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Spring 2008 Course Listings and Summer 2008 |
| 201: Christ College Symposium.
Cr. 0. Christ College sophomores, juniors, and seniors are required to register for the course and expected to attend each gathering except in the case of a course conflict. Presentations and discussions of topics of special interest to members of the Christ College community. Only Christ College students may register, but all students are welcome to attend.
This course will introduce students to central developments in the history of the Christian tradition and to the nature and purpose of Christian theology. It will also encourage students to practice developing a "working theology" by examining primary texts in the Christian intellectual and spiritual tradition. This work will be reflected in three short papers and one longer research paper. Readings include selections from the Bible, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as selected writings by other classical and contemporary theologians. The course aims at improving the student's (1) knowledge of Christian theological and practical traditions; (2) ability to read theological texts closely and to think critically about them; and (3) integration and expression, oral and written, of critical reflection on the readings.
This course introduces students to fundamental issues in the theory and practice of interpreting our lives as individuals and as a community. The course will draw its theoretical emphases from major figures in the human sciences that might include Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Clifford Geertz, R.G. Collingwood, and Michel Foucault. The course will not, however, simply consider and examine social and cultural theory in the abstract but rather show how it can be applied to historical and contemporary phenomena. This will be approached primarily by reading historical and other texts that incorporate these theorists into tangible settings, and by practicing the craft of cultural and social interpretation ourselves. The primary assignments, along with weekly discussion, include sets of papers in one of the following two patterns: two individual papers of approximately 2-4 pages, 1 longer paper of approximately 10 pages, and one collaborative research project; OR three 5 page papers and one collaborative research project. An additional plenary hour will be spent each week viewing films, listening to lectures, or participating in research projects and presentations.
This course will explore the experimental, conceptual and philosophical aspects of the natural sciences, primarily physical sciences. To do so, we will examine two very broad thematic questions: (i) “What are the planets and the stars?”, and (ii) “What is light?” These grand themes provide great insight into how scientific knowledge develops and evolves. They illustrate well the very human character of a complex and fascinating endeavor. We briefly examine the discovery of DNA’s double helical structure, as seen through the eyes of its most famous co-discoverer. As in any human endeavor, science has its creative and aesthetic
dimensions, as well as its monumental times of tension. It has also
often been influenced by both philosophical and religious ideas,
and we shall consider both as they relate to the issues at hand.
Overall, my hope is to deepen appreciation of the richness of the
scientific heritage we have, as well as to better understand its
limits. Some Course Goals: Readings: Selections from the following as well as other sources Grades: Regular reading, class participation, and serious intellectual engagement are essential elements for success in this course. Grade will be based on a research paper & presentation, essay exam, essay final exam, and laboratory participation. The laboratory will meet approximately every other week, and three visits to the VU observatory will be required.
This course will examine homelessness from historical and sociological perspectives, as well as through literature. We will explore how the meaning of homelessness-and the composition of the ranks of the homeless-has changed in the United States over the centuries. Moreover, we will analyze the different ways society has perceived homelessness and sought to develop policies to address this issue. Required Readings: Assignments include two five-page papers, a ten-page take-home final, and a brief presentation.
This course will provide an overview of the pressure groups, the role of the public, political party positions and policy-making at the national and state level in the highly-charged arena of educational policy. Subjects to be covered include teacher preparation, school curriculum, school and student improvement, school financing, church and state issues, and higher education. A major case to be examined is “No Child Left Behind.” It is hoped that the seminar participants will develop the skills of critical analysis in viewing current policy and proposals for reform. A research paper, a mid-term exam, and a final exam will be required.
Once the privilege of film buffs with access to archives or festival circuits, world cinema has now become widely accessible through technologies like high-speed internet and multi-region DVD players. This course investigates the intersections between major film centers in America and abroad by examining representative selections from noteworthy movements and schools. Adding to this comparative analysis, we will look at complementary literary texts that demonstrate shared socio-political commitments and formal techniques. We will be less concerned with cinematic adaptations of literary works than with the exchange of ideas between media from similar regions and periods. Movements and themes we will consider may include the following: forging the American dream in studio-era Hollywood and American literary modernism (Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby); post-World War II politics in Italian neo-realism (Rome: Open City and The Path to the Spiders’ Nests); voyeuristic horror in Britain (Peeping Tom and Psycho); and post-colonial memory in Bollywood (Lagaan and The God of Small Things). Course assignments will include active in-class participation, several one-page response papers, a short analytical essay, and a longer research paper. * Special Note: Because film viewing is crucial to our course, we will have screenings on Friday afternoons with mandatory attendance. Be prepared for extended three-hour periods on these Fridays.
