Amherst College Catalog Section V

480 Pages·2013·2.67 MB·English

V
COURSES OF INSTRUCTION
The most up-to-date information about the curriculum is
found in the course listings on departmental websites:
https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments
or at:
https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/registar/
ac_catalog
Courses of Instruction
COURSES are open to all students, subject only to the restrictions specified
in the individual descriptions. Senior Honors courses, usually open only to
candidates for the degree with Honors, are numbered 498 and 499, and Special
Topics courses are numbered 490. All courses, unless otherwise marked, are
full courses. The course numbers of double courses and half courses are fol-
lowed by D or H.
SPECIAL TOPICS COURSES
Departments may offer a semester course known as Special Topics in which a
student or a group of students study or read widely in a field of special interest.
It is understood that this course will not duplicate any other course regularly
offered in the curriculum and that the student will work in this course as inde-
pendently as the director thinks possible.
Before the time of registration, the student who arranges to take a Special
Topics course should consult the instructor in that particular field, who will
direct the student’s work; they will decide the title to be reported, the nature of
the examination or term paper, and will discuss the preparation of a bibliogra-
phy and a plan of coherent study. All students must obtain final approval of the
Department before registration. Two Special Topics courses may not be taken
concurrently except with the prior approval of the Student’s Class Dean.
FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS
During 2013-14, Faculty members in groups of one or more will teach 28 First-
Year Seminars. Every first-year student must take one of these courses during
the fall semester. They are open only to Amherst College first-year students.
100. The Brothers Karamazov: a Multidimensional Approach. The contem-
porary Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk claimed in 1999 that “the book of the mil-
lennium is Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I know of no other book which
dramatizes with such beautiful intensity, and on almost encyclopaedic scale,
the problems of living in this world, of being with other people, and dream-
ing of a next world.” Through a careful reading of Dostoevsky’s final work of
fiction and universally regarded supreme artistic masterpiece (1880), we shall
investigate the applicability of Pamuk’s claim, availing ourselves of additional
works that shed light on the novel’s socio-political, psychological, religious/
spiritual, philosophical and aesthetic dimensions. Other texts to be considered
include: 1) Dostoevsky’s early travelogue “Winter Notes on Summer Impres-
sions” (1862); 2) excerpts from Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What is
to be Done? (1863); 3) a medieval saint’s life, “Alexei, Man of God”; and 4) two
critical studies by American Dostoevsky specialists James Rice (Dostoevsky and
the Healing Art, 1985) and Liza Knapp (The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky
and Metaphysics, 1996). We shall be using the recent Pevear and Volokhonsky
translation (1990), occasionally comparing it to Constance Garnett’s previously
considered standard version of the early twentieth century (revised by Ralph
Matlaw in the 1970s). Our semester-long examination of The Brothers Karamazov
82
FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS
will conclude with a discussion of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s “Why Dostoevsky
Lives in the Twentieth Century,” from his 1925 essay “Dostoevsky and Proust,”
and Leonid Tsypkin’s short novel Summer in Baden Baden (1980), which will
help us to articulate further the attractions, the challenges and the ambigui-
ties we encounter when reading a writer as profound, and as controversial, as
Dostoevsky.
Fall semester. Professor Rabinowitz.
101. Illness and Meaning. This course examines the interplay between mean-
ing, illness, and bodily experience. We will read a range of literary, anthro-
pological, and philosophical texts in order to explore the following questions:
How do writers try to make order and meaning out of illness, and how do they
use illness to talk about other aspects of experience? How might we understand
illness as not merely a disorder of the body but also a disordering of mean-
ing? Given the seemingly subjective nature of bodily experience, how does one
understand or access the pain of the other? How have writers conceptualized
the ailing body as a site of both creative experience and political and economic
control?
Fall semester. Professors Frank and C. Dole.
102. Voting and Elections: A Mathematical Perspective. The outcomes of
many elections, whether to elect the next U.S. president or to rank college foot-
ball teams, can displease many of the voters. How can perfectly fair elections
produce results that nobody likes? We will discuss different voting systems
and their pros and cons, including majority rule, plurality rule, Borda count,
and approval voting, and examine the results of various past elections. We will
also assess the power of each voter under various systems, for example, by cal-
culating the Banzhaf power index. After exploring the pitfalls of various voting
systems (through both theoretical analysis and examples from recent as well
as historical elections), we will try to answer some pressing questions: Which
voting system best reflects the will of the voters? Which is least susceptible to
manipulation? What properties should we seek in a voting system, and how
can we best attain them?
