Anthropology |
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Hour: 2 Instructor: Sienna Craig |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: INTL or SOC |
Course Title: The Values of Medicine: Cultural Expressions of Healing Systems |
Description: |
What does a Hmong shaman in California have to do with a medieval anatomy book, the history of midwifery in America, or a 19th century guide to medicinal plants of New England? How do we understand what it means to learn or practice "good" medicine or be a "good" doctor? What does it mean to have an illness versus a disease? In what ways does modern medicine still reflect on early Greek roots of this tradition—in terms of medical theory, methods, and ethics—and how has contemporary Western medicine (also known today as "biomedicine") been fundamentally altered through the processes of modernization? Can we discern specific points of change and continuity in the history of Western medicine and its encounters with other non-Western medical systems? This course explores how social, medical, and economic values are ascribed to medicine and healing systems over time. We will discuss how healers, students of medicine, patients, the general public, and policy makers negotiate what it means to say a medical practice "works" and why; likewise, we will question the boundaries of lay and expert knowledge in relation to the practice of healing, and consider the social, economic, and political divisions such boundaries help to create and reinforce. Through journals, essays, and other forms of critical and creative writing, as well as discussions of readings and films and engagement with holdings in Dartmouth's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library collections, we will question assumptions about how medicine is defined and practiced in the West and cross-culturally.
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Biology |
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Hour: 12 Instructor: Natasha Grotz |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: TAS |
Course Title: Genetically Modified Organisms: The Key to World Hunger? |
Description: |
One of the issues confronting society today is how to feed the world. Central to this issue are current agricultural practices. In the course, we will examine current agricultural practices including large-scale agriculture and organic farming. Along with this, we will consider why large-scale agriculture arose, as well as the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). More specifically, we will examine some of the leading advances in plant research relevant to the use of GMOs as a means to alleviate hunger. The scientific techniques used to generate GMOs, as well as the rules governing their distribution, will be considered. Additionally, we will define the requirements for a food to be labeled as organic and ask whether we can we feasibly feed the world using organic farming or whether it is practical in only some parts of the world. In order to more fully understand these issues, we will read primary literature as well as books such as Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works and Genes on the Menu: Facts for Knowledge-Based Decisions. |
Comparative Literature |
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Hour: 10 Instructor: Nancy Canepa |
Requirements Met: WCult: W; Distrib: LIT |
Course Title: The Literary Fairy Tale |
Description: |
When people think of fairy tales, the first names that often come to mind are the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Walt Disney. But the European literary fairy tale was actually inaugurated in Renaissance Italy, and by the time the Grimms compiled their collection in the 19th century it had already evolved into a sophisticated genre that included hundreds of tales, and most of the ones today considered "classic" (Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, et al.). This course is a survey of the ways that fairy tales, whose basic narrative structure is relatively fixed, are rewritten and imbued with cultural "messages" in their multiple European and American incarnations. Course work will consist of close study of the tales and collections that mark the different phases of this development: the early tales of the 16th–18th centuries, addressed to aristocratic audiences (Straparola, Basile, d'Aulnoy, Perrault); the canonization and infantilization, but also creative re-elaboration, of the classic tales in the 19th century (Grimms, Andersen, Collodi, the Victorians); and the extraordinary regeneration of the fairy tale, as both children's and adult's genre, in this century and the last (Baum, Calvino, Sexton, Carter, Disney, et al.). We will cover topics such as the defining characteristics of the genre; the intersections between the real and the marvelous in fairy tales; ideology, or the role of fairy tales in the "civilizing process"; and fairy tales, children's literature, and the cultural construction of childhood. We will also undertake "case studies" of several of the best-known fairy-tale types, consider various critical approaches to the fairy tale, and put our encounter with this genre to dynamic use by writing, telling, and performing tales. |
Computer Science |
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Hour: 2 Instructor: Lorie Loeb |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: ART |
Course Title: Interactive Storytelling |
Description: |
