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Course Criteria
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1.00 Credits
The British are often linked to rigid class systems, social structures and institutions that are centuries old and meant to keep people in their places. Royalty, inherited wealth, and tradition combine to form insurmountable barriers for those who would dare seek entry into a class she or he was not born to. In America, we have long believed that we are more egalitarian, more willing to accept people from different classes as they navigate through a fluid society where hard work and intelligence are the key to social and economic success. Our literature is full of stories about the poor kid who battles his way out of the ghetto into the boxing ring or onto the basketball court, or the immigrant who works long hours at her job while going to school at night. Politicians invoke Horatio Alger stories as prototypes for real-life successes. Although there are obviously poor people and wealthy people and a range in between, some people claim that these are not true "classes." Many other people, however, argue that there are four main classes--with a number of strata within each--in America: the elite, the middle class, the working class, and the underclass, and that the class you are born into-more than sex or race-will determine how your life will play out. In this Seminar, we will look at social class from a number of perspectives including cultural, economic, and historical. Some of the questions we'll ask are: How is class constructed, and by whom Can a person move from one class to another What do race and gender have to do with class How is class depicted in "serious" and popular culture Is the class structure in America somehow different than the class structure in other countries Are we in denial about the existence of social class What is "class warfare" Readings will include works by Matthew Arnold, Meridel LeSueur Tony Cade Bombara, Tillie Olsen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Langston Hughes, among others. Robert F. Peltier is a Senior Lecturer in the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric where his interests include the intersections of fiction and non-fiction writing, especially narrative structure. Absey & Company will publish his novel, Gretta's Garden, this 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
No Course Description Available. 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
How does a career develop Is it due to talent Luck The books one reads in college We will investigate the career of a contemporary writer, (playwright, screenplay writer, novelist), from her obscure post-modern first play that was produced in a bar in the Bowery to the modernist play on Broadway that won her a Pulitzer. Along with the complete body of works by Suzan-Lori Parks, we will read some of the plays and novels that clearly influenced her (Shakespeare, Beckett, Hawthorne, and Faulkner). Trinity College will be producing a week's worth of Parks' 365 Days 365 Plays and we will follow that production, if not also insert ourselves into it. Finally, we will partner with Hartbeat, a theatrical company based in Hartford, who will be in the process of developing a work on poverty in the city to be produced in the spring. Both of these experiences will ground our theoretical questions about tradition, talent, and creation in concrete practice. 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
An ancient Greek writer reports that a man continuously flogged the statue of a famous Olympic victor. The statue of the dead athlete fell upon and killed its abuser, and subsequently was thrown into the sea. The townspeople only averted the resulting famine by recovering the statue and worshipping it as a god. This story points to the immense power accorded to athletes in Greek society. In this seminar, we will explore the relationships between athletic competition and religion, politics, education, literature, and art in the ancient Greek world. We will ask what these connections tell us about ancient Greek culture. We will address issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and the mechanics of competition, including that burning question: were Greek athletes really nude We will draw on primary sources ranging from literary texts and historical documents to artistic representations and material artifacts. This seminar also will consider the impact of ancient Greek athletics on modern culture, from the nineteenth-century "revival" of the Olympic Games up to the present day. To what extent does the modern Olympic movement rely on myths about ancient Greek athletics Are there real connections between the role of athletic competition in ancient Greek and modern societies We will explore these questions through film, Internet resources, and media coverage of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia (September 15-October 1). Students will be required to participate in classroom discussion, write several short essays and a longer research paper, and complete a final project. Field trips may include a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and attendance of an athletic event. 1.00 units, Seminar
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3.00 Credits
Everywhere we turn, we are confronted with news of a booming economy and of the increased opportunities available to "make it" in world dominated by global corporations, e-business, and Internet start-up companies. We hear less about the poverty, economic inequality, and the class, racial, gender, and sexual cleavages that are also features of American society at the beginning of the new century. This seminar will consider these developments by taking us on a journey up the class ladder of American society. Through the use of film, journalism, sociology, anthropology, guest speakers, and field work, we will examine the ways in which one's class standing affects opportunities, resources, and power at the start of the twenty-first century, and how this relationship is affected by race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. This journey from top to bottom will also involve the many episodes of collective action by groups resisting their unequal positions in American society. 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