Fall semester. Professor Leise.
103. Slavery and the American Imagination. This interdisciplinary seminar
explores how Americans have imagined slavery over time. Drawing from
works of history, fiction, and film, this course examines depictions of the “pe-
culiar institution” to uncover connections between America’s racial past and its
racial present. Specific discussion topics include the origins of American slav-
ery; the slave narrative; the emergence of radical abolitionism and pro-slavery
ideology; the invention of the South; the politics of slavery in the Civil Rights
era; the “discovery” of slave society; the “Roots” of black power; agency and
resistance; slavery in contemporary fiction; and slavery and autobiography.
Fall semester. Professor Moss.
104. Friendship. An inquiry into the nature of friendship from historical, liter-
ary, and philosophical perspectives. What are and what have been the relations
between friendship and love, friendship and marriage, friendship and erotic
life, friendship and age? How do men’s and women’s conceptions and expe-
riences of friendship differ? Readings will be drawn from the following: The
Epic of Gilgamesh; Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus; selections from the Bible and
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; essays by Montaigne, Emerson, and C.S. Lewis;
83
AMHERST COLLEGE
Mill’s On the Subjection of Women; Whitman’s poetry; Jewett’s The Country of the
Pointed Firs; Morrison’s Sula; Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, and Herzog’s My Best Fiend.
Fall semester. Professor Emeritus Townsend.
105. Romanticism and the Enlightenment. The late eighteenth century is
often characterized as the Age of Enlightenment, a time when educated men
and women were confident that human reason was sufficient to understand
the laws of nature, to improve society’s institutions, and to produce works of
the imagination surpassing those of previous generations (and rivaling those
of classical antiquity). The early nineteenth century brought a distrust of ra-
tionality (the Head) and an affirmation of the importance of human emotion
(the Heart). “Romanticism and the Enlightenment” will test these broad gener-
alizations by reading, looking at, and listening to some representative verbal,
visual, and musical texts. Among the texts are paired and opposed works by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, J. W. von Goethe, Voltaire, Thomas
Gray, John Keats, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz
Schubert, Jacques Louis David, and Caspar David Friedrich.
Fall semester. Professor Emeritus Guttmann.
106. Things Matter. We are surrounded by things that mean something—the
objects we place by our bedsides, the pictures we tack on our walls, the books
and DVDs we set on our shelves, even the foods we keep in our cupboards. To
the unwitting passerby, these things might mean differently or they might ap-
pear to mean nothing at all. But in fact we know that, in the space of a house or
a dorm room, a subculture, or a nation, things matter. Objects tell stories; images
reveal histories; favorite television shows represent tastes; movies incite emo-
tions. Through readings in literature, poetry, autobiography, and philosophy
and through screenings of films and television, this seminar will explore the
meaning of things in our everyday lives. How do things matter? What do they
mean? And how do we describe the ineffable quality of stuff?
Fall semester. Professor Hastie.
107. Secrets and Lies. Politics seems almost unimaginable without secrecy and
lying. From the noble lie of Plato’s Republic to the controversy about former Pres-
ident Clinton’s “lying” in the Monica Lewinsky case, from the use of secrecy in
today’s war against terrorism to the endless spinning of political campaigns,
from President John Kennedy’s behavior during the Cuban missile crisis to
cover-ups concerning pedophile priests in the Catholic church, from Freud’s
efforts to decode the secrets beneath civilized life to contemporary exposés of
the private lives of politicians, politics and deception seem to go hand-in-hand.
This course investigates how the practices of politics are informed by the keep-
ing and telling of secrets, and the telling and exposing of lies. We will address
such questions as: When, if ever, is it right to lie or to breach confidences? When
is it right to expose secrets and lies? Is it necessary to be prepared to lie in order
to advance the cause of justice? Or, must we do justice justly? When is secrecy
really necessary and when is it merely a pretext for Machiavellian manipula-
tion? Are secrecy and deceit more prevalent in some kinds of political systems
than in others? As we explore those questions we will discuss the place of can-
dor and openness in politics and social life; the relationship between the claims
of privacy (e.g., the closeting of sexual desire) and secrecy and deception in
public arenas; conspiracy theories as they are applied to politics; and the im-
portance of secrecy in the domains of national security and law enforcement.