Interactive storytelling begins with the rich experience of storytelling and adds the element of audience interaction. For hundreds of years, audiences have been involved in the telling of stories, but because of the advent of new technologies there has been a growing interest in the field of interactive storytelling. We will look at computer and video games, blogs, interactive theater, role-playing games and depictions of interactive storytelling in books, movies and television to analyze the quality of the audience experience and discuss the value of interactivity in the art of storytelling. We will develop methods for analyzing the interactive story by first studying traditional (linear) narrative structure and comparing it with interactive story structure such as branching narratives, loops and games. Classroom exercises will be given to help develop a set of tools to understand how stories are built, discover where the decision points are and what sorts of choices the interactor would find meaningful. Readings include some or all of Crawford's "Interactive Storytelling," Bradbury's "The Veldt," Aristotle's "The Poetics," and Murray's "Hamlet on the Holodeck." The final paper will be the development of a group interactive story script to be presented in class. |
Education |
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Hour: 2A Instructor: Kimberly Williams |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: SOC |
Course Title: Education and Intelligence |
Description: |
Are you intelligent? How do you know? Can schools make one intelligent? Educators seek to understand intelligence—especially in light of our modern day research into the inner workings of the brain. But what does it mean to be intelligent in today's schools? If you do well in school are you intelligent? This course will examine theories of intelligence such as: Multiple Intelligence (Howard Gardner), Social/Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman), and Artificial Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins), as well as some additional research on the brain and intelligence (e.g. Dweck and others). This course will examine intelligence from a bio-psycho-social perspective—reflecting on such questions as: If we better understand how the brain works, can we build intelligent machines? Can schools teach social intelligence and, if so, should they? What aspects of human intelligence do we value as a society and reinforce in schools? How have new theories of learning and the brain and intelligence affected schooling? How will our thoughts about intelligence shape the future? Through debates and a variety of writing strategies, we will examine these questions and more. |
Engineering Sciences |
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Hour: 12 Instructor: Alvin Converse |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: TAS |
Course Title: Energy Technology and Public Policy |
Description: |
Energy technology is in an important transition, propelled by increased global demand, resource limitations, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, environmental protection, and exciting technical opportunities. The main objective of the course is to develop a scientific understanding of these factors, but it is not the only objective. The energy transition is being managed by governmental policy as well as economic market forces. Resource issues are a potential source of war; hence their resolution or avoidance is a potential cause of peace. A lot depends on the technical options and choices that we will be studying and discussing, and about which you will be writing. |
English |
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Hour: 11 Instructor: Edmund Campos |
Requirements Met: WCult: W; Distrib: LIT |
Course Title: Exploring the Renaissance: English Travel Literature |
Description: |
The age of Shakespeare was also the age of global exploration. The European encounter with new worlds fired the imagination of Renaissance writers at home and abroad. As explorers crisscrossed the Atlantic, so too did words and ideas. This course explores the interplay between Renaissance travel and literature by reading both the literature of travel (travelogues, diaries, journals, chronicles, etc.) and the literature that travel inspires (plays, poetry, epics, etc.). While the boundary separating history from literature often prevents an interdisciplinary look at the connections between travel writing and Renaissance literary works, this class will show how these two kinds of writing are often mutually referential. To what extent is travel writing literary, and to what extent are Renaissance prose and poetry shaped by the historical Age of Discovery? How does the discovery of new lands and new peoples unite both historical and literary inquiries under a shared set of concerns touching nationhood, race, and gender in the early modern period? While the focus in this class is on English narratives, it will also include other European writings, especially Spanish and Portuguese writings in translation. Not only did Spain and Portugal lead the way in transatlantic travel and exploration, they provided textual models of discovery to which England responded in the formation of Protestant models of empire. |
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Hour: 2A Instructor: Jonathan Crewe |
Requirements Met: WCult: NW; Distrib: LIT |
Course Title: Writing South Africa |
Description: |
The primary texts for this course will be important works of fiction written in English by men and women of differing ethnicity in South Africa. The period spanned by the course runs from the sixteenth century through the present, but we will mainly read works written after World War II, both during and after the Apartheid era. The fictional reading will be supplemented by readings in history, social analysis, and criticism. Students will be asked to write at least one critical paper on a work of fiction and one research paper on the context(s) of that work or of another work read in the course. Shorter writing assignments and presentations will also be included in the work of the course. The aim of the course is to familiarize students with a richly diverse body of fiction and the world in which it was produced. Some or all of the following writers will be considered: Olive Schreiner, Sol Plaatje, Alan Paton, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Abrahams, J.M. Coetzee, Zoe Wicomb, Zakes Mda and Njabulo Ndebele. |
