Seminars for 2011-12
1. Mimetic Desire in the French Novel. J. 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 own true, self-generated desire? Or is desire mimetic, an imitation of a conscious or unconscious model? Stendhal and Proust mercilessly peel away all romantic illusions concerning the authentic origins of desire. In reading Stendhal’s The Red and the Black 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. All readings in English.
2. Simply Sondheim. J. Bailey. The Hollywood release of Sweeney Todd in 2007 and its composer’s recent 80th birthday celebrations have sparked a renewed interest in Stephen Sondheim, an undisputed giant of 20th-century American musical theater. A study of Sondheim’s Broadway shows offers a glimpse not only into the history of musical theater, but of the nation which gave it birth and the social complexities that are celebrated in Sondheim’s lyrics and music. In this seminar, we will study the composer, his times, and several musicals—including Into the Woods, Company, and A Little Night Music. Writing will consist of critical journalistic reviews, creative expressions and in-depth research.
3. From Information to Knowledge. T. Chen. Last year Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, said, “There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every two days.” As a result, rather than deciding what additional data should be collected to answer specific questions, the challenge has shifted to determining how to generate meaningful knowledge from vast stores of existing data. Consider, for example, the IBM Watson system that became famous on Jeopardy earlier this year: What technical innovations were needed to design a system that could mine over four terabytes of data to answer individual questions in under three seconds? How might similar techniques be used to improve, for example, doctors’ ability to successfully treat patients? How about to better predict hospitalizations and lawsuits? In this seminar, we will discuss technical challenges in making large datasets useful and reflect on the ethical implications of doing so. In the final research paper students will explore these issues by exploring in depth a particular case of their choosing.
4. I Disagree. V. 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 12 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.
5. “Flashpoints” in Rock & Roll History. K. Dettmar. Rock & roll has both endured and enjoyed a rocky public reception since its earliest days: Bill Haley & the Comet’s “Rock Around the Clock” (1954) provoked riots across the country, and rock quickly developed a snarling public image. High-profile dust-ups continue to characterize rock’s relationship with its public; the vitriol released regarding Rebecca Black’s video “Friday” is only the most recent installment. In this seminar, we will trace the “scandalous” history of rock & roll through its public controversies: Bob Dylan “going electric” at Newport, Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar at Monterey, Sinead O’Connor tearing up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, Milli Vanilli revealed as frauds. … In such moments, we learn a great deal about what rock hopes to be, about its intrinsic contradictions and structural instability, and about the resistance it meets from its own fans.
Writing assignments for the course will trace an arc of increasing complexity and more in-depth research, beginning with shorter, “close reading” exercises of musical and filmic moments in rock history and culminating in a sustained, well-researched exploration of the cultural history and significance one of rock’s “flashpoints.”
6. Telling Stories: Form and Function of Narrative in Everyday Life. D. Divita. We tell stories to imbue life events with a temporal and logical order, to establish links between ourselves 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.
7. Baseball in America. L. 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 4-year-old child with a glove and a 90-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.
8. Pomona Goes Green. G. Gorse. The Earth Charter states that “we stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future.” How do our choices—as individuals in our daily lives and as members of the planned community of Pomona College—affect this future? How does the concept and goal of “sustainability” unite academic, artistic, pragmatic, and social endeavors? In this seminar, we will investigate these questions, using Pomona College as our case study: How can we make this a more sustainable “campus.” How can and should such a campus be a model for our global future? In our search for answers we will read authors such as Italo Calvino, Leo Marx, Alan Trachtenberg and William McDonough; write about campus spaces, student organizations and initiatives; and engage the dynamic interdisciplinary field of “Environmental Analysis.”
9. Virtuous Markets? G. Hueckel. Are there such things? Are not markets simply the forum for the pursuit of self-interested “greed”? Does not economics, the discipline devoted to the study of markets, rigorously avoid questions of morals? Certainly the “dismal science” is widely seen as describing a world populated by actors greedily pursuing their own narrow interests. Yet modern economics is descended from the work of the 18th-century moral philosopher Adam Smith, and some recent work—notably that of Deirdre McCloskey—has called us back to Smith’s richer ethical framework to consider that markets may encourage, rather than constrain, the traditional virtues. In this seminar, we will draw from Smith and McCloskey to analyze the ethical character of market behavior. Students will assess McCloskey’s argument through brief written reviews of her work, and a longer research paper will provide the opportunity to construct their own evaluation of a controversial market outcome of their choosing.
