Course Listings, Fall 2011
Section 1 Travel Tales and Understanding
Instructor: Peter Briggs
T/Th 11:15 –12:45
This seminar covers a miscellaneous group of readings, all involving travel, exposure to new cultures, and the kinds of learning that come with exposure to unfamiliar and often thought-provoking values. Some readings are set in everyday contexts, while others are more unusual: captivity narratives, imaginary travels, a temptation narrative, and even a descent into madness. This rich reading fare guarantees lively class discussions, often centering on the social and personal values of different cultures; the same fare provides many writing opportunities, chances to look into new values or conflicts among values on paper. This is a seminar without “right answers”; it prizes ongoing explorations above arrival at a final destination. Readings include Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity among Native Americans, Zitkala-Sa’s account of her educational travels, Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats, Nancy Mairs’ account of her crippling illness, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
Section 2 Culture Shock: Stories of Division, Change and Reconciliation Across Social and Ethnic Boundaries
Instructor: Sharon Bain
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
The concept of culture comprises the beliefs, values and institutions that are passed down from generation to generation within a social or ethnic group. Culture, as each of us defines it, influences our behavior, informs our attitudes toward others, and shapes our understanding of right and wrong. What happens when disparate cultures intersect? How do individuals cope with the “culture shock” that forces them to redefine reality as they know it? Does this shock lead to conflict, destruction or enlightenment? This seminar will explore culture shock through works that depict groups and individuals whose lives are changed when they encounter a foreign culture. Works include the novel East Wind: West Wind by Pearl Buck; the short stories “Kirinyaga” by Mike Resnick and “Annie and Fatima” by Assia Djebar; and the film Everything is Illuminated. In weekly writing assignments and class discussions, students will examine the cross-cultural relationships between characters in these works and will analyze the methods used by the authors and filmmakers to illustrate the constructive or destructive nature of these relationships. For our semester project, students will choose one of their writing assignments to expand into a larger paper and to discuss informally during our final class meetings.
Sections 3 and 4 Performance and Self
Instructors: Linda Caruso Havilland, Sec. 3; Gail Hemmeter, Sec 4
M/W 1:00-2:30
When we use the word “self” what do we mean? Are we coherent, authentic, natural selves, or is what we call “self” a role we’ve taken on and can easily discard or change at will? What does it mean to perform ourselves -- in life, on stage, in film, in dance, in texts? Do we perform a social or cultural role in a script that has already been written for us? Or do we create ourselves through desire, passion and will? In this seminar, we will use a variety of texts to examine the ways we perform ourselves in daily life at the intersections of gender, race and class. We will also look at the ways artists and writers construct performances that convey these social and political aspects of identity. We will draw our texts from a variety of sources: philosophy, psychology, theater, dance, fiction, poetry, and film. They include examinations of the self by Descartes and Freud; poetic expressions of gender performance by Tony Hoagland, Anne Sexton, and Gloria Anzaldua; theories of performance and performativity by Judith Butler and others; analyses of gender in ballet and modern dance and in films such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch; depictions of race in Henry David Hwang’s M. Butterfly; dramas of class in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation and in the writing of Dorothy Alison; and reflections on identity in the graphic novel Ghostworld. Our final project will provide an opportunity for groups to create a short performance around themes and ideas generated by the class. Because writing is also a performance, we will pay attention to how we present ourselves on paper. Students will write frequently, participate in occasional projects and peer review groups, and have opportunities to revise their work.
Section 5 The Politics of Development in East Asia
Instructor: Michael T. Rock
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
The aim of this seminar is to examine the relationship between politics (autocracy and democracy) and economic development in the East Asian newly industrializing economies [China, Japan, South Korea, and Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) in Northeast Asia and Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand in South East Asia]. We will draw on theory and case studies to answer questions such as: Have East Asia's high growth governments fashioned uniquely new relationships between states and markets challenging a more conventional wisdom that democracy and markets are inseparable? Why hasn’t the middle class played its historic role of ushering in democracy? How has ethnic diversity affected or influenced the emergence and consolidation of semi-democratic regimes? Why has the transition to and consolidation of democracy been so difficult in some of these polities, while it appears to have occurred rather smoothly others? Finally, how has the transition to and consolidation of democracy in several of these polities affected development.