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Hour: 10A Instructor: Soyica Diggs Colbert |
Requirements Met: WCult: CI; Distrib: LIT |
Course Title: Black Movements |
Description: |
This course will examine how black people's ambiguous relationship to space and place in the Circum-Atlantic world informs modes of representation, by focusing on images of home, homelessness, flight, entrapment, embodiment, and metaphysical transcendence that permeate the African American literary tradition and the literatures of the black diaspora. We will analyze how movement is used to explore themes of black expression, including freedom, family, identity, subjectivity, national belonging, and history. Readings include Jean Toomer's Cane, Aime Cesaire's A Tempest, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones; we will watch Josephine Baker's Princess Tam Tam and listen to musicians including Billie Holiday, Kanye West, and Naz. |
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Hour: 10 Instructor: Gretchen Gerzina |
Requirements Met: WCult: W; Distrib: LIT |
Course Title: Orphans, Runaways, and Adventurers: Children's Literature 1690–1911 |
Description: |
Early literature for children took the form of instruction, verses and fables. As ideas about childhood changed, so did the literature written for them. Using the extensive special collections in Rauner Library, where the class will meet, we will read early conduct books, fairy tales, poems and plays, such as Peter and Wendy. In the second part of the course we will read several novels, including Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, The Wizard of Oz, and The Secret Garden. There will also be reading on the social history of childhood. |
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Hour: 10A Instructor: Shalene Vasquez |
Requirements Met: WCult: NW; Distrib: LIT |
Course Title: Spirituality in Black Diasporic Literature |
Description: |
How do we perceive notions of spirituality, and how are different practices articulated in Black diasporic communities that engage Western and non-Western ideologies? In this course, we will examine the literature of Black diasporic writers, paying particular attention to the ways in which African and Western practices have collided to reimagine Christianity and to form uniquely diasporic practices. We will explore works such as the Negro Spirituals, W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Aimé Césaire's A Tempest, and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow. In order to develop a better understanding of the importance of critical responses to texts, emphasis will be on independent research of the assigned works. Additionally, I will structure a portion of our class activities into workshop sessions where students bring their written insights into dialogue with fellow classmates. |
Environmental Studies |
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Hour: 10A Instructor: Jack Shepherd |
Requirements Met: WCult: NW; Distrib: SOC |
Course Title: Africa: The Environmental Legacies of Colonialism |
Description: |
We must ask ourselves some troubling questions about Africa today: Why is this particular continent the most underdeveloped in the world? Why are its people so stricken with illness and so impoverished? Only recently have we begun to search for, and to confront, the harsh answers to these questions. The Congo offers an unsettling case study of the environmental, social, political and economic legacies of colonialism. We begin our exploration with the disquieting questions raised by King Leopold's Ghost (Hochschild), The Heart of Darkness (Conrad), and Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible. We expand our search with Rhodes: The Race for Africa (Thomas). We more widely interrogate colonial and post-colonial Africa and the environmental legacies now emerging elsewhere from that period. We examine today's regional controversies over land and water resources, food and cash-crop production, resource conservation, and resource extractions like oil and "blood diamonds." We ask: Does the specter of colonialism still haunt sub-Saharan Africa? How does it inform our troubling questions? |
Film Studies |
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Hour: 3A Instructor: William Phillips |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: ART |
Course Title: Screen Adaptations from Drama and Fiction |
Description: |
This course will explore requirements for good film adaptations, from the point of view of the screenwriter/filmmaker. There will be one oral presentation, four papers (one of which may be a brief screenplay), and two brief quizzes. Texts will include Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Stephen King's Christine, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and Maurine Watkins' Chicago. We will view the film versions of these titles, and in addition West Side Story, Baz Luehrmann's Romeo + Juliet, Roxy Hart, and the film Adaptation. |
French |
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Hour: 11 Instructor: Michael Fodor |
Requirements Met: WCult: W; Distrib: INTL/COMP |
Course Title: Enlightenments: France and the United States |
Description: |
The American and French Revolutions were culminating moments of the 18th century, inaugural moments of Western republican modernity. In this seminar we will study Enlightenment texts that shaped these constitutive events. We will pair up six prominent French and American thinkers: two political pathbreakers, Montesquieu and Jefferson; two more radical theorists, Rousseau and Paine; two polymaths, Diderot and Franklin. |
