problems and political themes. Often considered "controversial," these movies represent the high point of twentieth-century American liberalism: they assumed that artful presentations of issues such as racism, materialism, and militarism would help prompt discussions that would eventually lead to a more perfect society and a more peaceful world. Students examine several popular, if rather didactic, films. With the help of selected critical readings, students consider how the values and attitudes of these films, with all their sociological trimmings, contributed to the cultural environment students inhabit today.
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LS 776 - Thinking through Genre (3.00 cr.)
This course considers what it means to create, experience, and analyze through the lens of genre. How does understanding a work of art or popular culture as a kind or type, and subsequently interpreting it with and against such expectations, affect how we order and make sense of the world? How does genre both constrict and enable? Students read theorists of the concept of genre, as well as critics writing about specific genres, and apply what they learn to two of the following four genres (as chosen by students): the western, romantic comedy, film-noir, and horror.
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LS 777 - Short Story Writing (3.00 cr.)
Students closely examine the short story as a distinctive art form, paying particular attention to its development over the twentieth century and the various shapes it now takes. A variety of story types (including the mini-novel, the Checkhovian tale, and the cryptic story) by a strong assortment of masters of the genre are read and discussed. Students also write and revise a story of their own.
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Liberal Studies: Historical Approaches |
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LS 601 - Guilt and Innocence: America in the Twentieth Century (3.00 cr.)
Traditionally, Americans have tended to see themselves as new Adams in a Garden of Eden. In the twentieth century, however, a debate emerged concerning America's guilt or innocence. This debate is viewed as it appears in fiction, popular essays, philosophy, politics, science, and the arts. Readings include Dewey, Fromm, Updike, Mary Gordon, Stephen Jay Gould, and others.
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LS 604 - Modern Hispanic-American Fiction (3.00 cr.)
In the great melting pot of the United States, Hispanics are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups. The writing they produce is diverse, highly creative, and passionate. This course examines three types of Latino authors: those who have emigrated to the United States, those who were born in the United States, and those who live in Latin America but are influential in the United States. Representative of these three groups are Isabel Allende (Chile), Rudolfo Anaya (New Mexico), and Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia). Other traditions are also represented. All works will be read in English translation.
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LS 608 - Latino Perspectives on the United States (3.00 cr.)
Traces the development of Hispanic or Latino culture in the United States, beginning with the first Spanish who explored North America, continuing with nineteenth-century Hispanic realities in California and New York, and concluding with Chicano persistence and the Cuban, Puerto-Rican, and Central American Diasporas.
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LS 610 - The Existential Imagination (3.00 cr.)
Nietzsche, that enigmatic nineteenth-century German thinker, spoke of doing philosophy "with a hammer." Often times this image is taken as indicative of the brutal, destructive power of Nietzsche's thought, the wielding of a philosophical sledge hammer. But the metaphor might be better grasped in terms of the cautious, skillful tapping of a sounding hammer, probing and testing the shiny veneer of ideas and values beneath which might lie a hollowness of spirit, a soft and frightful emptiness of purpose. This sounding hammer has been put to practice by a variety of artists, authors, and thinkers during the past century or so, in many guises and forms, one of which might be termed the "existential imagination."
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LS 613 - The American Ethos (3.00 cr.)
Ethos refers to the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or people as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations. Questions about the nature of the American "character" in this broader sense often permeate the national dialogue. No matter what the topic of debate, everyone seems to have a firm idea of what being an American means. Yet invariably individual definitions of the American identity differ widely. This course probes a broad spectrum of material, from belletristic literature and academic studies to icons of popular culture and time-honored symbols of the United States, to come to a better understanding of those enduring, if sometimes contested, American values.
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LS 614 - Working in Baltimore: Local and Global Perspectives (3.00 cr.)
From steel, the port, and drug wars to technology and globalization, this course considers a range of political and economic issues in Baltimore and postindustrial America in a changing world. It considers historical and modern developments, from the individual and local experience to the national and global contexts. This course relies in part on David Simon's HBO series, "The Wire." Service-learning option available.
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LS 616 - America at Work: Local and Global Perspectives (3.00 cr.)
From farm to factory to fiber optics, the meaning of "work" has been central to the American experience. Shifting to industrial and then to post-industrial eras raises questions not just about business and economics, but about forces transforming society and the individual's place in it. This course considers a range of political, economic, social, and personal issues of America in a changing world – from industrialization to de-industrialization and globalization; from the "service economy" to the "gig economy"; and competing views about the future of work.
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LS 617 - Voters, Campaigns, and Elections in the United States (3.00 cr.)
Focuses on the upcoming U.S. Presidential election and its context using academic scholarship, political rhetoric, historical documents, and current news analysis. U.S. politics and elections in historical context, the evolution of upcoming elections, and the American electorate itself are considered. Finally, the possible implications of the new President, his or her policies, and the political environment in which he or she will govern are discussed.
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LS 620 - Power and Money: Understanding a Global Economy in Flux (3.00 cr.)
Why don't countries with McDonald's go to war with each other? What are the real costs (and benefits) of American energy dependence? What has been the most effective poverty alleviation scheme of the last century (hint: not the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund)? How can people turn trees into HDTVs? Will today's young people ever be able to retire? This course approaches these and other political economy enigmas with lively and erudite discussions of the classics, the controversial, and current events.
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LS 621 - Reading the Nobel Prize Winners (3.00 cr.)