10. Can Zombies Do Math? G. Karaali. We have all heard of the objective and universal nature of mathematics. Bertrand Russell talked about a beauty cold and austere. Are these perceptions of mathematics related? Accurate? Can anyone but the warm-blooded humans that we are do math? Does a zombie have what it takes to comprehend and appreciate the aesthetics of mathematics? We will tackle these questions in two ways: by investigating what it means to be human and not a zombie and by examining several distinct cases made in defense of the human nature of mathematics. We will find our evidence in personal experiences, as well as in fictional works, essays, and scholarly articles. The semester’s intensive reading and writing activities will see the two threads of our inquiry intertwine, as we seek to understand what makes us human and how math relates to our humanity.
11. Muslim Literary Landscapes. Z. Kassam. In western media, Muslims appear as volatile and angry, the kind of people who are prone to violent uprisings and terrorist attacks. Such representations rarely include the variety of factors—differing interpretations of religion, national identity, the impact of colonization, the struggle for gender justice—that shape the realities of Muslims in the 20th and 21st centuries. In this seminar, we will read literary works by Muslim authors of this period in order to better understand this range of factors.
We will read these works alongside critical literature, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism, that frames the situation of Muslims in order to extend our knowledge and develop tools for research and writing. Through five written projects, students will develop their understandings of the socio-cultural, historical, and political backgrounds of the issues taken up by the authors. These projects will include researched essays, encyclopedia entries, book reviews, and letters, as well as a bibliography using correct citation format. Three of the assignments will include a comprehensive drafting-and-revision process that includes feedback from peers and a Writing Fellow. By the end of the semester, students should be able to conduct research, read critically, write clearly and have a better understanding of some Muslim societies as well as have a reasonable grasp of some of the issues faced by Muslims.
12. The European Enlightenment. G. Kates. European society in the 18th 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 governmental 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.
13. Travels and Discoveries. A. Khazeni. In 1325, at the age of 21, Ibn Battuta set off from his native Morocco on the hajj to Mecca. He did not return home to North Africa until 1349, after he had seen not only Mecca, but also Egypt, Syria, Persia, Iraq, East Africa, Anatolia, Central Asia, India, the Maldives, Sumatra and China, traveling nearly 73,000 miles. Following his journeys, Ibn Battuta wrote a book of travels known as the rihla, recounting his adventures. In this seminar, we will explore forms of travel writing about the African, Asian and Indian Ocean worlds. What leads people to travel and how are they changed by the experience? How have travelers from different cultural perspectives and points of origin documented the distances they traversed and their encounters with people and places both familiar and strange? Readings include The Travels of Ibn Battuta, The Baburnama by Zahir al-Din Babur, The History and Description of Africa by Leo Africanus, and Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Emphasis will be placed on writing critical essays on travel and travel literature, culminating in a final original research paper.
14. The TV Novel. K. Klioutchkine. How does a television series relate to our everyday experience and to our understanding of the culture we live in? How did a 19th-century serialized novel relate to its readers’ perception of the world around them? What can these genres tell us about our selves? 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.
15. Growth. M. 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, and environmental lenses to provide a more holistic understanding of the topic. Students 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.
16. Philosophy Through Science Fiction. P. Kung. Alternate universes. Time travel. Robots. Immortality. Mind reprogramming. In some of the best science fiction, authors drop characters into worlds featuring intriguing technologies or wildly different scientific laws. Why? Because the way characters navigate that world dramatizes some previously hidden question about the nature of reality or the human condition. We might ask ourselves, for example, what makes me me? The question becomes more acute if I can endlessly customize my abilities, my character and my memories to suit my taste. Is there any sense in which a “real me” remains? Suppose a time traveler should reluctantly reveal the date and manner of my death. Am I then still in control of my own fate? In what sense has the time traveler’s revelation robbed me of freedom to make of my life what I will? We’ll examine these sorts of questions through both philosophical readings and science fiction works by Dick, Gilliam, Jonze, Wells, Le Guinn, Whedon and Zelazny, among others. In their papers, students will craft arguments where they attempt to answer them.
17. Living Art in Los Angeles: Southern California Performance Art. J. Lu. “Los Angeles again… ./ I sit on the sidewalk naked …/ dozens of slogans are written all over my body… ./ ‘to perform is to return’ / ‘To arrive is just an illusion’ / ‘the other is thinking of you / I am the other / but you might no longer be yourself,” writes performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña. You have arrived in Los Angeles. How will you perform? How have you been conditioned to perform? Can human performance bring art and life closer in order to actually help us solve problems as troubling as war and the destruction of the environment? Performance art was conceived as an aesthetic and socio-political practice that attempts to break out of the traditional boundaries of visual art and theater by including body-based work, identity-based work, time-based work and storytelling. In this seminar, we will investigate the historical origins of performance art, focusing specifically on how it emerged from and in the local context of Los Angeles and surrounding areas. In addition to reviewing particular performances and writing for performance, we will produce research papers that will investigate particular artists in depth. Field trips to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),and a mural tour with experts from The Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) will also be central to our explorations.