Section 6 The Examined Life
Instructor: Karen Tidmarsh
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
What is the examined life? Does self-awareness guarantee a “life worth living," or is more needed? What is the relationship between self-examination and happiness? We will consider these questions and others as they are addressed by a variety of important writers from different periods and disciplines. Texts will include: “Why I Live at the P.O.” by Eudora Welty, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” by J. D. Salinger, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Shakespeare’s King Lear. We will also read selections from Plato, who originally cautioned about the unexamined life, Freud, who advocates examining the unconscious, and Kierkegaard, who examines his Christian faith through an existentialist lens. Texts will serve as starting points for discussion and writing. A goal of the course will be to improve students’ ability to read difficult texts, take positions on their meaning and implications, and speak and write about them clearly and persuasively. Students will write frequent short essays, with drafts and revisions.
Section 7 Finding the True Self Through Literature
Instructor: Dennis McAuliffe
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
Many writers, especially women mystics, have written deep reflections about discovering their innermost authentic selves. Human beings habitually superimpose images of the self, sometimes referred to as egos or masks, on the true self, making it difficult to find and come into relationship with the true self. In this course we will make a close examination of texts that deal with this question in a variety of surprising ways. During class discussions and in a series of short papers we will explore what these women discover about themselves and relate their methods and findings to our own search for our authentic selves. The course will include texts from a variety of genres, including fiction, creative nonfiction, philosophy, and poetry (mainly women poets), from the Medieval period (e.g., Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue) to the present (e.g., Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy, Simone Weil’s Waiting for God.
Section 8 Reading Culture: Poverty in the United States
Instructor: Matthew Ruben
T/Th 12:45 – 2:15
Poverty is one of the most persistent problems and controversial issues in the United States. Along with its obvious economic dimensions, poverty has a wide variety of cultural meanings. In fact, the subject of poverty forces us to think critically about how we define and understand the concept of culture. This course will explore key methods for studying and writing about culture by looking critically at a variety of works addressing the theme of poverty and wealth in America, including Benjamin Franklin’s classic “The Way to Wealth,” Michael Harrington’s highly influential The Other America, Sandra Cisneros’ novella The House on Mango Street, and the feature films American Beauty and Menace II Society. The course will look at how poverty and poor people have been discussed and represented in the United States during the last 150 years, and it will provide an opportunity to explore the many ways "poverty" and "culture" intersect and interact, each term affecting the meaning of the other. This course involves critical reading, in-class discussion and cogent, idea-driven writing. Course materials are drawn from a variety of genres and fields, and are meant to promote rich, open-ended interpretation and discussion. Students will write a series of papers and will have the opportunity to revise their work.
Section 9 Reading Culture: Poverty in the United States
Instructor: Matthew Ruben
T/Th 2:15 – 3:45
See course description for Section 8
Section 10 Child Survival on the World's Streets and at War
Instructor: Phillip Kilbride
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
This course examines millions of children who now survive around the globe in circumstances unimaginable, but very real for them. International tourism, globalization and privatization of the worlds’ national economies have been catastrophic for them. Survival strategies typically include for boys working on the streets as garbage collectors and for girls, survival sex. Eating from garbage cans and sleeping on streets, in sewers, subways, tunnels, and abandoned buildings are common. Millions of children also comprise armies of the young in civil wars, themselves frequently resulting from the same global economic forces impacting street children. Female child soldiers, like street girls, are regularly forced into unwanted sexual circumstances.
Readings and visual materials are drawn from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Each student will write a short paper on her nation of choice and contribute to class discussions concerning this material. We will seek to evaluate universal circumstances endured by all children on the streets and at war, but to also understand specific contexts unique to each national situation. Regular response papers concerning the assigned readings will be prepared and for some assignments rewritten. These readings include social/economic descriptions, personal memoirs, life stories, and experiential ethnographic profiles of communities of children.
Section 11 Unveiling Africa
Instructor: Robert Washington
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
This seminar aims to interrogate and dispel many prevalent myths about
black Africa by exploring the rich, complex, enchanting, troubled, and
exciting realities of African social worlds. It will examine the ordeal
of colonialism, the distorted images of black Africa produced in
American popular culture, the African struggles for liberation, and the
difficult post liberation experiences of nation building. The seminar
will use varied materials including literary works, biographies, movies,
and documentaries as the basis for class discussions. Chinuba Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Joseph Conrad’s “Outpost of Civilization , Jomo
Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, Nelson Mandella’s Long Walk To Freedom;
movies such as Tarzan, Cry of The Beloved Country, Out of Africa, Biko,
and Lumumba; scholarly texts such as The Black Man’s Burden and Dreams
and Deeds are among the materials we will engage and debate in this
seminar. Students will write short essays with the objective of
improving their organizational and analytical skills.