From DNA to the expanding universe, from Marie Curie to arms control, from The Jungle Book to the Arab Spring: the scientists, economists, writers, and peacemakers of the last one hundred years have made essential contributions to improving our world and our understanding of it. Selected writings are examined from a wide range of those whom Alfred Nobel hoped would have "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." Students explore common and competing themes, their cumulative impact toward improving the human condition, and how we mortals can stand on the shoulders of these giants. No particular background in mathematics or the sciences is required.
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LS 623 - Another America, Central America (3.00 cr.)
This course focuses on and compares contemporary Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Topics for discussion include the continuing Spanish conquest and indigenous resistance to it; military dictatorships and genocide; U.S. interventions; social revolutions; and the rise of gang violence. Readings range from fiction and poetry to personal testimony and social science statistical research.
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LS 625 - The American Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1976 (3.00 cr.)
An investigation of the growth and decline of the struggle for African American civil rights in the United States from 1954 to 1976. This study addresses major personalities and institutions which influenced the direction of the civil rights movement from the Supreme Court decision of Brown versus the Board of Education to the nation's Bicentennial Celebration just a few decades later. It also analyzes the overall impact of the movement on the lives of African Americans in the United States in the late twentieth century.
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LS 626 - Music and Technology, 1700 to the Present (3.00 cr.)
Music in the Western world undergoes continual evolution, and technology contributes to such evolution in a major way. For example, the invention of the microphone eliminated the need for vocalists to project to the audience in a large hall. The valve in brass instruments made it possible for music to change keys more frequently and rapidly. The audio recording has afforded unparalleled access to alien musical cultures but, paradoxically, may have retarded tonal progress. Students explore the influence of technology on music from 1700 to the present. Musicians and works considered range from Beethoven and Wagner to Frank Zappa, Brian Eno, and beyond. Students also have the opportunity to explore others via their own projects.
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LS 628 - Scientists and Psychics (3.00 cr.)
By the end of the nineteenth century, a strange confluence of events had allowed some of the leading chemists, biologists, and psychologists of the day to investigate seances, hypnotic trances, precognition, clairvoyance, and telekinesis. This examination of late Victorian science explores the assumptions upon which physicists and psychics based their research, as well as the cultural milieu that provided such a fertile ground for both sets of investigations. The discoveries of Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Dr. Anna Kingsford serve as the focus for a detailed study of the "mutability" of facts within the context of science in fin-de-siècle Britain.
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LS 630 - The Philosophy of Faith (3.00 cr.)
This course considers religious belief and its place in human existence. It examines factors that foster religious conviction(s) and their possible consequences for the individual believer, while asking whether the possibility of a meaningful existence must (or can) be predicated upon belief in a religious "absolute." Ultimately, students attempt to determine what constitutes faith, what can stand as a legitimate object of faith, and why (or whether) faith is significant for human existence.
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LS 632 - Tradition and Revolt in Literature: Twentieth-Century Modernism(s) (3.00 cr.)
This course explores the complexities of the literary movement known as modernism and examines the shift in scholarly understanding from a single "modernism" to multiple "modernisms." For much of the twentieth century, the term modernism described the works of a limited number of writers, usually T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. In an age dominated by accelerated industrialization, urbanization, the first global war, and new technologies which transformed daily life, these writers redefined the nature of literary expression, developing literary forms such as stream-of-consciousness narrative, free verse, the long poem, and imagism to express their twentieth-century experience. Yet there were many other authors, African American writers, working class writers, feminist writers, and popular writers writing at the same time whose poems, novels, stories, and plays were excluded from the conventional scholarly definition of modernism. Nonetheless their works illuminate new angles of vision and express sometimes startling perspectives on early twentieth-century modernity. By pairing canonical and marginal texts, the course attempts to determine what makes a text modern.
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LS 635 - Genealogy of Race (3.00 cr.)
Explores the modern European 'scientific' invention of the concept of race as a way of categorizing human difference in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings of intellectuals such as Voltaire, Kant, Forster, Blumenbach, as well as Gobineau and Galton. This course then turns to exploring the persistence of the category of race in scientific writing throughout the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. The course concludes with a critical analysis of statements that debunk race as a scientific category.
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LS 636 - Deconstructing Postmodernism: Literary Theory in a Postmodern, Postcolonial World (3.00 cr.)
This course looks at the ways artists of the twentieth and the twenty-first century view their world and recreate it in their works. Students study modern literature from around the world and reflect on the various ways in which different cultural traditions have confronted the questions of individual and collective identity. This course provides students with a working knowledge of the most important contemporary trends and figures from a wide range of literary traditions while examining the historical and social context in which each writer's work develops. All works will be read in English.
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LS 702 - Scientists or Psychics: Victorian Era Science, Empiricism, and Belief (3.00 cr.)
The prelude to modern science in the work of English, American, and European scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the assumptions upon which both scientists and psychics based their research, as well as the cultural milieu that inspired and supported investigations of both types. Special attention is given to theories of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton as well as other scientists who revolutionized scientific theory and investigated paranormal phenomena.
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LS 705 - Underground Film (3.00 cr.)
A survey of American independent filmmakers who have influenced mainstream cinema, including Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Jordan Belson, John Whitney, Stan VanDerBeek, Nam June Paik, and Andy Warhol. Forgoing commercial careers, these artists went "underground" to retain artistic freedom in their choice of subjects and techniques. Students draw upon readings, lecture, and screenings to critique underground films in class discussions and papers.
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LS 706 - Liberation Thinking (3.00 cr.)