84
FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS
We will examine the treatment of secrecy and lying in political theory as well as
their appearance in literature and popular culture, for example Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington, Primary Colors, Schindler’s List and The Insider.
Fall semester. Professor Sarat.
108. Evolution and Intellectual Revolution. The centerpiece of this course is
Darwin and his book On the Origin of Species. Like all revolutionary ideas, Dar-
win’s theory did not appear out of nowhere and did not settle matters once and
for all; therefore the course will explore the scientific context in which this work
appeared and Darwin’s own intellectual background. We will read the great
book itself to see what exactly Darwin had to say and how he went about saying
it. Pigeons will come up. Then extracts from the writings of Darwin’s contem-
poraries will be used to look at the scientific, social, and theological responses
to Darwin’s theory. Finally, we will consider a few of the major issues in evolu-
tion that still reverberate today.
Fall semester. Professors Jones and Martini.
109. Political Leadership. Political leadership can be a good and noble profes-
sion. But leadership can also be a position from which great damage can be
done. Leadership in political life attracts various kinds of people and for vari-
ous reasons. Some leaders live for politics; for them politics is a cause. Others
live off politics; for those leaders politics is essentially a livelihood. Most leaders
seem to enjoy the pleasures of power and influence, whether openly or hidden
in their inner lives. Some leaders would refuse to trade their power even for
significant wealth.
Leadership is necessary to all government—democratic, authoritarian and
totalitarian governments, revolutionary movements and even terrorist net-
works. There seem to be certain general qualities of leadership and then there
are those particular to a given type of politics. Understanding democratic lead-
ership requires comparative thinking because it’s important to consider what
democracy is not, as well as what it is. The paradox of a vibrant democracy
is that it necessarily involves perpetual struggle between the people and the
leaders, even if both want the public good. Citizens must be supportive yet
vigilant; leaders must be effective yet accountable. Democracy is by nature self-
contradictory and often frustrating, like life itself.
Fall semester. Professor Tiersky.
110. Ethnicity, Race and Racialization in the United States. This first-year
seminar explores the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United
States, the national dependence on early and contemporary immigration, the
emergence of U.S.-based ethnic and/or racial identities, the different patterns
of racialization practiced throughout the history of the nation, and the tension
between the realities of racial inequality and the national projections of demo-
cratic equality and equal protection under the law. We look at the evolution of
race and ethnicity theories, at the relationship between overt and covert expres-
sions of racism, and discuss at length the difference and relationship between
racism as a personal attitude and racism as a system of privilege and disadvan-
tage based on race.
Fall semester. Visiting Lecturer B. Sánchez-Eppler.
111. Thinking Through Improvisation. Much of the thinking we do in college
is applied to activities that involve large amounts of reworking and editing. But
in many endeavors, efforts that are apparently more spontaneous are required.
85
AMHERST COLLEGE
Thinking in improvisational modes requires several special techniques, and
yet is done by virtually all of us at times. Improvisation can be used to solve
emergency problems or create art at the highest levels. The preparation for suc-
cessful improvisation is often enormous, but editing must occur just before the
act of execution. We will explore improvisational thinking with the aid of sev-
eral skilled practitioners as guest lecturers and performers. We will ask how
improvisational thinking differs from other ways of thinking and how it is
similar. We will inquire into the variety of techniques used in improvisation,
drawing from diverse fields. We will explore the relationship between impro-
visation and creativity. We will learn how to naturally incorporate improvisa-
tional strategies into our explorations of the liberal arts.
Improvisation is a process not a product. It involves creating in the moment
without the opportunity to edit later, instead evaluating during its execution.
Improvisation is difficult, rewarding and unavoidable. It requires mastery of
many automatic subroutines as raw material and extreme attention to one’s
surroundings and inner voice to integrate these subroutines successfully. Im-
provisation is one major way of thinking. It can be routine or creative and can
be practiced and learned. It requires risk-taking and courage, openness and
trust. Good improvisation is strongly connected to the creative life. Improvi-
sational skills are intrinsically multidisciplinary and can be used to advantage
in many fields where they are often unacknowledged. Improvisation is also
multicultural in practice. Therefore experience with improvisational thinking
is essential to a complete liberal arts education.
Fall semester. Professor Poccia.