Section 12 The Journey: Act and Metaphor
Instructor: J. C. Todd
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
A journey can be seen as a manifestation of freedom, of resistance, of oppression, of intellectual engagement. Our aim is to develop critical insights into the journey and its structure as an act and as a metaphor. We will use a variety of sources: literature, history, cultural studies, science and our own travels, beginning our investigation as the first humans began their travels—on foot, examining the history of walking and its relationship to consciousness. We will explore spaces where travelers might rest and reassess: Bryn Mawr’s green spaces, cloister and labyrinth, the streets of Paris, and the public squares and walkways of Philadelphia. Our core text is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust; other readings include classics such as the Sumerian myth of “The Descent of Inanna,” and more contemporary scientific, literary and cultural essays, fiction, and poetry by writers such as Judith Butler, Charles Dickens, Alan Ginsberg, Jane Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, and Virginia Woolf, as well as films by Agnes Varda, and visual art. Engagement with these written and visual texts will lead to discussion, fieldwork, journaling, and analytical writing and revising toward mid-semester and final portfolios. Each student’s writing in this course will become a map of the journey of her critical engagement with the idea of journey. In addition to conferencing with the instructor, students will form a community of readers, commenting supportively on the writing of their peers. One Saturday afternoon field trip is mandatory; date TBA.
Section 13 Stranger Than Fiction: From Realism to the Fantastic
Instructor: Daniel Torday
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
While we often think of fiction and nonfiction as distinct genres, the lines that divide them are not always so clear. How do we read George Orwell’s account of seeing a man executed by hanging differently if Orwell actually witnessed the event—or if it was “only a story,” as he claimed long after “The Hanging” was published? How can reading both the fictional accounts of the Russian Red Cavalry found in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry Stories and earlier accounts of the same events found in Babel’s diaries help us understand why some writers of war narratives present their texts as nonfiction, while others write fiction clearly derived from first-hand experience? And what’s with WG Sebald’s crossing the lines between memoir and novel? In this course we will use close readings of a group of stories, novels, essays, and films that blur the lines separating nonfiction and fiction—in form and in content—to make inquiry into the nature of the dialectics of the reporting of empirical facts, memory and storytelling. While engaging these texts, we will develop and hone the writing skills expected on the college level
Section 14 Ways of Knowing, Modes of Acting: Narratives of Self and World from a Natural Sciences Perspective
Instructor: Peter Beckman
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
We investigate the ways in which human beings attempt to make sense of themselves, the world that surrounds them, and their ways of being and acting in this world. The perspective will be that of the natural scientist. We will read and discuss literary texts produced in a number of different historical periods and cultural contexts along with recent scientific articles. Some examples are Abbott's Flatland (1884), Kafka's Metamorphosis (1912), parts of Descartes' Meditations (1641) and Discourse (1637), and short stories by Wells, O'Conner, Leguin, von Kleist, and Borges. Most of these readings will be paired with recent articles about physics, astronomy, biology, and evolution from Scientific American. We will compare the manners in which these texts and articles seek to create narratives that present a construction of self and world. We will discuss the usage and function of different types of discourses on which the various texts rely in order to present their narratives. Writing assignments will be linked to the content of our readings and to class discussions.
Section 15 Bookmarks: Technologies of Reading and Writing From Plato to the Digital Age
Instructor: Katherine Rowe
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
We are living through an extraordinary period of media change: particularly of change in our basic tools of communication and self-expression. This seminar is dedicated to understanding those changes, focusing on the long history of reading and writing, from the classical period to the present. Our key interest: what questions should we be asking about the tools we use on a daily basis? We begin in the archives, working with early manuscripts but thinking comparatively across the centuries. We may explore the differences and similarities among scrolls, books, and web pages: how do they store and transmit knowledge? How do they serve the interests of writers, editors, and readers? Or we may compare the unexpected rebound effects Mark Twain experienced when he bought his first typewriter with those that students today experience with digital tools such as Wikipedia and Facebook. This is a seminar for serious readers: the texts are demanding; the questions are big. Together they illuminate the practical challenges we face as readers and writers in a networked world.
