Seminars for 2014

Seminars for 2014

1. Mimetic Desire in the French Novel. Mr. Abecassis. A major insight of the novel as a genre concerns the nature of desire.  Do we really desire persons or objects because of our authentic and autonomous desire?  Or is desire mimetic, an imitation of a conscious or unconscious model?  Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust mercilessly peel away all romantic illusions concerning the authentic and autonomous origins of desire.  In reading Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Proust’s Swann in Love in conjunction with René Girard’s Deceit and Desire in the Novel, we will analyze in detail the mechanism of mimetic desire and reflect upon its applications to the study of psychology, anthropology and culture writ large. 
    
2. Modern China in Literature. Mr. Barr. China has undergone enormous changes since the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, and compared to just thirty years ago it is already a very different place.  In this seminar, we will investigate the Chinese experience as represented in modern and contemporary literature.   How do these texts address and transform enduring issues in China, such as tnnnnhe gaps between young and old, state and individual, mainland and Taiwan?  What elements from the Western literary tradition have these authors adapted for their own purposes?  To explore these questions, we will read classic works by authors such as Lu Xun and Eileen Chang—active in the period before 1949—as well as Pai Hsien-yung, Ha Jin and Yu Hua, who have established their reputations since the 1970s.  We will also consider the images of China presented in one or two film adaptations by Chinese directors. All readings in English.
    
3. Stage Blood Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing, Baby. Ms. Bernhard. What happens when identities, bodies, ideas, representations, beliefs and spaces collide on stage? How does the disobedient theatre disrupt, destabilize, or even destroy a culture’s image of itself without shedding real blood? How does the dramatic event function as a means to focus an audience’s attention on what was previously in the dark? Is the audience a culpable part of the event or performance? In this seminar, we will read, analyze and perform short script-in-hand materials from a wide range of historical periods and genres, and on a wide range of topics, in order to better understand the ways in which the theatre is always a politicized and sacred space where cultural identities are fought over, re-inscribed, or transformed.  Who are “we,” anyway?  Who is outside the magic circle?
   
   Specifically, we will explore important writings on dramaturgy and performance from around the world, including: Brecht’s emphasis on “estranging the ordinary”; Boal’s”theatre of the oppressed”; the Natya Shastra from India; and writings on disability theatre, queer theatre, devised theatre. Plays may include those by Cherrie Moraga, Caryl Churchill, Peter Handke, Quirara Alegria Hudes and Suzan Lori-Parks, among others. Analytical skills will open up critique of fall semester productions of the Theatre Department plus one outside company.
    
4. Diasporas and U.S. Foreign Policy: Identity, Organization, Influence. Mr. Boduszynski. Changes in American society since the 1970s have led to a fascination with issues related to “multiculturalism” and ethnic “identity”—in the context not only of domestic public policy, but also of foreign policy. In this seminar, we will assess the relationship between ethnic and political identities vis-à-vis “homelands,” and then explore how these identities get translated into organizational activism in pursuit of particular U.S. foreign policy goals, both historically and in contemporary politics. Once we understand the identities and issues, we will examine the strategies—media, political, lobbying, grassroots organization—which diaspora groups use to achieve their aims. The course will involve active engagement (through site visits and guest speakers) with the rich array of diaspora organizations with a presence in the Los Angeles area, and students will be asked to research (employing fieldwork interviews) and write a substantial case study of disapora activism on foreign policy issues.
    
5. Iconic Iconoclasts: Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí. Mr. Cahill. A cut eye; flying tigers on a poster; poems about gypsies and the moon. Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí all simultaneously represent Spain’s artistic mastery in the early-to-mid twentieth century and, at the same time, embody the boundary-pushing force of the avant-garde. In this seminar, we will explore what it means for poetry, plays, paintings and films to be iconic and iconoclastic, controversial and co-opted at the same time. How does the success of particular artists overshadow their political, social and aesthetic complexity? How does a film commissioned by the Spanish government end up being banned in Spain? Examining the literary, visual and cinematic works of these artists in detail, we will consider how all three push aesthetic and social boundaries within and beyond Spain’s borders, exposing the margins of society, the self and our sensory perceptions of the world. In research papers, students will be able to explore and frame works from multiple artists in depth; the final paper provides the occasion for you to imagine and design an exhibit of all three artists and their work.
    