Examines the foundations of liberation thinking during the Renaissance. This course compares European and Latin American paradigms developed during the European conquest of the Americas, and checks in on them again during the seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some themes studied are mortality; justice/charity; God/Church; spiritual/temporal power; spirituality/sovereignty; immanence/transcendence; the nature of the soul; virtue; theology and history; the Gospels; the evangelization of Native Americans; the doctrine of non-violence; the Counter-Reformation; Utopian visions; and revolutionary appropriations of Christ (liberation theology).
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LS 709 - The Moral and Political Ideas of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (3.00 cr.)
One of the most popular literary works of all time, The Lord of the Rings is filled with moral, political, philosophical, and religious ideas. Exploring Tolkien's great themes of friendship, war, mercy, treachery, possession, land, and totalitarianism, students take a close look at Tolkien's writings, the film trilogy, and philosophical works upon which he likely relied.
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LS 710 - Fiction and Film of the 1980s (3.00 cr.)
Students examine how today's contentious society took shape in the 1980s; how, for example, conservatism in politics and religion gathered steam in the late seventies and eighties, even as "postmodernism" (in its many guises) triumphed in the academy and the arts. The course undertakes a study of the two trends which defined American culture in the 1980s, with effects that still linger today. The first was the assimilation, into the mass media and elsewhere, of values and attitudes associated with the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. The second was the rise, also widely celebrated in the commercial culture, of money-making as a preeminent social goal.
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LS 711 - Comedy and the Novel (3.00 cr.)
The novel was born under a comic sign: the ribald satire of Gargantua and Pantagruel; the zany burlesque of Don Quixote; the comic prose epic of Tom Jones; and the baroque playfulness of Tristram Shandy. While comedy in its generic purity has resided comfortably through the centuries in stage drama and later film, it has undergone a delightful and instructive mongrelization in narrative. This course blends historical and theoretical texts on the nature of comedy in its diverse forms with an eclectic grouping of comic novels.
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LS 712 - Nature: The History of a Philosophical Concept (3.00 cr.)
"Nature tends to hide itself." This adage by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus was one of the first philosophical statements about nature-and we are still seeking. This course explores how the concept of nature has evolved: the early Greeks made it the foundation of metaphysics; Christian thinkers like Augustine despised it, or they made it overlap with the concept of God before early modern thinkers like Descartes gave it a mechanistic outlook; then it turned out that nature seems to have a history and an "evolution"; the twentieth century witnessed the dissolution of the concept of nature in relativity and indeterminacy as well as the revival of nature as a "person" that suffers and has its own rights, so that through environmentalism nature has turned into a political asset. Participants read and discuss exemplary primary sources of all areas; they are encouraged to contribute from their professional points of view. The inclusion of science, current affairs, or literature will depend on the specific engagement of participants. As it spans all epochs of Western philosophy and touches upon a variety of disciplines, this course may serve as a general overview of philosophy.
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LS 713 - The Many Faces of Immigration (3.00 cr.)
The United States has long been known as a nation of immigrants. Most current residents originally came from someplace else, or at least their forebears did. This course examines immigration primarily as a cultural phenomenon, focusing on the process and its impact on the individual immigrant. Students investigate the political, social, and economic conditions that may have motivated someone to leave his or her native country, as well as the adjustments a person had to make upon arrival in North America. Students also have an opportunity to consider the subject from the vantage point of their own family background.
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LS 715 - Detective Fiction and the Quest Romance (3.00 cr.)
Students examine the unique appeal of the detective story. Students are urged to reflect on what the detective story reveals about the culture of the intended audience. They also examine the theories developed to discover to what psychological and cultural needs the fantasy of the detective-hero responds. Readings and film adaptations include stories or novels by Poe, Doyle, Hammett, Chandler, Parker, Grafton, Lippman, and others.
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LS 718 - Hell and Us: The Question of Evil from Medieval to Modern (3.00 cr.)
What is evil? Can a person be evil? What are the limits for ridiculing evil through satire? This course examines the question of evil in medieval and contemporary culture through a multidisciplinary perspective, employing insight and analysis from ethics, psychology, and the arts. By studying influential theologians and psychologists (Augustine, Aquinas, Stone), and focusing on paintings, poems, short stories, essays, songs, and movies within different time traditions (Michelangelo, Dante's Inferno, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc.), students discuss broader ethical and social issues such as violence, war, mass murder, suicide, the representation of the devil in antiquity and modern times, political satire, dictatorship, and genocide.
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LS 720 - Forgiveness and Revenge (3.00 cr.)
How and when is forgiveness possible, and is revenge ever justified? Such deliberations underlie peace negotiations and conflict resolution, retributive versus distributive justice, and conflicting views of the prison-industrial complex. This course examines forgiveness and revenge through the rich philosophical tradition of Western and Eastern thought, applying this to analyses of contemporary cases. Aeschylus, Tolstoy, the Baghavad Gita, Gandhi, excerpts from the Koran and the Gospel of St. John will be among the texts studied. Students will be invited to reflect on the philosophical-historical consequences of adopting particular strategies of forgiveness/revenge.
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LS 723 - Challenges of Radical Dissent (3.00 cr.)
Mindful of the figure of Socrates as gadfly critic, this course asks what radical dissent might mean in our contemporary society, assesses how such dissent impacts (or fails to impact) our political reality, and, remembering the fate of Socrates, evaluates our responses to radical critics. Readings come from both classical and contemporary thinkers. Themes in the Modern Experience
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Liberal Studies: Themes in the Modern Experience |
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LS 640 - Contemporary Mysticism and Spirituality (3.00 cr.)