The federal government owns 653 million acres of land—much of it in the American West—making it the single largest and most important land owner in the nation. The federal government is also, at times, the most schizophrenic land owner as it struggles to meet the conflicting interests of 300 million citizens. Decisions about western federal land and resources are fundamentally political decisions with enormous ecological, economic, political, and cultural implications, and they raise fundamental questions about environmental protection. What constitutes wise use of federal lands and resources? What “public” or “publics” should be served? What standards should we use to determine land health and quality? We will examine existing answers to these questions and work with others in the West to identify new answers for the 21st century. The class will meet once a week during the second half of the spring semester, for lecture, discussion, and planning. With this foundation in place, the class will travel west for one month to explore the physical and political character of western federal lands first hand, including the ways that this vast federal estate has contributed to western economics, politics, and culture. Grades will be based on one on-campus research paper, several short papers in the field, field notes, and participation.
“Why endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer--Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading: which may be food for a Week's stroll in the Summer? Do not they like this better than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes down stairs? A Morning’s work at most. Besides a long Poem is a test of Invention which I take to be the Polar Star of Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails, and Imagination the Rudder. Did our great Poets ever write short Pieces? I mean in the shape of Tales--This same invention seems indeed of late Years to have been forgotten as a Poetical excellence” (John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 8 October 1817). The epic poems of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid tell of struggles: the wrath of Achilles, the homecoming of Odysseus, the foundation of Rome, the necessity and difficulty of change. Each poem, in ways appropriate to its own tradition and cultural contexts, offers answers to questions about the human condition: What is a hero or a heroine? What does mortality mean to humans? What is the relation between human beings and gods? In this course we will try to gain an understanding of the scope and development of a genre that has its roots in the oral tradition but also exhibits the genius of the artist, and the self-reflexivity of the written text. We will read each text closely, and with the aid of some pertinent secondary literature, we will try to appreciate each in its own context. As we complete each text, we will also compare these poems and their unique visions of heroism to each other, staying alert to how each poet responds to the epic models of his predecessors, even as he crafts his own. Coursework will include weekly short writing assignments, oral presentations and a final paper based on the individual student’s interests. Required Texts:
This course uses the social and historical basis as a vehicle to achieve understanding of modern Africa and its literature. And it uses the literature as a valuable resource to achieve this social and historical understanding. We will begin with an analysis of traditional (pre-colonial) society and history, then move to an examination of European colonization and the African response, and conclude with an analysis of contemporary Africa’s problems and prospects. Even as we achieve this broad perspective on the African experience, we will also have the opportunity to specialize in an area of interest. Readings will be supplemented with films on society and history. The literary works, although they rely heavily on post-colonial writing from Africa, will attempt to match the developmental perspective we have sketched out here. Texts include: Tutola, The Palm Wine Drinkard; Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat; and a South African text, possibly Mda, The Heart of Redness. Teaching responsibilities will be shared by a professor of political
science and a professor of literature who do not always agree. Student
responsibilities will include an oral presentation, a critical paper
(6-7 pages) and a final examination. 325A: Freedom. Cr. 3-4. Mr. Murphy. “Give me liberty or give me death!” “It’s a free country!” The language of freedom permeates American society, from the nation’s founding to yesterday’s news. But we rarely seem to stop and contemplate what this notion is all about, and what sorts of tradeoffs or drawbacks our national obsession with freedom might entail. In this seminar, we shall consider a few basic questions. Should we consider freedom primarily a negative notion (removing obstacles to doing what we want), or does it necessarily involve some sort of overarching ethical dimension? What sorts of social or political institutions follow from these varying commitments to human liberty? Most of the reading in this class will be in the field of political theory, works that attempt to clarify the concept of freedom and to think through its implications for social and political life; but we shall also consider the ways in which literary works and films might teach us about freedom. Assigned texts may include the following: 325B: Poe and Baudelaire. Cr. 3-4.