6. Gender-Bending Asia. Ms. Chin. In almost every aspect of our lives—language, dress, food, intimacy and politics—gender identities play a role in shaping our behavior and experiences. Is one born to be a woman or man? Does one have a choice? If gender identities are not natural, where do they come from and how are they changing?  Are male and female the only two options? Through studying cases from different parts of Asia of how individuals’ bodies and sexualities are subject to cultural norms, state surveillance, commercialization and globalization, we will critically reflect on the norms about sex and gender represented in popular culture. We will focus on film, television and literature, investigating the multiple ways in which popular media texts construct and communicate gender and sexuality. Historical and cross-cultural examples allow us to confront realities of gender diversity and discrimination. We will also explore the socio-cultural mechanisms that shape our individual and collective notions of identity. In examining cultural myths about gender in Asian media, we will consider how gender is tied in with notions of power.
    
7. I Disagree. Mr. de Silva. The most important skill in any relationship—personal, professional, political—is knowing how to disagree. Why? In this seminar, we consider the problem of living with difference. What does it take to be the one juror out of twelve who votes innocent? What are the dangers of living with people who agree with you? How does a scientific community confront troublesome new ideas? A religious community? Is it weak to compromise? Do you enjoy being right? Do you prefer being wrong? It is an unfortunate fact that the word “disagreeable” is usually taken to mean “unpleasant.” In this seminar, we will rehabilitate the word and revive the noble art of disagreement. Participants will be expected engage with the wider college community as we grapple with these questions.
    
8. Radiohead: The Sound of a Brand New World? Mr. Dettmar. How can music so difficult be so popular? In 2010, Q magazine named Radiohead’s OK Computer the best album of the past 25 years—and, in fact, Q’s readers had named it the Best Album of All Time twelve years earlier. In that quarter-century, no other band—arguably, no other artist in any medium—has so influenced popular culture while also registering its crises and contradictions. In this seminar, we’ll consider Radiohead as pop musicians, techno-gurus, progressive rockers, Neil Young fans, experimental video- and filmmakers, soundtrack writers and world-famous anti-celebrities. What combination of talents and obsessions might account for the centrality of Radiohead in contemporary culture? We’ll think about their influences (Messiaen, Mingus, R.E.M.) and those they’ve influenced (Coldplay, Muse, Steve Reich). Writing assignments will include close analyses of particular songs, thinking about influence, lyrics and the interplay of words and music; and studies of Radiohead as a historical and ongoing cultural phenomenon. What musical, cultural, political world(s) did Radiohead inherit when they formed in Oxford in 1985? What is their legacy—what is the “new” world they have helped (and continue to help) to shape?
    
9. Telling Stories: Form and Function of Narrative in Everyday Life. Mr. Divita. We tell stories to endow life events with a temporal and logical order, to establish links between our selves and the communities in which we participate. Stories thus serve as a primary element in the relationship between language and identity. In this seminar, we will investigate this relationship by examining the linguistic particularities of everyday narratives while thinking about the varied functions that they fulfill. We will look, for example, at the autobiographical narratives that emerge through psychotherapy and the narrative arcs of makeovers on reality television. We will look at personal narratives of the everyday—such as David Sedaris’ anecdotes about learning French—and larger cultural narratives such as the War on Terror. During the semester, students will collect their own storytelling data, recording and analyzing narratives from a pool of subjects in order to investigate the representational and interactive dimensions of this vital discursive practice.
    