A mystical world-view attentive to the unity of all things, the possibility of release from suffering, an awakening to a "higher" plane of reality or to the richness of the natural world, has long been a theme of ancient philosophies, both Eastern and Western. Such spiritual themes are also central to contemporary authors writing in both popular and explicitly philosophical ways. Students explore a series of such twentieth- and twenty-first-century (American) texts, as well as their own beliefs and experiences.
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LS 641 - Human, Animal, Machine: Nature in Technological Society (3.00 cr.)
Utilizes contemporary, largely American authors, as they reconsider our imperiled relation with the natural world. Bill McKibben compares twenty-four hours spent on an Adirondack mountain with twenty-four hours of programming on every single local cable television station. Anthony Weston explores the rich intelligence of animals, including our own pets. Students will be invited to investigate their own complex relationship with nature and technology.
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LS 642 - Science, Magic, and Religion: European Cultural History of the Scientific Revolution (3.00 cr.)
Key social, political, and philosophical changes facilitated a radical shift in the European world view between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries: the rise and decline of the witch craze, the scientific revolution, the evolution of positivism, and recent efforts to deal with relativity in mathematics and physics.
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LS 644 - African American Religious Thought (3.00 cr.)
This course begins with an investigation of the religious world the African slaves brought to North America. Although conversion to Christianity from Islam or African tribal religions was problematic, African American churches began to flourish by the end of the Civil War. Students reflect on a cluster of problems: racism, biblical interpretation infrastructure, doctrine, and tradition. Next, students turn to understanding how the "Great Migration" diversified and challenged the religious ideas popular in urban areas of the country. The course ends with a study African American Christianity in the present era, a transitional period that can be understood as a conflict between classic revivalism, the remnants of the civil rights movement, and the rise of hip-hop culture.
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LS 645 - The Pre-Civil Rights Movement: The Generation before Brown, 1932-1954 (3.00 cr.)
An investigation of the beginnings and growth of the struggle for African American civil rights in the United States from 1932 to 1954. This study looks at the early roots of segregation in the late nineteenth century; the role and influence of the labor movement on civil rights in the early to mid-twentieth century; the impact of the Great Depression and World War II on the civil rights movement; and finally, culminates in the efforts and events which produced the landmark decision of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.
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LS 646 - The Philosophy of Happiness (3.00 cr.)
What is happiness? How can we create and discover it within our own lives? What are the barriers-personal, social, and existential-that seem to make this so difficult? Classical and contemporary answers to these questions are explored, including figures such as Aristotle, Epictetus, and the Buddha, and their modern re-interpreters. This course also considers the findings of modern psychology, and how these findings shed light on the perennial questions of human happiness.
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LS 647 - Jesus and Relationships (3.00 cr.)
A study of Jesus with a focus on his attention to the dynamics of human living, the conditions of human existence, the problem of dissatisfaction, and the pursuit of wholeness, as well as how the social sciences might help us understand Jesus' teachings. Readings include the Gospels and interpretations of the teachings of Jesus from the second through the twentieth century, including Augustine, Howard Thurman, and Flannery O'Connor.
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LS 649 - Philosophical Anthropology in Slave Narratives (3.00 cr.)
The most frequently used argument against slavery is that slaves are human beings. This is a problem of philosophical anthropology. Students read American slave narratives with the purpose of uncovering the picture of humanity which emerges from those sources. The course leads students to investigate the philosophical foundations of the phenomenon of slavery that brought a very specific kind of diversity of human perspectives into the United States. Its purpose is to utilize the literary productions of African Americans for philosophical anthropology.
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LS 650 - The Absurd in Life and Literature (3.00 cr.)
Traces the concept of absurdity from first principles to modern postulates. The first principles are assembled from writers as diverse as Kierkegaard, Freud, Camus, and Kafka. The modern postulates include the notion of an absurd hero (or antihero) in modern fiction and absurd tragedy (or tragic farce), called Theater of the Absurd. Writers studied include Edward Albee, Paul Bowles, Michael Chabon, and John Irving.
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LS 651 - Fashion and Philosophy (3.00 cr.)
Fashion is impossible to escape. One's phone, clothes, car, house, hobbies, all connect at the same place: where design and industry meet. This course examines multiple issues surrounding the art and business of fashion. Ethical and social philosophy is used to explore topics that include the body, working conditions, design leaders, film portrayals, and fashion's contribution to art and civilization.
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LS 652 - Making Foreign Policy (3.00 cr.)
Who makes American foreign policy, and how? This course looks at making foreign policy with cases from World War II through today. What ideals, institutions, personalities, and constraints are at work with various countries, economic crises, the environment, cyber security, and more? Students examine the making of foreign policy as told by distinguished practitioners, mostly presidents and their key advisors. Lessons are drawn from these experiences as students design and debate their own foreign policy strategies for current and emerging issues.
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LS 654 - Spiritual Classics from the East (3.00 cr.)
What is the meaning of human existence? Is there a guiding spirit and purpose within the universe? If so, how can we discover it and live in harmony with it? How can we escape the stresses and suffering which infect our daily lives? Timeless answers to these questions are offered up by two of the great classics of world spirituality: the Indian Bhagavad Gita, and the Chinese Tao te Ching. Each work combines a mystical sensibility with down-to-earth practical advice for daily living. The expressive richness of each work has resonated across diverse cultures for over two thousand years. These books are placed in dialogue with each other, with Western thought and religion, and with students' own personal journeys.