Mr Olmsted. We will conduct a seminar in comparative literature to the extent that our linguistic limitations allow. Poe and Baudelaire are a well-suited pair of writers, since they are linked by temperament and style as well as by the fact that Baudelaire translated Poe into French. Our emphasis will be on the prose writings of each author, although Baudelaire's poems will also receive close attention. The course aims to introduce students to these major authors and to provide an opportunity for studying the intertextual properties of their works, with special attention to their humor, supernaturalism, misogyny, social satire and all-around weirdness. Texts: Requirements: Regular class attendance and participation in discussion; completion of three essays; one presentation.
This seminar studies the history of religions in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present by focusing on the images and visual practices used by different groups. Attention will focus on a variety of visual media—illustrated books and tracts, paintings, sculpture, monuments, panoramas, lithographic prints, photography, film, and television. By examining the ways of seeing and the images used by Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Pagans, New Agers, Native Americans, Buddhists, and Hindus among others, we will explore how seeing and believing become synonymous in the teaching of children, proselytism, revivalism, devotional practices, commemorative ritual, pilgrimage, civil religion, and in public debates over national and ethnic identity. Requirements: Texts:
Born in 1813 Denmark, and raised by an intensely religious, successful merchant of humble origins whose second wife gave birth just after five months of marriage, Søren Aabey Kierkegaard entered the University of Copenhagen in 1830 to study theology. But it would be ten years before he took his final exams, during which time he became alienated from his melancholy father and the Christianity in which he was raised. Meanwhile he devoted himself to reading literature and philosophy, attended the theatre, and otherwise lived as a dandy about town. In 1838 Kierkegaard’s journals report a prodigal’s return, in both an earthly and heavenly sense. Two years later his formal education came to an end after defending a dissertation on Socratic irony, at which point he broke off a year-long, passionate engagement to Regina Olsen. Why exactly he was convinced he could not go through with their marriage remains an interpersonal puzzle. But what we do know is that the ordeal triggered a vast and complex literary career, both signed and pseudonymous. In bookstores, Kierkegaard is classified under “philosophy/religion.” This is both accurate and misleading. He financed his own publications, never held an academic post, and felt no obligation to make his writing fit a particular disciplinary genre. For most authors this would spell complete disaster, except that here we have a case of unprecedented genius. Stages on Life’s Way, for example, opens with a dinner party at which several bachelors give puzzling, and tipsy, speeches about love, and ends with an equally puzzling, though sober, commentary on an anonymous diary about a broken engagement found locked in a box at the bottom of a pond with the key inside. Fear and Trembling opens with four odd retellings of the binding of Isaac and in the course of things distinguishes Abraham from a guilt-stricken merman. Sickness unto Death is nothing short of a diagnostic manual of the human spirit, the preface of which proclaims, “in one sense this little book is such that a college student could write it, in another sense, perhaps such that not every professor could write it.” In addition to not fitting a particular genre, Kierkegaard’s work has inspired and influenced readers from a variety of academic disciplines, such as theologians Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr, novelists Albert Camus and Walker Percy, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, and psychologist Rollo May. His work has also been used as an interpretive grid for analyzing other phenomena, such as: “a Kierkegaardian reading of” Ivan Karamozov, the film American Beauty, or the artistic and political career of Václav Havel. But what finally is this unusual literature about? In his first publication Kierkegaard criticized his contemporary Hans Christian Andersen for not having a “worldview.” And this is precisely what he sought to include in his own work: a view of life, a vision of our ethical, spiritual, psychological, and social circumstance, of what it means to be an authentic human individual. This allowed him to address classic themes of love and despair, religious faith and doubt, ethical commitment, aesthetic detachment, and political critique. And he does so in a literary form so earnest, yet so riddled with irony, you will want to read it twice. Course expectations include one 15-20 page or two 8-10 page essays. Reading assignments will be roughly 15-30 pages for every 50-minute session.
