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Course Criteria
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1.00 Credits
From wireless communications to high-resolution brain imaging devices, contemporary technological advances present us with a digital culture that promises to both exhaustively analyze and radically transform the way we perceive the world. Debates over whether the Internet is rewiring our brains, or how artificial intelligence thinks, have led cultural critics and scientists alike to become increasingly interested in the processes of human cognition. Recent studies of cognition therefore ask to what degree the innate structure of the mind is actually highly malleable, easily shaped by social and technological forces. In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will seek to understand whether neural facts--the structure of the brain and the way it perceives the world--are in fact social values, reflecting the social and technological conditions in which a mind develops. We will read cognitive scientific work alongside other theories of culture and consciousness prominent in the humanities as we explore the ways in which cognitive science and cultural studies are mutually illuminating. Readings will include texts by Jacques Derrida, David Chalmers, Jerry Fodor, Raymond Williams, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, and Marshall McLuhan.
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1.00 Credits
This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on the ways in which partial, invented, and misunderstood historical, religious, and scientific facts became triggers for the production of Italian Renaissance art. From Pierio Valeriano's fanciful emblematic interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphs that fueled the Renaissance Egyptomania in the visual arts, to representations of Moses with horns by artists such as Michelangelo (a mistranslation of the Hebrew "tongs of fire"), to Ulisse Aldrovandi's illustrations of dragons and other mythological creatures and their discussion in scientific terms, Renaissance artifacts served as important sources of new facts they represented and legitimized. Organized around carefully articulated weekly themes and buttressed by the reading of both primary sources and recent scholarly literature, this seminar will introduce students to the fact-bending and fact-producing dimensions of Italian Renaissance art, giving them tools to research actual objects (for example, the 1602 edition of Valeriano's HIEROGLYPHICA in the Wesleyan Special Collections, or relevant prints from the Davison collection) for their final projects.
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1.00 Credits
How do memory cultures take shape around the experience, recollection, and representation of collective trauma? How do these styles of remembrance shape public debate over the nature and legacies of histories of violence? From the United States to South Africa, this course will trace the way official and unofficial efforts to represent collective trauma provoke debates about group identity and boundaries, as well as the nature of memory itself. From popular films and public art to memorial sites and museum exhibitions, we will study the politics and aesthetics of recalling traumatic pasts as a form of history-making in postconflict settings. Combining sociological approaches to racialized conflict and collective memory with insights from history, anthropology, and cultural geography, we will investigate how memory cultures take shape as communities grapple with the physical and emotional legacies of violent pasts.
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1.00 Credits
This seminar will explore how lawyers are deploying new visual and digital media and how judges and jurors are responding. We will also take a broader perspective, analyzing how digital technologies and new habits of using them in everyday life are reshaping the nature of legal knowledge and altering the ever-shifting relationships between law and the wider culture. We will discuss how law can be approached as a co-producer of popular culture, as when pictures from a trial are absorbed into the vernacular of society, often through television and film, but also through documentary films. Some of the questions we will ask include: How do lawyers, judges, and juries think with pictures? How is justice pursued in these new environments? What constitutes proof or trustworthy evidence when judgments of guilt or innocence may turn on the kinds of audiovisual displays that jurors are used to seeing in movies, advertisements, and the Internet? The course is intended to serve as a jumping-off point for debating issues of ethics and justice in the digital visual age.
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1.00 Credits
Facts aren't born; they're made. The challenge is to understand how people have come to think of facts as existing in the world independent of human intervention. This interdisciplinary survey course explores the tools and techniques that people have used to craft facts. We consider examples from the 18th century through the present day, such as training manuals, films, and instruments. The course also examines how broader structures--such as social networks and the law--help produce facts as people share, defend, and use them.
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1.00 Credits
The student fellowship entails full participation in the lectures and colloquia. Student fellows read, hear, and converse on the common themes. They are to work on their research projects and give a presentation to the center fellows.
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1.00 Credits
This interdisciplinary history seminar for first-year students focuses on Europe's most famous capital city between 1550 and 1650, a period when Rome was a symbol of religious zeal, artistic creativity, and intellectual repression. We will explore these contradictions and their impact on cultural innovation by taking a close look at daily life in early modern Rome and at the lives of some of the city's most celebrated women and men. These saints, murderers, artists, and scientists include San Filippo Neri, Beatrice Cenci, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Galileo. Course materials emphasize writings by historians, art and music historians, and historians of science, as well as visual, literary, musical, and documentary sources from the period. The seminar culminates with a research project on some individual or aspect of baroque Rome.
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1.00 Credits
This course will explore some classic readings on civil disobedience and nonviolent political resistance in literature and philosophy. We will examine connections between some key moments in the history of intellectual thought in 5th-/4th-century BCE Athens and in the 19th/20th century. The lives of Socrates, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., will be the focus of our study, though we will also read works of Greek tragedy (Sophocles), comedy (Aristophanes), and history (Thucydides), and writings by Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Orwell from the modern period. The course will conclude by examining the use and relevance of civil disobedience in the 21st century.
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1.00 Credits
In this creative writing course, students will analyze narrative techniques of masters of the short story such as Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Julio Cortazar, Patricia Highsmith, Alice Munro, E. P. Jones, and J. D. Salinger. This course focuses on character, plot, and suspense. Students will study methods of constructing vivid primary and secondary characters, story structure and its relation to suspense, and strategies for plotting and pacing stories. Students also will examine problems related to perspective and psychic distance in third- and first-person narratives. Paula Sharp is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories. She is writer-in-residence at the College of Letters and has taught there since 2003.
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1.00 Credits
This course will focus on advanced fiction-writing techniques used in suspense fiction and will explore the concept of genre. Are fictional genres such as the suspense thriller, the detective story and the literary story artificial constructs, or do these labels meaningfully distinguish between categories of fiction with distinct traditions and qualities? Students will begin the semester by wrestling with definitions of the suspense thriller and examining techniques used by Gothic writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley to evoke mood and suspense in fiction. Thereafter, the class will chart the emergence of the detective story genre in the works of Poe and Wilkie Collins; read classic detective stories by such authors as James Cain, Patricia Highsmith, and Georges Simenon; and learn plotting techniques exalted by masters of the detective story. Paula Sharp is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories. She is writer-in-residence at the College of Letters and has taught there since 2003.
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