112. Growing Up in America. How do race, ethnicity, social class and gender
shape the experience of growing up in America? We will begin by examining
the life of a contemporary African-American male on his journey from the in-
ner city to an Ivy League university. We then look back historically at some
nineteenth-century lives—male and female, real and fictional—to understand
how the transition from an agricultural to an urban industrial society has influ-
enced the experience of coming of age. The remainder of the course will center
on coming of age in the twentieth century. Our focus will be on the formation of
identity, relationship with parents, courtship, sexuality, and the importance of
culture and community. In addition to historical, sociological and psychologi-
cal texts, the class will include fiction by Horatio Alger, Ella Deloria, and James
Baldwin.
Fall semester. Professors Aries and Hart.
113. Exile in Spain and Latin America. “Exile” is both a person who is forced
to leave his or her native country and a state of exclusion; both an individual
and an experience. In this course, our study of exile will encompass the individ-
ual writers, artists and thinkers who were exiled from their homelands as well
as the reasons, confusions and consequences that the experience of exile pro-
duces. We will trace poets such as Cristina Peri Rossi, the authors Jorge Sem-
prún and Reinaldo Arenas, works of art like Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and films
such as Luís Buñuel’s Viridiana, among other examples, as they enter into states
of exile and self-consciously examine their own limbo between two countries.
Many of these individuals and works of art left Spain or Latin America because
of their political opposition to the ruling regime; we will delve into the histori-
cal, political and cultural backgrounds that resulted in their exile. In addition,
we will linger over the larger questions exile raises: Can the exile ever return
86
FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS
home? Are the children of exiles also exiles? Can we generalize about the exile
experience?
Fall semester. Professor Brenneis.
114. Encounters with Nature. What is our place in nature? How do we feel
about natural spaces we encountered growing up and how do we view the
environment of Amherst College and its setting in New England? How did
people in the past think about nature and how did they change their environ-
ments as a consequence? How have their ideas affected us today? And how do
we imagine the future of the natural world?
This course will explore how our ideas of nature have changed over time.
We will give particular attention to the ways we have recreated particular kinds
of natural spaces and how we have depicted nature in images. We begin with
walks in the nearby wildlife sanctuary, discussions of our past encounters with
nature, a study of the Amherst Campus, and, while the weather is still warm, a
hike or two. During these excursions we will discuss what we see, learn some
basic drawing techniques that will help us take visual notes on the landscape,
and discuss and write about how our experience with the land might differ
from how people experienced it in the past. We then will explore New England
further, discuss ideas about wilderness in the United States, and look closely
at American landscape painting. Where do our deeply held assumptions come
from? To find out, we will look at poetry, philosophy, Western traditions of
landscape painting, and scientific illustration. We also will think about why
people collect and draw natural specimens, and how they mapped their envi-
ronments from the Renaissance through the Aztec empire to the current day.
Fall semester. Professor Courtright.
115. Beethoven Hero. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was assigned the role
of “hero” early in his career, creating a sensation as a piano virtuoso upon his
arrival in Vienna. Some of his greatest compositions embrace heroic struggle
and triumph, as for example, in the Eroica Symphony with its initial dedication
to Napoleon, or in Fidelio, an opera about the victory of freedom over tyranny.
In addition, his well-known personal struggles with deafness, unrequited love,
and financial insecurity helped amplify the popular notion of Beethoven Hero.
This course will explore how and why Beethoven continues to embody the
highest aspirations of humanity across culture and history.
Fall semester. Professor Kallick.
116. Genes, Genomes and Society. The sequencing of the human genome ranks
as one of the most significant scientific achievements of the last century. How
might we ensure that scientific progress is matched by society’s ability to use
that knowledge for human betterment? While the scientific ramifications of the
genomic revolution are just now being explored, major implications are already
apparent in such diverse fields as philosophy, medicine and law. The course
will begin with a primer on genetics and molecular biology but quickly move to
consider some of the philosophical, ethical, and very practical societal concerns
raised by recent genetic discoveries. We will consider such issues as the safety
of recombinant DNA, the origin of humans and of human races (and are there
such?), the use and potential misuse of DNA fingerprinting by governmental
agencies, the complex interaction between one’s genes and one’s environment,
87
AMHERST COLLEGE
the ability of parents to screen potential offspring for a range of diseases, the
creation of genetically altered plants and animals, and human gene therapy.
Fall semester. Professor Ratner.