10. Walking: Poetics, Politics, Practice. Ms. Dwyer. Place one foot before the other. Repeat. Walking is our most basic form of locomotion. Yet walking does more than get our bodies from one place to another. Journeys on foot are associated with maturation, education and meditation. Nature has long been a source of inspiration for the walker, be it in the Romantic quest for the Sublime or in today’s weekend escapes. The bustling city of the nineteenth century, in turn, engendered its own aesthetics of walking in the figure of the flâneur, the slow-moving man-about-town who observes urban modernit
    
    How are walking, thinking and writing connected? How have walker-writers reflected on the city? What does it mean to experience nature? Who is left out of certain practices of walking and why? What happens when barriers are erected or property lines drawn? How can walking become an act of protest or defiance? These are among the questions we’ll explore by reading literary, essayistic and theoretical texts. Using their own most basic form of locomotion, students will move through “the city” and “nature,” reflecting on those experiences in writing.
     
11. The Politics of Classical Art. Mr. Emerick. We celebrate ancient Greek art from the fifth century BCE as classic presenting this 2,500-year-old phenomenon as a great achievement and as (somehow) foundational.  How did this happen?  Who claimed classic art as “classic”?  We will study how, first of all, the ancient Greeks themselves did.  Athenians had the biggest stake in this program; during the 440s and 430s BCE they pushed it hard the better to take political control of their Aegean sea-going Ionian empire, the one they had set up at the edge of, and in competition to the Persian world-empire further east.  The aftermath can astonish us. This classic visual culture, which packed a powerful ideological (humanistic) west-is-best punch, became a beacon for Hellenistic princes (Persia’s conquerors!), for Roman senators and emperors (Greece’s conquerors), then for people in the West generally right down to modern times.  How does the art of a particular moment come to be considered timeless and transcendent?  The stuff of high culture beyond all reproach?  What is a “classic art”?   What are its political and cultural uses? 
     
12. Baseball in America. Mr. Foster. Why is baseball America’s game?  Think of the evolution of baseball as a game played between teams from crossroads towns in the 1860s to Major League Baseball in 2011.  Baseball is a game/sport that can be shared between a four-year-old child with a glove and a ninety-year-old great-grandparent who remembers seeing Babe Ruth play in Yankee Stadium.  In this seminar, we will evaluate the cultural, economic, historical, political, and racial aspects of Major League Baseball.  Baseball is also about heroes, people who are bigger than life: Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Derek Jeter.  Baseball also has anti-heroes, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson and Barry Bonds.  Hopefully, at the end of this journey, we will better understand why baseball is America’s game.
     
13. The Heart of a Doctor. Ms. Hoopes. In literature, doctors are often portrayed as caring deeply about patients.  But as medicine becomes more complex and technology-driven, the ability of a doctor to feel empathy towards patients can be compromised.  In this seminar, we’ll read the Hippocratic Oath and consider the hearts of today’s doctors.  We’ll think about how medical training affects students, and what we ask when we expect doctors – who frequently must watch their patients die – to respond to the feelings of patients and families. We’ll consider what different cultures expect of doctors, and the challenges doctors face when caring for patients who come from cultures radically different from their own.  To increase our insight, we’ll read selections from Robert Marion’s Intern Blues, Pauline Chen’s Final Exam, Lori Alvord’s The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, Abraham Verghese’s My Own Country, Dang Thuy Tram’s Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and other sources.
     
14. Education and Its Discontents. Ms. Karaali. Thinking people have long debated what makes a good education and just what education is good for. In this course, we will tackle these two enduring questions, engaging with classical and contemporary arguments about education and clarifying our understanding of the goals of (a liberal arts) college. We will study the history of schooling in the United States, survey the philosophical underpinnings of education, and investigate the purposes of educating the young in the arts, the humanities and mathematics. We will read excerpts from the Western canon and other thinkers from around the world, as well as historical surveys and essay compilations arguing for diverse points of view. You will thus begin college with a critique of the notion and institutions of education, and develop a stance that will guide you as you consciously and purposefully move forward in your lives. 
     
