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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course analyzes several dramatic films in class with the application of the theories of moral psychology of John Rawls, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Jean Piaget. Through class analyses and discussions, students will learn to apply these developmental and social contract theories. Films studied may include The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mutiny on the Bounty, Babette's Feast, The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Born on The Fourth of July, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Casablanca. SOCIAL SCIENCE & HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the intersections between modernism and post-modernism as historical periods, worldviews, aesthetic statements, and attitudes toward politics, culture, art, and personal style. Through analysis of architecture, film, literature, music, and other artifacts of popular culture, and through works by contemporary North American and European social theorists and critics, students explore the dilemmas as well as the hopes of "the postmodern condition." HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
This interdisciplinary course critically investigates the various ways the West has constructed otherness through the prism of the primitive. Drawing from classical literature, anthropology, travel narratives, ethnography, art history, psychology, philosophy and popular culture-from Homer to Freud by way of Tarzan-students wrestle with questions of the primitive, civilization, otherness, identity, self and representation, in an effort to better understand practices of marginalization and aggrandizement. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
In an attempt to bring a critical perspective to assumed notions of rights and justice, this course examines several of the dominant philosophies which have given rise to the tradition of classical liberalism. Students examine ancient Greek conceptions of justice and natural right; early and medieval Christian political philosophy; the rise of natural law theory; and the crucial philosophical debates of the early modern period. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
Students explore the shifting phenomenon of performance art by examining its historical origins, as a reaction to and deconstruction of the economic and aesthetic constraints of such artistic disciplines as visual art and theater. The course explores different formal movements in performance, including bodybased work, identity-based work, time-based work and story-telling. The focus is on performance as it has developed and mutated in Los Angeles, with guest class visits from innovative and leading local artists. Through reading, viewing taped performances, discussion and practical exploration, students familiarize themselves with the radical possibilities of this discipline through historical, societal, political, and economic perspectives. FINE ARTS & HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
In this course students critically examine the authentic, fictional and distorted image of black Americans created for mass consumption in mainstream popular American culture and entertainment. This course further examines significant distinctions between images presented by black Americans and those created by others that merely depict African Americans. Nearly three centuries of popular American culture, mass media, and American history are examined in order to grasp the full scope and impact the black image had and continues to have on the American psyche. In addition, through films, video, and guest speakers the course offers an interdisciplinary examination of what W.E.B DuBois refers to as "the bifurcation of the Negro image, that peculiar sensation of a doubleconsciousness, the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others. one ever feels his or her twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings" (Soul of Black Folks, 1903). HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
Technology has had enormous influence over our lives, making many things easier, complicating others, and opening up new areas for ethical discussion. Yet little attention has been paid to how technology has shaped us as human beings: communication, sex, warfare, medicine, etc. This course considers issues such as visuality, speed, and mechanization and reflects on how technological development has altered understanding of the self, desire, and even our own bodies. Theorists considered include: Barthes, Sontag, Horkheimer, Adorno, Virilio, Heidegger, Postman and Stone. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
Culture has become an increasingly important concept for understanding ourselves and the world, as well as an important arena for pursuing just social change. This course provides a wide-ranging survey of the history of Cultural Studies (CS) while focusing on the theories that have most informed CS, the concepts and language most often employed, and examples of CS in practice. From the beginning, CS has been highly political in nature and focused on the potentials for resistance in oppositional subcultures, first, valorizing the potential of working class cultures, then, youth subcultures to resist capitalist domination. As it developed, CS was informed by feminism, critical race theory, gay and lesbian theory, queer theory, and postmodern theory. Today CS is now focused on examining the ways that cultural texts promote sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression, or can be employed in resistance and struggle. The course provides students with tools for doing cultural critique and political analysis and cultural activism. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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3.00 Credits
This course studies Mark Twain as a social critic and moral educator and examines the personal philosophy that he brought to his writings. In context of Rawls' moral psychology, course topics include Twain's critiques of moral determinism, conventional religion, creationism, as well as the "moral sense" in human morality, adultery, hypocrisy, patriotism, superstition, religious intolerance and persecution. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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1.00 Credits
In this one day workshop students explore various models of constructions of the primitive other, followed by an opportunity to apply these models to a variety of popular films and documentaries. Students gain a greater understanding of the sundry means by which the Western world, broadly speaking, negotiates difference, civilization and the primitive, and self and other. No grade equivalents allowed. HUMANITIES DOMAIN
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