Geography |
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Hour: 10A Instructor: Susanne Freidberg |
Requirements Met: WCult: W; Distrib: INTL or SOC |
Course Title: Globalization and the Material World |
Description: |
We all know that we live in an age of globalization, but what does that really mean? What could it mean? This course explores these questions. We will start by examining how capitalism works and how, over centuries, it has created an interconnected world economy. We will then look at how different places and people—merchants, migrants, as well as less mobile workers—have experienced and shaped this interconnectedness. Lastly we will debate normative visions of a more equitable and ethical globalization. The writing assignments will provide opportunities to analyze these visions, and also to explore how global forces play out in local lives and places. |
Government |
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Hour: 3A Instructor: Linda Fowler |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: SOC |
Course Title: Invitation to Struggle: Congress, the President and National Security |
Description: |
The U.S. Constitution set up "an invitation to struggle" in the realm of foreign affairs in which the legislative and executive branches share power. The course examines the prerogatives of each institution, the historical evolution of contemporary executive dominance, and the political and security consequences of the current state of imbalance. Readings draw widely from political theory, constitutional law, history, and contemporary political science scholarship on political institutions. |
History |
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Hour: 10A Instructor: Marysa Navarro-Aranguren |
Requirements Met: WCult: W; Distrib: INTL or SOC |
Course Title: Clashing Empires: Aztecs and Spaniards in the XVI Century |
Description: |
On November 6, 1519, a group of Spanish soldiers led by Hernán Cortés entered Tenochtitlan, the magnificent metropolis built by the Aztecs on Lake Texcoco, as a guest of the Great Moctezuma. In August 1521, after an eight month siege, Tenochtitlan lay in ruins. Few events in the history of the Americas have held more fascination than the conquest of the Aztecs by Cortés and his men, and few have given rise to more controversies. Scholars today still disagree about the actions of Cortés once he entered the city, the importance of horses, firearms, religion and diseases in the destruction of the Aztec empire, and the role of Moctezuma and the beautiful Malintzin. |
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Hour: 10A Instructor: Allen Koop |
Requirements Met: WCult: W; Distrib: SOC |
Course Title: The Cold War |
Description: |
This course focuses on the causes of the Cold War, then probes a few Cold War crises, and concludes with various explanations for the end of the Cold War. Readings will be drawn from memoirs of the participants, analyses by contemporary observers, arguments by later revisionists and their critics, corroborative novels, and recent commentaries. Students will assess the roles of evidence and argument in the writing of history. |
Linguistics |
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Hour: 2A Instructor: Timothy Pulju |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: None |
Course Title: Languages in Fantasy and Science Fiction |
Description: |
Works of fantasy and science fiction often feature invented languages that are meant to add richness and verisimilitude to their authors' invented worlds. But how successful have various authors been at creating realistic languages, both human and non-human? What types of features should particular types of invented languages include? Which invented languages have enjoyed the most success with their audiences, and why? In this class, we will consider such questions as we take a multidisciplinary approach to fictional languages, examining them from literary, structural linguistic, and anthropological linguistic standpoints. Readings will include primary sources such as the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Marc Okrand's Klingon Dictionary, and Harry Harrison's West of Eden novels, as well as secondary works of linguistic scholarship such as Charles Hockett's "How to Learn Martian," and Bill Spruiell's "A Lack of Alien Verbs." |
Mathematics |
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Hour: 2A Instructor: Andrea Kremer |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: TAS |
Course Title: Hazardous Data: Uncovering the Truth and Analyzing the Consequences |
Description: |
Unfortunately, many numbers, charts, and graphs routinely used in publications fictionalize the truth. Yet, these very same numerical misrepresentations form the rationale for economic, political, and social policies. Furthermore, misleading statistics often form the basis for personal "informed" decisions. This course will examine the misconceptions that often are embedded in the data published in the health care field. Students will learn epidemiologic methods and analytical techniques to differentiate numerical fact from fiction. Then students will apply these techniques to communicate effectively how and why numbers can misrepresent a purported relationship. The intricacies and fallacies of study designs, the strategies of sampling methods, the application of statistical tests, the validity of statistical predictions, the role of confounding factors, the requirements for proving causality, and the criteria for accurately graphing data are some areas that will be examined. Selected readings will be distributed in class; they include articles about conflicts of interest that influence health care policy, clinical decision making, medical care ethics, and health care reform. The required texts will present an overview of epidemiological concepts and the role of social epidemiology in evaluating current public health issues. A background in statistics is not a prerequisite for this course. |