15. Muslim Literary Landscapes. Ms. Kassam. In this seminar, we will read works by and relating to Muslims from different parts of the globe alongside critical literature in order to extend our knowledge of Muslims. Through reading, discussion and written projects, students will develop their understandings of the socio-cultural, historical, religious and political backgrounds of the issues taken up by the authors. By the end of the semester, students should be able to conduct research, read critically, write clearly and have a reasonable grasp of some of the issues faced by Muslims.
     
16. The European Enlightenment. Mr. Kates. European society in the eighteenth century was riddled with inequalities of all kinds: religious bigotry and political despotism, as well as new forms of racism, slavery and class strife. The writers and artists associated with the European Enlightenment suggested radical ways to address these problems. These proposals encompassed both the political and social realms, imagining new forms of friendship and marriage, as if those relationships might constitute analogies to politics itself. In doing so, they blurred the lines between the government and the social, the political and the private and established a moral foundation for our modern era. Readings will include primary works from the period by such authors as Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and Richardson.
     
17. Cult and Culture. Mr. Kirk. What do cult, culture and cultivation have in common? The three words evidently descend from the same root, but the things that they name seem to belong to entirely separate spheres. The wager of this seminar is that, at least in this case, etymology is the royal road to truth. At the basis of activities as various as anxiety, worship, inebriation, romance and the experience of art lies one thing: cultus, the rite of cultivation. Literature, philosophy and film will be our sources. To be considered: the cult of wine in Euripides’s Bacchae, medieval courtly love, the religion of capitalism, Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety as disclosive of being, Goethe’s Faustian bargains, Tarkovsky’s post-apocalyptic Stalker. We will also wonder about those cultivations that are hidden, i.e. the oc-cult: James Merrill’s ouija-board-dictated Book of Ephraim, Dario Argento’s classic Italo-slasher Suspiria, Ariana Reines’s new poem Mercury. Finally, another wager: if the cultic basis of our modern life is a secret we keep hidden from ourselves, this can only mean that the realm of the occult has expanded to include everything that we do.
     
18. The TV Novel. Mr. Klioutchkine. How does a television series relate to our everyday experience and to our understanding of the culture we live in? How did a nineteenth-century serialized novel relate to its readers’ perception of the world around them? What can these genres tell us about ourselves? In this seminar, we will explore these questions as we understand the links between the serialized novel and the original television series, the novel’s present-day popular incarnation. We will read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1867) before focusing on the television series Mad Men. 
     
19. Growth.  Mr. Kuehlwein.  In The Matrix, Agent Smith likens the human obsession with higher levels of consumption to a virus.  Is growth that pernicious, or is it a natural and noble goal?  In this seminar, we’ll examine that question by focusing on the effects of growth.  We’ll look at whether it is destroying the environment or developing technology to achieve sustainability.  Is it eradicating global poverty or just widening income inequality?  Is it contributing to worker alienation or creating interesting new jobs?  More fundamentally, is it making us happier or more anxious?  We’ll explore these questions through economic, historical, sociological, environmental and psychological lenses to provide a more holistic understanding of the topic.  The class will critically analyze what they read in a variety of writing assignments including an op-ed piece, an article review, a comparison of two texts and a research paper.
     
20. Myths, Media and Markets in the Construction and Commemoration of Icons. Ms. Martin. Images of violent revolutionary Che Guevara adorn Urban Outfitter T-shirts as part of a global hipster fashion trend. Icons are everywhere, from clothing to graffiti to public monuments. This class takes a critical look at icons as cultural symbols and the myth-making surrounding them through media and markets. From religious saints to sports figures, icons are not just received but creatively appropriated by various communities and causes. Yet how, and why, are icons deployed by individuals, governments and corporations as symbols of resistance, cultural ambassadors, or brands? What does the response to commemorative statues of Selena in Texas and Michael Jackson in China tell us about discourses of immigration and privatization in those places? What do media representations of Bruce Lee, Tiger Woods and Eva Peron reflect about cultural attitudes regarding race, class and gender? These are some of the questions we will seek to answer in this course. We will explore the political, economic and social contexts from which icons emerge, and their impact on those contexts. As part of our critical analysis, we will read ethnographies, social and cultural theory and examine media representations about the reception of various icons. We will explore concepts such as ritual, charisma, representation, globalization and branding.
     