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LS 655 - World Short Fiction: Diversity and Common Ground (3.00 cr.)
A variety of modern and contemporary short stories by authors from all over the world are examined. Students learn about other cultures, yet also discover that many of the themes and emotions revealed in the stories are universal. Readers can connect with the stories even if the specific experiences are not ones that they themselves have had. All works will be read in English.
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LS 656 - Numeracy: A Language of the World and the Imagination (3.00 cr.)
Mathematics is a way of thinking, of questioning, analyzing, and synthesizing information about the world around us. It can lead to wonder and awe, as well as increased understanding which improves decision making in our personal lives and in public policy. The aim of this course is to provide the student with a deeper appreciation and understanding of mathematical thinking and the importance of its role in our highly technological society. Topics include the scale of things and the power of ten; lies and statistics; the shape of things and visualization; the world in motion, the world of bits and bytes.
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LS 657 - Challenges to Democracy (3.00 cr.)
An ambitious introduction to modern democracy and democratization, content is drawn from academic scholarship, political rhetoric, historical documents, analytical video, and current events. Larry Diamond's The Spirit of Democracy is referenced in order to explore the surge, and partial retreat of democratization in the last forty years. Two partially intertwined, issues of particular interest in the last few years are considered: nation-building and the Arab Spring. Today's challenges to American democracy are also examined. Finally, students look ahead at the uncertain future for democracy in the United States and the world.
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LS 658 - Revisiting the Classics (3.00 cr.)
This course revisits some ancient classics to see what they have to tell us about the big questions-good and evil, life and death, suffering and redemption, God and humanity. Selections from the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton converse with each other and with modern retellings in print and on film by authors such as Elie Wiesel, Derek Walcott, T. S. Eliot, Tom Stoppard, and William Young.
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LS 659 - Violence and Competition in Urban America (3.00 cr.)
The character and origins of ethnic and racial conflict in America's cities: cultural, social, and political factors associated with competition and violence between and within these communities. Among the issues studied are political contest and coalition building, intergroup violence, economic restructuring, drug warfare, welfare and welfare reform, housing opportunities, and school desegregation.
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LS 660 - Practicing Death (3.00 cr.)
Facing his own approaching execution, Socrates proclaims (as recounted in the Phaedo) that "it seems to me natural that a man who has really devoted his life to philosophy should be cheerful in the face of death." For Socrates, the philosophical manner of existing, what he called "care of the soul," is properly practicing death. Much more than a morbid consideration driven by darkness and fear, the thoughtful examination of death is precisely an engagement with life. This course examines the notion of practicing death, noting its foundations in diverse philosophical systems (such as ancient Greek philosophy, Eastern thought, and existentialism) and locating its more immediate presence in specific examples from literature and film. Underlying the examination is the question of the creation of individual value and the determination of individual meaning in response to the inevitability that is one's death.
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LS 661 - Exploring Digital Culture (3.00 cr.)
Since the early 1990s, the Internet has emerged as a powerful new platform for communication. Students investigate the social, political, cultural, intellectual, and economic impact of new communication services such as Facebook, Twitter, blogging, Second Life, the World Wide Web, and others. Discussions address such critical issues as privacy, cyber-bullying and civility, identify theft and security, free speech, and more. They also assess the way the Internet and its applications have influenced the way we see ourselves and others, the way we interact, and even the way we think. The class is conducted primarily online. No expertise in the specific internet applications examined or used is required.
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LS 662 - Generosity (3.00 cr.)
An interdisciplinary seminar on generosity interested in giving and sharing as a theme in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Particular attention is paid to generosity as an expression of divine and human natures. Topics include stewardship, cooperation, stinginess, greed, hoarding, noblesse oblige, the greater good, and nonfinancial aspects of generosity critical to living well such as forgiveness, empathy, and optimism.
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LS 663 - Between the Cracks: Reviving Neglected Texts (3.00 cr.)
The course focuses on works which too often go untaught, unread, unseen, and underappreciated, because they do not readily fit traditional, generic, or disciplinary expectations. Each of the works taken up will challenge received ideas and settled interpretive strategies. Students are encouraged to read against the grain in ways both unsettling and liberating. The reading list varies from semester to semester. May be repeated for credit.
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LS 664 - Work and American Identity (3.00 cr.)
Integrating academic scholarship, personal reflection, fiction, and popular culture, this course traces the transformation of work from unpleasant necessity to vocation or calling, and explores how we as Americans have come to mark our identities by our occupations. In tandem with this theme, participants explore the well-documented erosion of leisure, especially among professionals, and the peculiarly American expressions of alienation that accompany it.
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LS 665 - The Law as a Tool for Social Change (3.00 cr.)
The law (legal theory and practice) serves as a powerful tool of suppression, both maintaining unjust status quos and motivating social legitimacy. The course examines whether law is an appropriate tool of social reform or a harmful distraction reaffirming existing hierarchies. In seeking to refine the possibilities and limitations of this tool, the class examines ancient and current appeals to the law by outsiders, ranging in diversity from Socrates to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Supreme Court decisions from the present term.
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LS 666 - Personhood at the Extremes (3.00 cr.)
