LA 102 - Liberal Arts Core

Institution:

The Boston Conservatory

Subject:

Description:

3 hours weekly; 3 credits. Liberal Arts Core 1 and 2 focus on an analytical study of American Culture, providing the opportunity to explore the intersection of Literature, History, Art, Religion, Politics, Economics, and other factors in the development of various strands in the American national identity. Core 1 focuses thematically on overlapping and intertwined issues of class, money, education, gender, race, and codes of social stratification. The course studies how these factors affect the development of specifically American individuality and community. Using critical frameworks, students explore how, in a theoretically democratic nation, they may nevertheless see enormous divisions, inequalities, and conflicts that often generate intellectual and artistic innovation. Core I thus presents an overview of American Cultural Studies, through seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century authors and citizens who provide both foundationally normative and dissenting voices. In the second semester Core 2 proceeds into an era defined in many ways by conflict and violence, exploring how a number of surprisingly creative results come out of a crucible of contending forces and ideas. Students in Core 1 and 2 read a wide variety of texts from different disciplines and genres: in the Fall, they study histories, jeremiads, poems, autobiographies, visual art, essays, short stories, and novels representing the diversity of creators from John Winthrop to Phillis Wheatley to Henry James to E.L Doctrow; in the Spring students explore elements of modernism, metafiction, oral history, and the contemporary stage in the works of artists such as T.S. Eliot, Tim O'Brien, Tony Kushner, and Anna Deveare Smith. Students observe and analyze ideas in the authors' works and translate them into critical writing, performance, and oral history interviews and presentations. Both of these first year classes focus on the development of students' knowledge of American Culture. Through the reading of a variety of texts from both classical and contemporary American Literature, the study of critical and other non-fiction commentaries and critiques, and through films, art, and performance, students learn to develop a number of concurrent skill sets. The first year classes encourage the development of clear and appropriately sophisticated writing skills, foster the practice of critical and analytical thinking, and build knowledge of the broad sweep of American artistic expression. Students are taught to understand and recognize the multiple and multicultural components of the rich and unique American voice and idiom. This introduction to college liberal arts study familiarizes students with the practice and application of methods of public discourse that are key components to informed citizenship.

Credits:

2.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.bostonconservatory.edu

Phone Number:

(617) 536-6340

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Semester

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