Native American Studies |
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Hour: 11 Instructor: Dennis Runnels |
Requirements Met: WCult: CI; Distrib: SOC |
Course Title: Autobiography of Native Americans: Indian Identity and its Textualization |
Description: |
What does it mean to be an Indian? How has Indian identity changed through the years and what has remained the same? How are these existential identities textualized, and to what extent has the participation of non-Indian co-authors (anthropologists, translators, editors, researchers) influenced the production of the text and the creation of Indian identities? This course will study and critique a representative selection of this literary genre from the 19th century to the present in an attempt to answer these and other questions. In addition, this course provides an opportunity to increase your skills in critical thinking, research techniques, and writing procedures: how to select a topic, use the library, compile a bibliography, draft and edit the paper, and document sources to avoid plagiarism. Furthermore, you will be expected to participate in class discussions and give individual presentations on selected topics. Your active participation is crucial to the success of the class. |
Psychological & Brain Sciences |
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Hour: 2A Instructor: John Pfister |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: SOC |
Course Title: Credulity: Science, Pseudoscience, and Thinking Critically About Human Behavior |
Description: |
Despite little, no, or even contrary evidence, a large number of pseudoscientific and otherwise dubious psychological practices and areas of study have caught the public's attention during the last two decades (Lilienfeld, Lohr, & Morier, 2001). Claims of such things as recovered memories, facilitated communication, extrasensory perception, alien abduction, communication with the deceased, homeopathic remedies, and New Age psychotherapies have gained increasing popularity in the mass media and among the general public. Why do such beliefs persist, and how do we evaluate new claims in science? This course will give students the tools to make their own decisions regarding what would constitute sufficient evidence for belief. Statistical and methodological arguments will be emphasized. Readings will include selections from Michael Shermer's Why People Believe in Weird Things, Terrence Hines's Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, Rupert Sheldrake's The Sense of Being Stared At, Keith Stanovich's How To Think Straight about Psychology, Thomas Kida's Don't Believe Everything You Think, and, Flim-Flam by James Randi. In addition, students will draw from original journal articles and the popular press to build their own library for skeptical analysis. |
Sociology |
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Hour: 2A Instructor: Kathryn Lively |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: SOC |
Course Title: Emotion and Culture |
Description: |
Most people think of emotions as purely internal experiences, composed solely of psychological elements. Recently, however, sociologists have begun to emphasize and explore the social side of emotion—for example, how emotions are socially and culturally shaped, how emotions are socially controlled, and the consequences of emotion for social life. We will examine the portrayal of emotion in popular culture and develop a better understanding of how emotion operates in our own lives. Readings include Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (selected chapters), The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Feeling, Love in America, Heroic Efforts, and selected journal articles relating to emotion and sport, emotion and mental health, and other selected topics. |
Theater |
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Hour: 11 Instructor: Mara Sabinson |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: ART |
Course Title: Theater for Social Change |
Description: |
This course will trace particular developments in American and Western European Theater from the First World War through the present. Artists and theater groups under consideration will be those whose work has focused on contemporary social conditions and the potential of performance to effect social change. In addition, students will experiment with developing scripts and performances based on current events. Readings will include selections from the writings of Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, The Federal Theatre Project, Harold Pinter, Joesph Chaikin, Peter Brook, Augusto Boal, August Wilson, etc., as well as newspapers, news magazines, and other media sources. In addition to creative and critical writing, students will be assigned one major research project. Emphasis will be on class participation. |
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Hour: 2 Instructor: Mara Sabinson |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: ART |
Course Title: Theater for Social Change |
Description: |
This course will trace particular developments in American and Western European Theater from the First World War through the present. Artists and theater groups under consideration will be those whose work has focused on contemporary social conditions and the potential of performance to effect social change. In addition, students will experiment with developing scripts and performances based on current events. Readings will include selections from the writings of Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, The Federal Theatre Project, Harold Pinter, Joesph Chaikin, Peter Brook, Augusto Boal, August Wilson, etc., as well as newspapers, news magazines, and other media sources. In addition to creative and critical writing, students will be assigned one major research project. Emphasis will be on class participation. |