21. Molecules and the Mind. Ms. Parfitt. At least twenty percent of American adults take a prescribed psychoactive medication for treatment of conditions like depression, ADHD, anxiety, or psychosis.  Most of these prescriptions are critical for these individuals to function optimally in their everyday lives; all of them come with side effects.  Writing of living with bipolar disorder, Kay Redfield Jamison states, “Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable.”   In this seminar, we will investigate how the brain works by looking at cases in which brain function has gone awry in ways that may be alleviated by drugs. Reading personal accounts of individuals’ struggles with psychiatric illness and neurodegenerative disease, we will consider such difficult questions as: Is addiction a personal weakness or a disease? Are there conditions in which individuals should be medicated against their own wishes? Is there an under-use of psychoactive drugs in our society today? Or an over-use? What regulations, if any, should be in place for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of neurological or psychiatric conditions? In addition to short position papers on these questions, students will be able to investigate in detail an issue of their choosing.
     
22. Seeing Science. Ms. Perini. Supposedly, a picture is worth a thousand words.   What is your school ID (or driver’s license) photo saying?   Does it even look like you?  Pictures have the fascinating capacity to communicate vast amounts of information.   So, it seems, does a brain scan presented by a scientist in support of a claim about the relationship between alcohol use and cognition.  Yet our experience with everyday pictures that are misleading or unreliable raise questions about the roles of images in science.   It is clear that scientists depend on visual representations: figures play prominent roles in research articles and textbooks; imaging techniques are used to produce data; numerical data is often graphed and analyzed in a visual format; important hypotheses, like Watson & Crick’s proposal for the structure of DNA, are conveyed through diagrams.   What is less clear is how images play these different roles, how images can be reliable sources of new knowledge and what scientists need to do in order to communicate responsibly with the public.  In this seminar, we will investigate the factors that make images effective in producing and communicating scientific knowledge.  We will draw on work from philosophy of science clarifying the reasoning involved in supporting scientific theories, in order to understand how scientific images might function to support scientific claims; we’ll also examine the literature on photography to highlight ways in which imaging can be unreliable, to assess the extent to which imaging can be genuinely productive—rather than misleading—in scientific research.  Another area of concern is the effectiveness of imaging in scientific communication.  We will study principles of figure design, and you will learn how to analyze figures; in one assignment you will use those design principles to propose improvements in a published figure.  Finally, we will also look at cases in which effective communication with images is difficult, and study the tactics that scientists use to overcome these barriers.
     
23. Sympathy for the Devil: Fiddle and Guitar Cultures Across the Globe. Mr. Rockwell. What is the meaning of a musical instrument? What do the fiddle and (later) the guitar have to do with the Devil? Why does the violin exist in some form in the majority of the world’s musical cultures?  What were the consequences of the guitar going electric? In this seminar, we’ll approach these questions by examining fiddle- and guitar-oriented music from historical, theoretical, cultural and analytic perspectives. Topics include Greek mathematical and cosmological foundations for understanding stringed instruments, the fiddle/guitar as a dangerous anti-societal force, musical virtuosity and Faustian narratives. We will analyze American, British, Scandinavian and African fiddling traditions, Delta blues and rock music and music played by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century violin virtuosi. Students need not be able to play violin or guitar in order to take the course.
     
24. “Tripping the Light Fantastic”: A History of Ballroom and Social Dancing. Mr. Shay. Social dances—such as waltzes, tangos and sambas—not only encode social and gender roles but also rely on a silent history of cultural appropriation and primitivism. These dances teach their participants how to be a “man” or a “woman” by specifying movements, postures and social behavior deemed socially appropriate to each gender. Millions of Americans have appropriated dances from African American and Latino societies. In this seminar, we’ll contemplate how any history of social dance must grapple with issues of gender and sexuality, race, primitivism, cultural appropriation, religion and censorship. We will consider how early twentieth-century figures such as Vernon and Irene Castle “whitened” and desexualized dances such as the tango, samba and rumba in order to make them safe to perform by elite members of (generally white) high society. And we’ll consider, as well, the century-long exhibition ballroom dance phenomenon (including the recent popularity of television programs such as Dancing with the Stars). In addition to short response papers to particular readings and performances, students will have the chance to explore a topic that relates to the contexts, gender and sexuality, ethnic, or social issues surrounding ballroom and social dance in cultural and historical context. In order to better understand what goes into these dances, students will attend one rehearsal of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Team.
     