117. Big Books. This seminar explores the particular pleasures and interpretive
problems of reading and writing about three very long works of fiction—novels
so large that any sure grasp of the relation between individual part and mam-
moth whole may threaten to elude author and reader alike. How do we gauge,
and thereby engage with, narratives of disproportionate scale and encyclope-
dic ambition? How do we lose, or find, our place in colossal fictional worlds?
As befits its interest in the losing and finding of place, the course introduces
students to college-level literary study.
In its most recent version, the seminar’s three novels included Herman Mel-
ville’s Moby-Dick, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, and Samuel K.
Delany’s Dhalgren. Although the novels for fall 2013 have not yet been selected,
they are likely to display similar historical, geographic, and stylistic diversity.
Fall semester. Professor Christoff.
118. Genocide. In the last century, genocide has occurred all too often. The
Holocaust is the most famous case, but it was not the first, nor has it been the
last. Indeed, in your lifetime, genocide has occurred in the former Yugoslavia,
Rwanda and Sudan. But just what is genocide? Why do states engage in mass
murder? How do they mobilize citizens to become perpetrators? What happens
to societies in the aftermath of genocide? How unique is the Holocaust as a case
of genocide? And finally, what are the politics surrounding the term “geno-
cide”? We will examine these and other questions through the in-depth study
of three particular cases of genocide: the Nazi murder of Jews and other groups
during World War II, Pol Pot’s massacre of Cambodians in the 1970s, and the
1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Fall semester. Professors Epstein and Redding.
119. Happiness. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson breaks with John
Locke’s emphasis on “life, liberty and property” and instead asserts that the
basic rights (“inalienable”) of humans are “life, liberty and the pursuit of hap-
piness.” In this bold move, Jefferson placed “happiness” at the core of the po-
litical and personal concern. We will examine in this seminar how we define,
measure, and attempt to generate and maintain happiness. Our examination
will serve as an introduction to the many methods of inquiry and articulation
available at the College. We will read, discuss and write about written texts
from philosophy, political science, history, literature, psychology and econom-
ics. We will watch, discuss and write about films from different eras that dem-
onstrate examples of “happiness.” In addition, we will undertake exercises that
will allow students to become mindful of their own well-being and will allow
them to have direct experiences of the issues we address.
Fall semester. Professor Barbezat.
120. Pariscape: Imagining Paris in the Twentieth Century. Paris has been for
centuries one of the exemplary sites of our urban sensibility, a city that has in-
delibly and controversially influenced the twentieth-century imagination. Po-
ets, novelists and essayists, painters, photographers and film-makers: all have
made use of Paris and its cityscape to examine relationships among technology,
literature, city planning, art, social organizations, politics and what we might
call the urban imagination. This course will study how these writers and visual
88
FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS
artists have seen Paris, and how, through their representations, they created
and challenged the “modernist” world view. In order to discover elements of a
common memory of Paris, we will study a group of writers (Baudelaire, Zola,
Calvino, Stein, Hemingway and others), philosophers and social commenta-
tors (Simmel, Benjamin, Barthes), filmmakers (Clair, Truffaut, Tati and others),
photographers (Atget and Brassaï) and painters (De Chirico, Picasso, Delaunay,
and others). Finally, we will look at how such factors as tourism, print media,
public works, immigration and suburban development affect a city’s simul-
taneous and frequently uncomfortable identity as both a geopolitical and an
imaginative site.
Fall semester. Professor Rosbottom.
121. Asia in Europe: Modern European Discourse on History and Identity.
In post-Enlightenment Europe, intellectuals have frequently drawn on images
of Asia and Asians to illustrate what it means to be modern, enlightened, and
historically progressive. Why? Through close readings of key figures in the in-
tellectual tradition of modern Europe, including Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716),
Adam Smith (1723-1790), Georg W. H. Hegel (1770-1831), Karl Marx (1818-1883),
and Max Weber (1864-1920), this seminar will explore the epistemological and
ideological function of cultural opposites, in this case the “East and the West.”
The seminar will conclude with more recent Western constructs of East Asia,
asking to what extent do currently prevalent images of Asia continue to repro-
duce the logic and substance of Hegel, Marx, and Weber? How might we learn
to read against the grain of persistent images of an Asian other that sustains the
identity of the modern West?
Fall semester. Professor Maxey.