Humans have persisted in thinking of themselves as a species apart, but what makes humankind unique, both individually and as a species, remains unclear. Advances in neuroscience and computer science, as well as ethics, generate questions about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and personhood and the rights and protections associated with being human. In this course students tackle classic readings from Descartes to modern ruminations on artificial intelligence, examine our relation to our creations and pets, and the way our various identities affect how our personhood is perceived and protected.
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LS 669 - Jane Austen's World: Marrying Literature and Philosophy (3.00 cr.)
Students read three of Austen's most beloved novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma), in the light of philosophical theories they illustrate. Is the virtuous heroine a stoic, keeping emotion under control? Is she a feminist, showing independence in a man's world? Or is she an illustration of Aristotle's "golden mean?" Is Austen a proto-Marxist critiquing bourgeois life, or a social conservative? Students read novels and philosophical excerpts, and watch Austen on film, as business and pleasure are combined.
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LS 730 - Tragedy, Comedy, and the Human Condition (3.00 cr.)
Too often people tend to think about tragedy and comedy primarily in terms of dramatic structure: do things end poorly or well, in death and destitution or in communion and procreative hope. Instead, what if people thought about tragedy and comedy as modes rather than genres, as tragic and comic ways of seeing and understanding themselves in the world rather than handy descriptors of plot? Nowadays, when comedy and tragedy too often serve as degraded semantic markers (everything's "tragic," everyone's a "comedian") or flatten out into melodrama and farce, is there still value in a genuinely tragic or comic vision of the human condition? Students examine these questions.
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LS 731 - The American Sixties: Transformations in Film and Fiction (3.00 cr.)
Focuses upon the search for an escape from the wasteland in the narratives of a decade of political and social change and instability. Emphasizes film and fiction as products of the culture and as commentators on the culture. Updike, Kesey, Bellow, Roth, Elkin, and others. Films include The Graduate and Easy Rider.
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LS 733 - Philosophy of Culture and the American Dream (3.00 cr.)
The philosophy of culture examines the following questions: what defines culture? Where do we start in thinking about cultural difference? What is the role of the symbolic world-mythic, artistic, religious, linguistic, scientific-in determining a community of humans? How can culture be seen as liberating or as imprisoning? This course examines the difference between human beings and other animals in an attempt to define human being as a cultural or cultured being. It focuses on the notion that human culture is centered on the human capacity for symbolic action, and that human cultures are formed around a common grounding in a set of myths.
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LS 735 - We Are What We Buy: The Culture of Consumption (3.00 cr.)
Understanding the modern world begins with the recognition of capitalism as its most distinctive facet. Drawing from microeconomics, history, philosophy, marketing, and popular culture, this course focuses specifically on how the powerful and ubiquitous forces of capitalism serve to shape, not just culture, but the individual's sense of self. Desire is conditioned by market forces, and the individual forms his or her identity through material consumption. Students use a variety of reflective techniques to come to a deeper understanding of their place in a culture of consumption.
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LS 736 - The Experience of Evil (3.00 cr.)
What is the nature of evil? What are its causes? In what forms or guises has it appeared in human history? How is our understanding of evil influenced and informed by concepts like fate, guilt, freedom, responsibility, providence, God and human nature itself? This course explores such questions by drawing upon a variety of philosophical, religious, and literary sources in an attempt to better understand the all too common experience of evil.
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LS 740 - Bargains with the Devil: The Faust Legend in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (3.00 cr.)
Narratives of a pact with the devil have served as a metaphor for the desire to surpass the limits of human knowledge and power at any cost. Starting with the sixteenth-century Faust Book and featuring recent cinematic, musical, and literary versions of the devil's pact, this course explores our enduring fascination with the forbidden: evil, devil worship, witchcraft, magic, and sexuality.
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LS 741 - Stories of the South (3.00 cr.)
Southern writers in the past century exhibited a stylistic, philosophical, social, and regional individuality. Some of them are just plain quirky. Their writings look at the future from the perspective of an illusion of the past order, often presenting themselves as the last spokespersons for an order which is needed in modern experience. At the same time, they saw that order as decadent and based on ideals that were hardly realized in actual experience. Finally, many of these writers felt the need to impose a theological perspective they found lacking in mainstream American literature. Participants study the modern myth of the south as revealed by its foremost writers: William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee Williams, Bobby Ann Mason, and others. Poems by Ransom, Warren, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate are included, as well as analysis of film versions of this myth in such features as Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, In the Heat of the Night, The Liberation of L. B. Jones, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Driving Miss Daisy.
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LS 742 - Shades of Black: Film Noir and Post-War America (3.00 cr.)
The darkest genre in American cinema, with tales of crime, corruption, and anti-heroism. Film noir has its origins in German expressionist film, but as it developed, it reflected and shaped post-World War II cultural anxieties about gender, race, power, and violence. Students view films, read source novels, and consider important critical writings about the genre.
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LS 743 - We Are What We Eat: Food and the American Identity (3.00 cr.)
Although most Americans will consume well over 75 tons of food in their lifetimes, food has remained on the margins of academic scholarship. This course brings cooking and eating from the margins using food as the focal point for an examination of culture, class, gender, and finally, the self. The preliminary thesis is that how we gather, prepare, and eat food reveals, and even establishes who we are. Intentionally and unintentionally, we express who we are by what we eat.
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LS 744 - American Manhood in the Making (3.00 cr.)