25. Race Rebels. Mr. Summers Sandoval. Throughout the 20th century, a varied collection of movements for racial justice transformed the United States.  Our popular understanding of these movements usually centers on one decade (“the Sixties”), one movement (“the Civil Rights Movement”) and one charismatic leader (Martin Luther King Jr.). The result is a narrow story that ignores more than it illuminates. We miss the wide spectrum of political movements marking the era, as well as their long, interrelated stories before and since.  As a result, we cannot recognize the complex work of organizing movements, or the masses of people who did that work.  Using the biographies of three significant activists, we will investigate the diverse, creative and inspirational ways African Americans, Asian Americans and Mexican Americans struggled for a more just world.  As we collectively reconstruct our understanding of these times, we will think critically about the historical contexts that turned everyday people into “race rebels” and confront the lessons their lives give to us in the present.
     
26. Nanotechnology in Science and Fiction. Mr. Tanenbaum. Nanotechnology—which combines physics, chemistry, biology and engineering—is currently one of the most heavily funded and fastest growing areas of science.  Depending upon what you read, nanotechnology may consume our world or enable unlimited new materials, destroy life as we know it or enable immortality, lead us to squalor or utopia, or simply make better electronic gadgets.  We will discuss current scientific research in contrast with a range of fiction by Philip Dick, Neil Stephenson, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Paul McEuen and others.  How do science and fiction intermix and inspire each other? Can technology change our self-image and identity?  Will technology enhance or subvert the development of the individual or our culture?  We will examine how the existing media and literature influence and define both the science and popular culture of nanotechnology.
     
27. The Theatre and Environmental Activism. Mr. Taylor. What does the theatre have to tell us about mankind’s symbiotic and ever-evolving relationship with our environment? How have dramatists throughout history observed, analyzed and ad-dressed environmental concerns through their work? How can the theatre of today help us re-imagine our relationship to and existence in a rapidly changing environment? And how can the theatre catalyze and/or inspire activism in our immediate (and urgent) environmental future? This course is a open-ended exploration of the answers to these and other questions central to two fascinating, dynamic and multi-dimensional human endeavors: theatre and environmental activism.
     
28. First Person Americas. Ms. Wall. Thanksgiving Day tells us a story of life in early America, but there was no single early America and no one story to represent it.  It was a kaleidoscopic world, full of different individuals and peoples building lives and families and communities amid wrenching, sometimes shattering, social change.  This course uses personal narratives from the many worlds of early America—indigenous, Spanish, English, French, African, multicultural—to explore the messy, multifaceted America they made, sometimes together, sometimes in opposition.  In autobiographies, testimonies, travel accounts, captivity narratives, legal documents and other original sources, we can glimpse early Americans trying to make sense of their own lives; and we can follow, imperfectly, the tracks of large social transformations, including conquest, colonialism, disease, the development of racial thinking, economic and territorial expansion and competition, warfare, enslavement, religious conversion, gender relations, environmental change, cultural loss and cultural adaptation.  We can never fully understand the past but we can try to listen to the stories people told about themselves and to take seriously what they meant in the telling.
     