19. Dangerous Books. S. McWilliams. In 2005, the journal Human Events released a list of the “most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries.” The existence of this and similar lists begs the questions: What does it mean to say that a book is harmful—or dangerous? Once we deem a book dangerous, how should we treat it? Readings will include selections from Darwin’s Descent of Man, Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Kinsey’s The Kinsey Report and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, among others. Students will also research and write about dangerous books of their choosing.
19. “We”: Identity and the New Science of Social Life. A. Pearson. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg founded a little-known website for connecting people. By April 2010, 41 percent of the U.S. population had a Facebook account, and by March of 2011, Facebook networks had galvanized social and political movements across South America, North Africa and the Middle East. What drives us to connect with others? Why do we love one sports team and despise others? What makes the iPhone so popular? In this seminar, we’ll explore the human propensity to form social groups—from cliques and sports teams to political, ethnic, and national groups—and examine its consequences for modern democracies. We’ll focus on what contemporary psychology and the science of identity can tell us about the nature of the social mind, and explore its basic vices and virtues–from ostracism and prejudice to empathy and altruism. Written assignments will provide opportunities for in-depth analysis of current scientific theories of group behavior and their potential for illuminating psychological underpinnings of political and social divisions.
20. Scientific Reasoning. L. Perini. Science allows us to learn about things too small to see, and too remote in time or space for direct contact. We know that observation plays a critical role in generating scientific knowledge, but pseudosciences like astrology are also based on observations. Why is it that we can use observational evidence to learn about some things we cannot actually perceive (like electrons) but not others (like an intelligent designer)? In this seminar, we will investigate how scientific reasoning works by analyzing philosophical accounts of scientific knowledge and by using case studies to evaluate and develop those accounts. To clarify differences between scientific and non-scientific reasoning with observational evidence, we will study Intelligent Design. We will also evaluate different proposals about what is required for scientific objectivity, looking at cases in which bias might be involved—including controversies about climate change. As a research project, each student will investigate a case of marginal, biased or pseudo- scientific research—such cases are especially illuminating in understanding scientific reasoning—and provide a philosophical analysis of that case. Our final topic is scientific creativity: What is the role of rationality in the discovery of new phenomena, and in the invention of new hypotheses?
21. Music and Beauty. A. Perman. What does it mean to say music is beautiful? Can Chinese opera, American country music and Zimbabwean spirit possession drumming all be beautiful? Does musical beauty thus vary from one society to the next, from person to person? Or is there something universal in the expression of beauty through sound? What makes music beautiful or ugly, good or bad, moving or annoying? In this seminar, we will explore ideas of beauty and philosophies of aesthetics through a cross-cultural exploration of music and its potentials. Drawing on philosophy, ethnomusicology, and other disciplines, we will articulate our own definitions of music, beauty, and aesthetics and explore the implications of these ideas on musical practice itself. Moving from general philosophies of music and beauty to specific case studies from various times and places, we will question ideas of aesthetics, its relationship to ethics, and several alternative approaches to beauty and music. Finally, we address how these ideas of music and the arts shape our understanding of the humanities and the value of the liberal arts. What are the implications of these ideas on how we think about human expression and its importance?
22. Advice about Love and the Literary Narrator. S. Raff. Some elusive piece of information, says a persistent but questionable intuition, holds the key to love and happiness. Why do the narrators of works of literature so often present themselves as purveyors of just such information? What do readers mean when they say that they are “in love” with a particular author, book, or character? What does a literary work’s status as object of love contribute to its authority as advisor about love? In this seminar, we will examine how various texts represent their role in the life of the reader (literature as medicine, aphrodisiac, guardian, spouse, or seducer) as well as the content of literary advice about love (how to seduce a virgin or annoy her, save a marriage or destroy one, curtail erotic melancholy or prolong it). We draw on works by Ovid, Molière, Laclos, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Wilde, Henry James, Freud, and Tommaso Landolfi.