Women's and Gender Studies |
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Hour: 12 Instructor: Colleen Boggs |
Requirements Met: WCult: W; Distrib: LIT |
Course Title: Of Nags, Bitches and Shrews: Animals and Women in Western Literature |
Description: |
What do stories about animals tell us about the treatment of women in Western society? What do stories about women tell us about the treatment of animals in Western society? And why are the two so often linked in the first place? In this course, we will examine Western cultural traditions that associate women with animals, and we will interrogate women's complex response to those associations. We will ask how, when, and why women and animals are jointly excluded from subjectivity and from ethical consideration. Given the advances in areas such as women's rights, we will ask whether there have been corresponding advances in the treatment of animals, and why women feel particularly called upon to work for those advances. Statistics suggest, for example, that the overwhelming majority of vegetarians and humane society members are women. Is the ethical treatment of animals an important feminist cause? We will read literary works (Ovid, Marie de France, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, "Michael Field," Ursula Le Guin, J.M. Coetzee, Ruth Ozeki) alongside religious (the Bible) and philosophical (Aristotle, Descartes, Wollstonecraft, Levinas) texts, and draw on current schools of critical thought such as ecofeminism (Carol Adams) and postmodern theory (Marin, Lippit, Wolf and Elmer) to develop an understanding of these issues. |
Writing Program |
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Hour: 2A Instructor: Nancy Crumbine |
Requirements Met: WCult: CI; Distrib: LIT |
Course Title: Writers at Work |
Description: |
What exactly do writers do? Simply put, they stop and record what the rest of us run past. To give meaning to their memory, they weave the data into form, writing stories about characters, history, biology, the psyche, mathematical properties, etc. They connect what most of us experience as disparate. Whether poets or physicists, screenwriters or biologists, writers are listeners and storytellers. They are born, however, neither from nor into a vacuum. Varying cultural histories and complicated identities lie behind every text that writers construct. This seminar will explore how cultural stories shape the identities of writers and inform their work. We will read writers on their writing process, how they develop their craft, how their contexts inform and shape their stories. We will examine writers from various fields, though the focus of the course will be on the creation of literature. A critical reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved, and other shorter texts, will focus on questions of cultural identities. Issues of gender, sexuality, religion, race, and class swirl within the texts and throughout the context in which they were written. We will read and discuss the writing process and techniques of other writers including but not limited to Alvarez, Dillard, Faulkner, Hawking, Olsen, Sacks, Sagan, Salinger, Stoppard, and Williams. The overarching goal of the seminar will be to help students to develop a concrete writing process, gaining voice and self-consciousness within their own cultural stories. Students will be encouraged to write not only about another writer's writing process, but about their own. |
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Hour: 10 Instructor: Wendy Piper |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: LIT |
Course Title: Writers on Writing |
Description: |
Writers commonly talk about their own writing, discussing the goal and aims of their work, as well as the methods of their craft. In this class we will read, discuss, and write about the writing process of some major writers. We will look at their critical statements regarding the nature and purpose of their fiction, and will study some of their short works in the light of those statements. Some of the questions we'll consider include the relation between writing and thinking, writing and ethics, and the stages of the writing process. We'll begin with some classic statements from Aristotle and Plato, and will read both nonfiction and fiction by Hawthorne, Faulkner, O'Connor, and Stephen King. |
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Hour: 2 Instructor: Jennifer Sargent |
Requirements Met: WCult: None; Distrib: TMV |
Course Title: The Ethics of Power |
Description: |
With power comes responsibility—responsibility to do the right thing. What is "the right thing" when a person in power has to manage competing interests? In this seminar, we will consider this question in a number of contexts. We will discuss the formal and informal ethics rules in professions of power and how and why individuals in those professions abide by or neglect to follow those rules. We will guide our inquiry with three case studies: 1) Prosecutor Michael Nifong's conduct in the "Duke Lacrosse Rape Case"; 2) Kenneth Lay's (and other key players') conduct in the Enron Case; and 3) election, public and judicial politics in the U.S. Presidency. Students will hone their expository writing skills and critical thinking skills through both opinion and research-oriented weekly paper writing. Texts for this class include Until Proven Innocent by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson, The Smartest Guys In The Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, and The Politics of the Presidency (revised sixth edition) by Joseph A. Pika and John Anthony Maltese. |
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