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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Apocalyptic thought pervades much of contemporary American culture, whether among Protestant evangelicals, new religions, novelists and filmmakers, or even scientists and environmentalists who warn of ecological catastrophe and the deadly consequences of nuclear proliferation. This course will introduce, using historical, sociological, and philosophical accounts, how North Americans have thought about and continue to think about questions of the End, both in a cultural and in a personal sense.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
No course description available.
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will focus on issues of language and identity in the contemporary lived experience of various U.S. Latina/o communities. We will ask: How are cultural values and material conditions expressed through Latina/o linguistic practices? How do Latina/o identities challenge traditional notions of the relationship between language, culture, and nation? In what ways might Latina/o linguistic practices serve as tools for social change? Building on a discussion of issues such as Standard American English, code-switching (popularly known as "Spanglish"), and Latina/o English, we will also examine bilingual education, recent linguistic legislation, and the English Only movement. We will survey texts taken from a variety of (inter)disciplines, including sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, literature, and education. Both directly and/or indirectly, these works address Latina/o language politics, as well as the broader themes of power, community, ethno-racial identity, gender, sexuality, class, and hybridity.
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3.00 Credits
This course will use novels, comics, poetry, autobiographies, zines, films, and visits to historic sites as windows into the complex histories of work and working-class life in U.S. history. Reading labor studies texts alongside these literary and cinematic accounts, we will survey major developments in the U.S. economy, labor force, types of work, and the lives of working people. Topics include: the transition from household economies to wage labor; work regimes under slavery; divergent experiences of immigrant labor and cultural assimilation; industrialization and the consumer society; deindustrialization and structural unemployment; the sexual division of labor; and the rise of knowledge and service economies. Throughout, we will focus on ways in which working people cope with or resist the burdens of their work lives and organize to seek greater control over decisions that affect them, including: union organizing, political engagement, stealing, and sharing their own interpretations and representations of their experiences.
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3.00 Credits
In 2011 Time magazine declared "the protestor" the person-of-the-year in acknowledgement of the massive social movements that swept the globe over the previous twelve months. This course is designed to clarify where movements like Occupy Wall Street came from and to evaluate how they might shape American life and politics in the near future. Taking a historical approach, we will begin by studying the civil rights, anti-war, counter-culture, and feminist initiatives of the 1960s. We will then explore how progressive and radical activists adjusted their theories and strategies as the country became more conservative in the 1970s and 1980s. Making use of movement documents, documentary films, and a variety of other sources, we will study the development of LGBTQ, ecological, and economic justice initiatives up to the present day. Throughout, we will seek to understand how movements in the United States are shaped by global events, and how the very idea of "social justice" has been reconfigured in their wake.
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3.00 Credits
The use of commercial and mass media imagery in art became recognized as an international phenomenon in the early 1960s. Items such as comic strips, advertising, movie stills, television programs, soup cans, "superstars" and a variety of other accessible and commonplace objects inspired the subject matter, form and technique. This course will critically examine the history and legacy of Pop Art by focusing on its social and aesthetic contexts. An important component of the course involves developing skills in analyzing visual images, comparing them with other forms, and relating them to their historical context.
Prerequisite:
ArtH 101-102
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to provide students with a fundamental understanding of the historical development and changing dynamics of race in North America, the Caribbean, and South America. In doing so, we will take on the fundamental position that race is a meaningful classification of human bodies. The question we will keep in front of us at all times is this: How does social milieu determine the meaningfulness of race? Racial classifications, like all classifications, are collectively imagined, and appear mired in various spheres of social life. We will devote a fair amount of attention to the meaning of race in personal experience, economic production and distribution, political organization, and popular culture. The complexity of race will be explored within a number of writings by authors such as Michael Hanchard, Edwidge Dandicat, and Patricia Hill Collins. This EDI course explores the experiences and expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which they confront, negotiate, and at times challenge dominant U.S. and/or European social hierarchies.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
American fiction took a turn at World War II: the simplest way to name the turn is from modernism to postmodernism. The most obvious mark of postmodern narration is its self-consciousness; postmodern books tend to be about themselves, even when they are most historical or realistic. Already a paradox emerges: why would World War II make narratives more self-reflexive? The first book in the course, and the best for approaching this paradox, is Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Subsequent books: Nabokov's Pale Fire, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Morrison's Beloved, DeLillo's White Noise, Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Johnson's Jesus's Son.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English Course, or a score of 5 on the AP Examination in English Lit, or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate exam for international students
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3.00 Credits
New York is a city that stands apart from the Old World just as it does from the rest of America. As Michel de Certeau put it, it is also a city that "has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts." And yet its air is thick with history, whose course has always been largely defined by its ever growing immigrant population. This seminar is a journey through more than a century of New York's immigrant culture. It is also a journey across various genres and creative media that have shaped New York's urban culture and myths. We will take as a case study the East European ways of navigating the city, but will also explore the "mappings" of the American metropolis across generations of writers of other ethno-linguistic and cultural backgrounds. We will delve into the gigantic repository of urban impressions that New York imposes upon new arrivals and, through a set of mythopoetic topoi that it generates, try to outline its place in the twentieth-century literary imagination. Topics of discussion will include, though will not be limited to, New York as the gate to the New World, an imagined space and a mental construct, the capitalist "jungle" and intersection of the consumerist and exquisite cultures, an "alternative" America and a version of the Jewish shtetl, a city "driven" by taxicabs and the subway, etc. A special session will be devoted to the artistic representations of 9/11 across immigrant cultures. Primary and secondary readings will be drawn from a variety of authors, including Jean Baudrillard, Michel de Certeau, Maxim Gorky, Federico Garcia Lorca, Franz Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, E.B. White, Paul Auster, Sergei Dovlatov, Junot Diaz and others; screenings will include films by Charlie Chaplin, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, Joan Micklin Silver, etc. Logistics permitting, we will take a field trip to Ellis Island and New York's Tenement Museum, as well as go on a tour of the city?s historic neighborhoods.
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3.00 Credits
The critically acclaimed television program, The Wire, ran for five seasons on Home Box Office (HBO) between 2002 and 2008. Set in "inner city" Baltimore, the program addressed a wide array of topics, including, but not limited to, the urban drug trade, law enforcement, local city politics, labor unions, education, and the newspaper industry. Though a work of "fiction," sociologist William Julius Wilson has called the show an important and instructive portrayal of the "deep inequality in inner-city America." By contrast, some scholars and critics have decried the series and indeed, courses like this one, as examples of mainstream America's fascination with and acceptance of African American drug use, criminal tendencies, and corruption. In this course, we will not deconstruct The Wire per se, but use select episodes from the series to explore key issues in Africana Studies, ranging from political geography to a history of Baltimore and the "War on Drugs." Students should have some familiarity with the show. Africana Studies will show select episodes during Winter Study. Readings will include texts about African American urban life, such as Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street and Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day.
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