If I am not for myself who will be If I am not for others who am I If not now, when These three questions posed long ago, raise a fundamental tension in human existence. Our personal answers define who we are and how we behave. This seminar investigates the problem of selfish behavior in the face of cooperative demands. Using the tools of elementary game theory and social science, we will investigate the dilemma of cooperative behavior among individuals caught between our selfish and social selves. In so doing, we will examine whether and how great evil and great good can emerge from "cooperative" and contagious behavior. We will see what is common in theory between ethnic cleansing, excessive student drinking, collective violence, and the civil rights movement. Only first-year students are eligible to enroll in this class. 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
Jews and Judaism have haunted Christians and Christian culture since the two religions parted ways in the first century CE. Christians have imagined Jews to be killers of Christ, perpetrators of attacks on Christians, and leaders of world conspiracies. Shylock and Fagin still haunt the western imagination. At the same time, Jews survived through the long medieval centuries largely protected by church authorities and became citizens of modern European societies. What images of Jews were created by Christians and by Jews themselves We will read some foundational texts by Christians such as The Merchant of Venice, as well as autobiographies of Jews by Gluckl of Hameln and Leo de Modena. We will also study modern films and novels that capture images of Jews up through the present day. Ultimately, we will try to understand how traditional religious anti-Judaism evolved into modern racial anti-Semitism. 1.00 units, Seminar
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3.00 Credits
This seminar will explore the cultural phenomenon known as hip hop. At once a way of life for countless urban and suburban youth and a multimillion-dollar business, hip hop is the most dominant expressive culture since the jazz age. From Puff Daddy, to the multiracial images in Vibe magazine, to the essays in The New Republic, hip hop is omnipresent in the United States. We will use rap critic Nelson George's book Hip Hop America (1999), after which this seminar is named, as the springboard for our discussions of hip hop's social, political, and economic significance in the United States. We will trace hip hop's development and explore links between rap and other Afrodiasporic vernacular expressions as we read a cross-section of books, articles, and novels by a range of authors, among them Tricia Rose, Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Sanyika Shakur, Nathan McCall, and Jon Pareles. We will also view documentaries about hip hop and view films by Spike Lee and John Singleton. An integral component of the seminar will be our relationship with the young men of Hartford's Benjamin E. Mays Institute. An all-male school-within-a-school that is part of Fox Middle School, the Mays was founded five years ago to help combat the high attrition of Hartford's black and Hispanic 7th and 8th grade boys. We will visit the Mays three times during the semester and meet with some of the boys at Trinity on selected Saturday mornings throughout the semester. The final seminar project will be a videotaped documentary of our shared discussions on hip hop culture. 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
In this seminar, we will explore the many ways in which the computerization of our society is eroding our personal privacy. Large corporations and various state and local governments are accumulating vast amounts of personal information about us. This information ranges from data about our health, our wealth, our buying habits, our communication and travel patterns, and just about every other aspect of our lives. Much of the information gathering is done under the guise of providing us with better and more convenient services. We want to examine whether the increase in service and convenience is worth the loss of privacy. We will explore how computers are used to gather and store personal data, and try to identify exactly what information is gathered about us and what we can do to control our personal information. We will also look at how computers might be used to protect our privacy. 1.00 units, Seminar
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3.00 Credits
This seminar will explore two kinds of order without law: (a) criminal organization and (b) informal systems of social control. We will focus mainly on the Sicilian Mafia (Cosa Nostra). We will analyze vice markets and debate prohibitions that foster organized crime. We will also examine gangs, pirates, community sanctions, vigilantism, and self-help. Students are encouraged to analyze and reflect on their own unwritten rules of campus life. The course is designed as an introduction to history and the social sciences. The particular approach is methodological individualism-jargon for the important common-sense idea that we should explain social phenomena from the bottom up, by identifying what individuals do (behavior), why they do what they do (motivations), and how their behaviors have unintended consequences (social mechanisms). Students will get acquainted with basic distinctions among history, economics, political science, psychology, and anthropology. The course is also designed to equip students with broadly useful skills in expository writing and public speaking. 1.00 units, Seminar
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