With the dawn of the American democratic experiment came new opportunities for identity and gender construction. Men and women from all over the world poured into America and brought with them their own notions of what it meant to be men and women. Although manhood is often viewed as stable and fixed-rooted in biological truths-history and literature tell a story of gendered contingency and uncertainty, often paired with intense anxiety. Students look at the way manhood has changed in America by reading the historical and literary documents that influenced Americans' perceptions of themselves and their individual and collective manhood.
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LS 745 - After King: Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Movement, 1968-1985 (3.00 cr.)
An investigation of the changing parameters of the struggle for African American civil rights in the United States from 1968 to 1985. This study begins with the pivotal year of 1968, a year which saw the splintering of the Civil Rights Movement in the aftermath of the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy and the siphoning off of many of its most important activists into other movements. The study continues into the critical years of the 1970s with the variety of efforts at integration and equality related to housing, education, and employment. The study concludes with the middle years of the Reagan administration and the shifting sands of public and governmental opinion regarding Affirmative Action.
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LS 747 - New Myths on the American Landscape: Writing (and) the American Dream (3.00 cr.)
Classic and contemporary presentations of the American Dream's promise and challenge. Students explore the ways writers from many differing communities define the American Dream, where these dreams come together, and where they diverge. Readings include works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, William Faulkner, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich.
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LS 748 - The Psychoanalysis of Culture (3.00 cr.)
The wager posed by this course is that Freud, even almost 70 years after his death, is still a uniquely potent resource for understanding the current historical and cultural situation. Participants examine late capitalist society with an eye to the continuing relevance of key Freudian concepts, with the general aim of defining and exploring the shift from a traditional ethic of sacrifice toward a postmodern ethic of satisfaction. Readings from Freud are liberally augmented by others in the psychoanalytic tradition (Lacan, Lefort, Zizek, McGowan) and a number outside it (Marx, Berger, Arendt, and others).
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LS 750 - Studies in Catholic Autobiography (3.00 cr.)
Some literary theorists propose that Christianity may fairly be credited with creating the genre of autobiography. Under the influence of Augustine, modern writers, whether religious or secular, continue to explore and expand the relationship between private life and public confession. This course puzzles with questions of conversion, calling, and commitment along with the value and limits of autobiography as a method of theological reflection.
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LS 751 - Holy Land: Freedom and Truth in a Violent World (3.00 cr.)
Jews, Christians, and Muslims have long debated and fought among themselves and between each other over "the holy land." Why? This question is pursued by reading, talking, and writing about traditional Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures, as well as competing contemporary accounts-including competing accounts urging religious views of the whole planet as holy, as well as nonreligious views of land as not holy at all.
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LS 752 - Sex and Modernity (3.00 cr.)
Human beings have always been interested in sex, but modern civilization is downright obsessed with it. Indeed, revolutions in both sexual behavior and attitudes toward love and sex are central to the phenomenon called "modernity." Questions of sexuality now preoccupy political struggles, religious debates, social movements, and psychological theories, to say nothing of the role played by sex in the emergence of a commodity culture. Sexuality is the central metaphor, the privileged myth of modern world. Students examine the nature and function of sexuality in modern life through readings from psychological and political theorists and from literature. In doing so, they consider questions about the history of conceptions of love and sex, a history that takes them back to the ancient world. Students are also required to absorb some key lessons from some of greatest thinkers of the modern period, including Foucault, Freud, de Beauvoir, and Arendt. Literary works by Fauset, Wedekind, Nabokov, and others. Taught from a feminist perspective.
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LS 753 - Philosophy of Peace (3.00 cr.)
We agree that peace is preferable to war, but what do we mean when we talk about peace? This course takes a philosophical and historical perspective on major figures in diverse areas of peace studies, from Aristotle to Zinn, from Lao Tsu to Gandhi, from Freud to Friere. It focuses primarily on thinkers who conceive of peace not merely as the contingent absence of war, but as a realizable and enduring possibility for humanity. Analyses of the contemporary situation through text and film helps students to soberly evaluate these views.
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LS 755 - The Dynamic of the City (3.00 cr.)
An exploration of modern discourses on and of the city. For centuries the city has captivated the mind and the spirit of human beings in numerous ways. As a locale, the city has frequently inspired the imagination. It has often been the site of avant-garde experimentation and the testing ground for new theories. As an environment, the city has been home to burgeoning technology and often the embodiment of social order as well as disorder. A cross-sectional examination of the modern city is undertaken from the vantage point of a variety of disciplines. The city under scrutiny varies from semester to semester.
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LS 756 - Service and Meaningful Work (3.00 cr.)
What is service? Why is it so important to the human spirit and community? What are the problems and pitfalls one encounters as one tries to serve others? How can one integrate other-directed service with one's own need for financial stability and personal fulfillment? How can one's work in the world be meaningful and satisfying? These are not merely theoretical questions; each life is an expression of the answers formulated by the individual. Still, philosophers and spiritual texts, both Western and Eastern, can do much to help students think through these crucial issues. Throughout the course, theoretical understandings and personal experience are woven together. Students have the opportunity to reflect upon their own lives, and to be challenged and illuminated by a variety of rich texts.
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LS 757 - The American Short Story (3.00 cr.)
Traces the development of American short fiction from the late nineteenth century to present times. Works by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O'Connor, and Cheever, as well as contemporary practitioners including Latin American and European writers whose work has been influential in the United States.
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LS 758 - How to Read the World: First Signifiers (3.00 cr.)