122. Representing Equality. In Representing Equality, students will discuss art
works and texts that touch on a variety of aspects of inequality in our larger
society, including educational disparities as well as racial ethnic, gender, and
economic inequality. They will also explore techniques of productive dialogue
across differences and acquire listening skills in interviewing and careful
listening.
The course will be discussion based and writing intensive with four analytic
papers based on course materials. These will include J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for
the Barbarians and Michele Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and art works like
Jeremy Deller’s, The Battle of Orgreave, in which the community of Orgreave
in Yorkshire re-enacted for film the 1984 battle between police and workers
during a coal miners’ strike. Participants will also engage with work done by
contemporary artists dealing with representation and tensions or inequality
within or between communities, such as the work of Anna Deveare Smith that
examines the ethnic rifts leading to violence, Kara Walker’s installations on
slavery, Emily Jacir’s collaborative project, Where We Come From, and Donna
Ferrato’s work on domestic violence.
Fall semester. Visiting Artist in Residence Ewald and Professor Saxton.
123. Sick Unto Death: Plague in Literature and History. Our class will read
about epidemic disease with one eye toward exploring personal responses to
plague in literature and the other toward understanding the ways communi-
ties have responded to the risks and dislocations of epidemic disease. Some
motifs are constants across centuries and cultures—the anguish of sudden loss,
the mysteries of why some fall victim while others evade illness, and the confu-
89
AMHERST COLLEGE
sion that accompanies the breakdown of social institutions and the habits of
ordinary life. Other aspects of the experience change over time, especially the
conceptual frameworks through which plague has been understood, treated,
and prevented. We shall be thinking about these continuities and discontinui-
ties as we read classics, such as, Albert Camus’ The Plague, as well as some yet-
to-be classics, such as, James C. Mohr’s Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death
and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown.
Fall semester. Professor Servos.
124. Vienna around 1900: Cradle of Modernity. This course explores the
“joyful apocalypse” of fin-de-siècle Vienna, where brilliant artistic creativity
emerged in a volatile multi-ethnic Empire teetering on the verge of collapse.
We shall examine how and why the city became the birthplace of many ideas
on gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity that continue to be relevant today. We
shall explore artistic experimentation in literature (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal,
Musil, Kraus), music (Mahler, Schönberg), and the visual arts (Klimt, Schiele,
Kokoschka, O. Wagner, A. Loos). We shall trace the various forces that sought
to respond to a pervasive sense of crisis: the emergence of new, often irrational,
forms of mass politics; the psychoanalysis of Freud; the skeptical philosophies
of Ernst Mach and Ludwig Wittgenstein; the pacifism of Bertha von Suttner;
and the emergence of modern Zionism (Theodor Herzl) in a context of a grow-
ing anti-Semitism that shaped Hitler’s irrational worldview. And we shall dis-
cuss how fin-de-siècle Vienna became a breeding ground for many of the social,
cultural, and political forces that characterize modernity to this day. Weekly
writing assignments of diverse kinds will be complemented by a focus on
methods and techniques of inquiry.
Fall semester. Professor Rogowski.
125. Space and Place. This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of physi-
cal space and the sense of belonging we call place. The organizing principle of
the course is the expanding circle; we will begin with the individual, then move
to the home and family, the city, the nation, and end with the globe as a whole.
We will cover a range of topics along the way, including memory, narrative, rep-
resentation, nationalism, borders, exile, imperialism, and globalization. Works
include Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of space, Benedict Anderson’s clas-
sic Imagined Communities, contemporary critical geography, the 1920s film genre
of the “city symphony,” with works by Ruttmann, Vertov, and Vigo, and nov-
els by a diverse array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including
E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and Tayeb Salih. We will approach this material
from a liberal arts perspective, which will give students exposure to a wide
variety of perspectives in the humanities and social sciences.
Fall semester. Professor Van Compernolle
126. Relativism and Toleration. Most of us agree that we should be tolerant
of the beliefs and practices of others. Often the call for tolerance is grounded
in some form of relativism—that is, in the thought that there simply isn’t an
absolute or objective fact of the matter. After all, on what basis could we insist
that others share our beliefs if those beliefs are subjective in some way, a func-
tion of our upbringing, our religion, our social norms, our culture, or our own
peculiar tastes and concerns? But what reasons do we have to accept some such
form of relativism? Can relativism really ground our commitment to tolerance?
If not, then how else can we justify that commitment? We will explore these
90