This course will introduce students to important modern and postmodern attitudes and practices focused on the human body. The course begins with an examination of young adult women’s “body practices,” then looks at male sexuality and concludes with a scrutiny of the process of dying. Our concerns will range over current discourses about eating disorders, virginity, clothing styles, body images, intergenerational mentoring, pornography, bisexuality, circumcision, domestic violence, AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease and other topics. The connecting theme among these different topics is the “invented” aspect of not only discourse about the body but our actual experience of it. As even the briefest survey of body practices indicates, they vary enormously over different time periods, from one culture to another, between generations, among different races and ethnicities, from one religious group to another, etc. Thus, to cite one example, “French kissing” is unfavorably regarded by most French people while one Brazilian tribe regards kissing of any kind as “a disgusting practice that contaminates the mouth” (Kimmel 68). Despite these differences, however, the “invented” quality of bodily practices does not mean that they cannot operate with coercive power. Thus, “inventions” may seem arbitrary in terms of their origins but can function in compulsory ways. Our task will be to understand how the body came to be invented and in what ways the invented body serves us usefully or, contrarily, is in need of re-invention. Requirements: In addition to regular attendance, the course requires three papers of four to six pages in length. The first two papers may, with the instructor’s permission, be rewritten in the event of a grade of B or lower; rewrites must be completed within two weeks and will be returned without comment. Written work should observe the Honor Code and sources, including Internet sources, must be indicated. Good participation in class discussions will have a positive effect on the final grade. I encourage the taking of class notes and keeping a journal that records your impressions of the readings—this habit makes it easier to prepare for discussion and to begin the paper-writing process. Students who opt to write a Senior Honors Thesis will not be required to write the third paper. A rough draft of approximately ten pages will be due at the beginning of the twelfth week of class. Texts may include:
Is it possible to understand, truly understand, the other? In this class we will explore two strategies for negotiating the distance between same and other, and the relation of those two strategies. The first is hospitality: the practice of welcoming and caring for the needs of strangers, arguably the centerpiece of practical ethics throughout the ancient world. The second is hermeneutics: the art of understanding. One branch of this art deals, of course, with the interpretation of texts: How can I possibly understand a text written in another time and place, likely in a different language, and almost certainly for a different audience? How do we identify better and worse interpretations? Can texts have more than one legitimate meaning? The difficulty of wrestling with such questions should remind us that thoughtful people ask similar questions about far more fundamentally human experiences: How do we make sense out of worlds in which we live? How can we identify better and worse interpretations of such worlds and of our place in them? Is there such a thing as ‘the’ meaning of life? In this class, students will be introduced to the philosophical field of hermeneutics, in both its specific (textual) and general (life) senses. Drawing on philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, theologians such as Graham Ward and Andrew Louth, and literary texts such as Homer’s Odyssey, we will explore, develop, and practice a hermeneutics of hospitality. Students will be asked to lead seminar discussion at least once and to write two to three essays of medium length. Likely texts include the following:
Christ College Senior Colloquium provides a capstone, integrative experience for Christ College Associates and Scholars. Through class conversations, readings, and written work, students will be led to give shape to the substance of their lives through autobiographical narrative, and they will be led to reflect upon the character and meaning of their future work. The practical dimensions of these reflections will include attention to the transition from college. Registration is restricted to students who will graduate in May or August or December 2008.
Summer Session I—2008 300AX: Contemporary British Theatre. Cr. 3.
Mr. Orchard. (Cross-listed with THTR 390X.) Come travel to England with theatre professor Dr. Lee Orchard and learn about some of the most exciting plays currently being performed on the London stage. Dr. Orchard has taught this study abroad course for many years and has developed a class that features daily trips to the theatre, including playhouses on the West End, the Royal National Theatre, pub and fringe theatres, the Donmar Warehouse, the Globe, and Stratford-on-Avon. Programmed activities consist of play attendance, classroom discussion, and field trips to theatre and non-theatre related sites (such as the Houses of Parliament, Warrick Castle, the Museum of London, etc.). Course evaluation will be based upon participation, two 3-5 page papers, and a final exam. Special fees include transportation, lodging, field trips, and ticket costs. Contact Dr. Lee Orchard, chair of the theatre department, for further details.
Hangzhou, China International Study Center (Cross-listed with ED 490, EAST 390, COMM 490, SOC 390
and SOCW 391.) Participants leave for Shanghai, China, on May 19 or 20 and return
from Beijing to Chicago on June 24 or 25. The program starts with
a two-day tour of Shanghai before arriving at Hangzhou, the provincial
capital of Zhejiang, where all classes will be held. There will
be four full weeks of classes with several group field trips. The
program ends with a three-day visit to Beijing, the capital of China,
before returning to the U.S. |