This course focuses on three "first signifiers": geography, tattoo, and the human face. Land and sea formations precede human signification. Writers who present the first scripts created by landscapes and seascapes and who consider the way humans inhabit and reshape those scripts using borders, boundaries, and maps are investigated. Students then analyze tattoo, which Jacques Lacan proclaims to be the first signifier and which writers use to consider how people make meaning and mark belonging. Tattoo may indicate variously and sometimes simultaneously the profane and sacred, the extravagant and essential, the personal and public. Finally, depictions of the human face are examined. According to Emmanuel Lévinas, the human face creates discourse and ethics: students use that insight to read graphic novelists who use word and image to consider the human face (and who see at once joy and love, repression and genocide). All three first signifiers ask us to consider how to interpret the scripts we are given and how to create new ways of reading the world.
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LS 759 - That Shakespearean Cinema (3.00 cr.)
A study of selected Shakespeare plays in their Renaissance theatre context and in their evolution as texts for film. Special attention is given to the conditions of theatre production in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and intense focus is placed on the cultural, economic, and creative reasons for the renaissance of Shakespeare as a film source during the 1980s and 1990s. Analytical and performance projects. No previous acting or directing skill required.
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RE 510 - Foundations, History, and Research of Literacy Instruction (3.00 cr.)
Students analyze and explore topics including various theories, processes, and models of reading and writing; definitions of literacy; knowledge of language development, cueing systems, metacognition, vocabulary, writing, spelling, phonemic awareness, phonics and comprehension; and formal and informal assessment for all literacy learners K-12. Introduces research processes and personal inquiry strategies.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 520 - Principles and Practices of Teaching Reading (3.00 cr.)
Introduces theory and research related to reading, and its curriculum and pedagogy; including the situated and multi-layered conceptualizing of reading with an eye toward practical implications for teaching and learning inside and outside classroom contexts. Includes multiple instructional strategies adapted to the specific needs and interests of all literacy learners K-12. Current children's and young adult literature texts are explored in context to support learners K-12.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 523 - Elementary Literacy and Literature (3.00 cr.)
Explores the major theories of language development, phonological processing, cognition, and learning as related to emergent and elementary literacy learners. In conjunction, current children's literature is explored to support the development of young learners.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring/Summer
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 525 - Reading and Writing in the Linguistically Diverse Class (3.00 cr.)
Offers an overview of the underlying concepts and practical skills needed for English learners (EL) to acquire literacy in English. Students learn methods and strategies for planning, implementing, and assessing reading and writing instruction for all ages and levels of EL students, from pre-literacy to academic skills. Special emphasis is placed on ensuring academic success for English learners in U.S. grade K-12 schools and beyond. Specific topics include reading comprehension, content-based instruction, vocabulary development, beginning reading skills (phonemic awareness and phonics), reading fluency, academic literacy, the writing process, and reading and writing assessment.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 531 - Adolescent Literacy and Literature (3.00 cr.)
Investigates the situated and multi-layered conceptualizing of adolescent literacy with an eye toward practical implications for teaching and learning inside and outside the classroom contexts. Current young adult literature is explored as a way to support adolescent learners.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring/Summer
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 601 - Media Literacy Education (3.00 cr.)
Introduces media literacy education, its curriculum and pedagogy. Media literacy education is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate media in a variety of forms. It expands notions of "reading" beyond traditional print texts to acknowledge various twenty-first century multiple literacies and consider perspective and difference. It can be integrated into a variety of subjects.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 602 - Second Language Development: Theory and Practice (3.00 cr.)
Focuses on facilitating understanding of language and language use, especially as it pertains to learning and teaching with emerging bilingual K-12 students. It introduces linguistic topics such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as the interdisciplinary areas of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 603 - Language, Literacy, and Culture (3.00 cr.)
Explores various social, cultural, and political aspects of language and language use, such as ideology; identity; language change, variations, and dialects; and classroom discourse. Students examine philosophies and theories of bilingual education policy, practice, and research. Topics include second language acquisition, English-only mandates, testing practices, and curricular programs.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring/Summer
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 604 - Methods for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (3.00 cr.)
Focuses on the theories and methods of second language teaching and learning, and develops skills in applying those methods to classroom practice through lesson plan development and demonstration. Students explore the techniques, strategies, and materials for delivering ESOL-focused instruction across the content areas. Students develop appropriate, research-based teaching strategies for application across language proficiency levels and grade spans.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 605 - Principles and Practices of Teaching Writing (3.00 cr.)
Introduces theory and research related to writing, its curriculum and pedagogy including the writing process, development of writing abilities, and writing instruction and assessment. This course explores the application of the literature to classroom practice at elementary, middle, and secondary school levels. Closed to students who have taken RE 601 .
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 606 - Assessments in Bilingual and Second Language Education (3.00 cr.)
Designed to give students a deep understanding of issues related to the testing and assessment of language minority students and offers practical suggestions for using assessment to inform student learning. Course content includes the study and evaluation of the means of assessing language and content proficiency, the consideration of relationships between second language proficiency and academic achievement, and sociocultural dimensions of testing and assessment. Teachers evaluate the outcomes of their curricular and instructional changes on English language learners' literacy and language proficiency. The final course in the TELL program.
Sessions Typically Offered: Fall/Spring
Years Typically Offered: Annually
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RE 609 - Disciplinary Literacy (3.00 cr.)
Introduces the research and application that addresses literacy as a tool for learning content-specific material. Students explore a wide range of disciplinary strategies related to reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing. Particular attention is given to vocabulary, comprehension, study skills, and writing strategies for all learning, including struggling readers and English Language Learners.
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