29. Composing the Nation: Music in Paris, 1900-1925. Mr. Peterson. In this seminar, we will explore musical life in Paris in a pivotal 25-year period. Specifically, we’ll investigate how national identity was defined through musical expression. In considering works by composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Lili Boulanger, Satie, Milhaud and Poulenc, we will pay close attention not only to the important musical genres (symphonic music, piano music, opera, song and chamber music), but also to broader cultural movements such as Impressionism and Symbolism. We will investigate two notable performances of the Russian Ballet in pre-war Paris. And we will explore the disruption caused by World War I and the wartime debates about national identity. Finally, we will examine emerging themes in post-World War I Paris, including the formulation of a post-war neo-classicism and the appropriation of jazz in the 1920s.
     
30. Bad Music. Mr. Schreffler. Music is good…or potentially so. Media reports of people and acts that imply music is not good, such as the Taliban movement banning music in Afghanistan, are at once sensational and practically inscrutable to a modern Western worldview—a worldview in which a core trait of music is its goodness. Poets say it’s good for the soul and scientists say it’s good for the brain. Music is thought to “culture” and humanize people—a belief that causes those who do not appreciate music to be viewed with skepticism. Yet there are significant cultural spheres in the world in which music itself is viewed with skepticism and its intrinsic value considered dubious. Music is bad—or potentially so. Even modern Western society does not view all music as good. So how and for what reasons do people identify “bad music”? In this seminar, we will explore notions of “bad music” from various ethical and cross-cultural aesthetic perspectives. Diverse listening examples will provoke critique—often heated—and reflection. In writing and discussions, students will be asked to go beyond the facile conclusion that all judgments regarding music are subjective and to develop and articulate newly informed positions on musical value—to distinguish what one dislikes, what one simply does not understand and what one can justifiably call “bad.”
     
31. Exploring Diversity Through Reflection: Why Race/Ethnicity, Gender and Culture Matter. Ms. Cue. As our nation becomes more diverse the need for increased understanding of the evolving role of cultural diversity becomes critical. In this seminar, we will explore the social construction and role of race, ethnicity, gender and culture in the development of children and adolescents. How do these concepts shape cognition and social development, and influence achievement motivation and academic success? Specifically, we will explore the practical application of these concepts and theories in community settings. You will develop basic skills to critically assess and evaluate the effectiveness of instruments and activities used in the study and teaching of ethnic minority children and youth. In addition, this seminar will also provide you with a forum to examine and reflect through writing on your own personal development and how lenses of race, ethnicity, culture, privilege and gender have influenced, and will influence, your lives. We will also identify and reflect on our own personal biases, strengths, limitations, stereotypes and misconceptions about others while also participating in activities that will help us learn about diverse groups. Writing assignments will include critiques of assigned readings and opportunities to engage in dialogues surrounding diversity that will augment your self-awareness, cultural sensitivity and competence toward others.  Encouraging you to think as future educators and professionals, this course will encourage you to identify and discover effective resources to promote a culturally sensitive worldview in local community settings (especially settings that serve children and youth).
     
32. Tracing Ecological Utopias and Dystopias in Film, Literature, and Art. Mr. Los Huertos. From creation myths to visions of apocalypse, we cast our hopes and fears into stories that reflect the long and complex relationship between humans and the natural world. In this seminar, we will examine utopian and dystopian film, literature, and art, drawing on 20th- and 21st-century science fiction literature and film (such as The Hunger Games, the Mars trilogy, Children of Men, The Day After Tomorrow, Soylent Green, On The Beach and The Time Machine); creation and destruction myths (such as Genesis and the Book of Revelation, Popol Vuh, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno and Thomas More’s Utopia); and visual arts (from Antiquity to the postmodern era). We will consider how creation myths variously imagine the relationship between “us,” “them,” and “the world,” and will explore whether (and how) this triangle of actors continues to shape contemporary thought about our ecological context. We will use dystopic science fiction literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries to ask how (and if) scientific knowledge informs the way we imagine the relationship between the human and nonhuman world. As a summation of the course, we will examine variety of eco-dystopias and think about how they use (or misuse) scientific information, cultural fears, and origin or catastrophe stories to inform our values and interests. Ultimately, we begin a journey to think about a variety of possible futures for this human-dominated world.

Other courses offered by the Writing Program