23. Fragrant Ecstasies: A Cultural History of the Sense of Smell. H. Rindisbacher. The reek of a Kansas feed lot, the aroma of fresh-baked bread, the scent of jasmine on a breezy spring day… This course provides an entrance into the vast world of olfactory perception, the fleeting realm that leaves only indirect traces, preserved in myriads of objects, texts, and cultural practices all over the world. Smells connect to perfumery and luxury, to chemistry and neuroscience, to aromatherapy and advertisement, to stench and death—but always also to the erotic and sex. It is an interdiscipinary field par excellence. In this seminar we will map the history of olfactory perception as it is reflected in modern Western literature. We’ll investigate examples ranging from the sweet smells of romantic nature to the stench of the smoke billowing from Auschwitz.
We study texts from many countries, epochs and genres, including literary, cultural, and historical writings, from the old perfumers Septimus Piesse and Eugène Rimmel to Celia Lyttelton’s The Scent Trail, and Patrick Süskind’s notorious Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Specific questions include how authors use olfactory description; linguistic encoding of smells; the divisions of the olfactory spectrum; and the synaesthetic reach of scents that ties together people, places, practices and memories.
24. Sonnet, Still Life, Lives. C. Rosenfeld. The English poet Ben Jonson likened the sonnet to an instrument of torture, a “tyrant’s bed,” where the poet strapped down his thoughts and “some who were too short were racked and others too long, cut short.” By contrast, T.S. Eliot suggested that the sonnet “is not merely such and such a pattern, but a precise way of thinking.” Why have some people—of certain genders and classes, at certain times and in certain places—considered form instrumental to thinking? Why have others considered form to be limiting of thought or even torturous of thought? In this seminar, we will explore this tension between form and thinking across three different domains of knowledge: the literary, the visual, and the historical. Focusing on the sonnet, still life and lives (commonly, biography) we will ask: what is the relationship between form and the production of knowledge?
25. Adventures with Russian Books: Tales of Passion, Crime, Wars and Revolutions. L. Rudova. Russian literature has long been understood as a vehicle for the expression of political and moral concerns. In this seminar, however, we also consider how this body of literature helps us understand the relationship between the human condition and art. We will read Russian literature from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, seeking to understand the individual, social and political dilemmas faced by central characters in the context of Russian culture and history. In this way, the values, passions, beliefs, dreams and fantasies expressed in Russian fiction will help us understand the peculiarity of the Russian national character. Finally, it is impossible to answer the question why Russian literature continues to stir the imagination of Western readers without examining its artistic craft. We will therefore analyze the narrative strategies and literary techniques that underlie the stylistic originality of such great authors as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Pasternak, Petrushevskaia and Pelevin. In their writing, students will examine the language and structure of the texts closely, building critical tools that will help them investigate a individual text, author, or issue in more detail, while also situating it in its cultural-historical context. All readings in English.
26. “Tripping the Light Fantastic”: A History of Ballroom and Social Dancing. A. 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. And 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.
27. The Sacred Alias: Real Play and the Name Taboo. D. Smith. Sacred language has long harbored the idea that the personal name is an intrinsic part of the self. As such, its advertisement threatens exposure to forces that might undo its bearer. From Homer’s Odysseus to the Rumpelstiltskin of the Brothers Grimm, from Superman’s Mr. Mxyzptlk to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Sparrowhawk, from St. Olaf’s troll to Ralph Ellison’s Little Man at Chehaw Station, true names and their association to power are of timeless importance.
In this seminar, we will explore the (super)natural link between naming and empowerment: How do the weak—through naming work—reverse their condition? Comparing gambits by the socially vulnerable to various games of insight, we’ll seek relationships between the detection of tells in gambling and that of so-called true names within social struggle. Through mystical theology’s and post-colonial theory’s understanding of the use of light to hide things, we will also consider the relationship between concealing and revealing, basic to both tell-reading and true-naming.
28. Nanotechnology in Science and Fiction. D. 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.
29. Finding India. R. Woods. The coronation of Queen Victoria as “Empress of India” in 1876—like the Great Imperial Durbar of 1911—asserted British cultural, racial, political and economic power over the subcontinent. At the same time, they both announced and obscured the complex nature of the cultural dynamics and cross-fertilizations between India and Britain, a relationship traceable from 1600 (when the British East India Company was chartered) through the present. Examining essays, historical commentaries, videos, analyses, music, food, sport, wit, wisdom and follies to see how “British India” and “Indian India” were invented and reinvented, we will discuss British exotica and Mughal culture; religious and cultural baggage; ideologies of raj; migration and cultural diversity; and the processes of historical self-conception. See <http://pages.pomona.edu/~rlw04747/rlw/12ID1s29> for up-to-date information.