Section 16 Good Science, Bad Science and Nonsense
Instructor: Mark Matlin
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
This seminar will explore the differences between legitimate science and its “evil twins” – bad science, pseudoscience and others – as exemplified by “miracle” cures, cold fusion, homeopathy, and astrology among other examples. We will learn about the scientific method – the self-correcting process by which hypothesis is compared with evidence and refined as a result. We will investigate the ways that bad science imitates real science, and learn how to spot science imposters. We will also address the personal and sociological factors that play a role in the conduct of science. Finally, we will consider how beliefs in unsubstantiated ideas originate and why so many people are willing to believe in them. Texts may include Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, Robert Park’s Voodoo Science, Kendrick Frazier’s Science Under Siege, Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So, and Thomas Kida’s Don’t Believe Everything You Think.
Section 17 Landscape
Instructor: Christiane Hertel
T/Th 11:15 - 12:45
We speak of the cityscape, dreamscape, and political landscape. But what is a landscape? And whose is it? Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response was that “Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape: There is a property in the horizon that no man has but… the poet.” (Nature, 1836) The idea of freedom -- be it personal, poetic or political -- has long been attached to the experience of nature and is an important theme in the arts. In this seminar we shall explore the representation of nature in and as art. The genres of landscape include wilderness, the pastoral and the sublime. The concepts of nature in art often reflect binary pairs, such as country/city, nature/culture, and garden/wasteland. We shall study the relation of nature to history and memory in memorial landscapes, such as travel sketches, battlefields, cemeteries and memory gardens. Our primary focus will be on examples of Western visual culture -- painting, land art, photography, installation, the panorama, gardens and parks, from the sixteenth century to the present, from Dürer’s prints and Dutch topographical landscape paintings to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates in New York’s Central Park. We shall pair these works with a diverse range of texts – artist’s writings, art criticism, interview, poetry, short story, art theory, and essays in environmental aesthetics. A field trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and writing about objects in the Collection of Art and Artifacts at Bryn Mawr will enhance our study experience.
Section 18 Meditations on Mortality
Instructor: Jennefer Callaghan
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
One thing is certain: we will all die some day. Most of us choose to ignore this simple fact, probably because of its power to provoke feelings of fear, anxiety, or defiant anger. Yet there is much to learn from facing our own mortality—becoming aware that death is an unavoidable, universal human experience. In this course, we will examine a range of responses to mortality by people who encounter death either personally or professionally. In what ways do they make meaning of their encounters with death? What understandings do they develop about the relationship between life and death? What, ultimately, can meditations on mortality teach us about life? We will seek answers to these questions by discussing and writing about texts drawn from the fields of medicine, literature, religion, and cultural studies. Highlights include Body of Work, a memoir about a medical student’s first year gross anatomy lab; the Pulitzer-prize winning play Wit; poems by Donne, Marvell, Keats, Dylan Thomas, and W.S. Merwin; and philosophical/theoretical texts by William James and Roland Barthes. Through frequent short writing assignments that lead to longer analytical and argumentative essays, students will learn strategies for generating and organizing ideas, drafting, and revising.
Section 19 Discipline and Disputation
Instructor: Elly Truitt
T/Th 11:45 – 12:45
The university is a medieval institution. The bachelor’s degree is a medieval credential. The liberal arts education has roots that reach back even further, to classical antiquity. In this course, students will investigate the formation of the liberal arts and the evolution of the curriculum as well as the locations of learning—religious institutions and early universities. Additionally, students will learn about the medieval production of knowledge, through commentary, annotation, exegesis, and manuscript books. In conjunction with the topics of this course, students will also consider what it means to be in engaged in a noble pursuit that stretches back over a thousand years. Readings range from early medieval theological treatises and allegorical poetry, scholarly articles, medieval autobiography and philosophy.
Sections 20 and 21 In Class/Out-Classed: The Uses of Liberal Education
Instructors: Anne Dalke, Sec. 20; Jody Cohen, Sec. 21
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
You have been in school for a number of years now, and you bring questions about the methods, means and ends of education. Wherever you may be positioned in this process, however settled into or skeptical of it you may be, this course is an invitation to reflect on the assumptions that shape education in the U.S., as well as on the habits of thought and action it encourages. Schooling in the U.S. has been subject to two competing claims: that it “levels the playing field,” giving all children an equal chance to succeed, and that -- like our homes, neighborhoods, and employment -- it remains deeply segregated by social class, characterized by “savage inequalities.”
In this course we examine the complex relationship between social class, being “in class,” and being “outclassed.” How does class shape educational opportunities and outcomes? What kinds of changes does each of us expect education to bring about in our own social position? To help us address such queries, we will read a wide range of educational autobiographies and theoretical analyses, focus on the case study that is Bryn Mawr, visit with students from a West Philadelphia school, and conduct workshops and interviews on campus. Throughout, we will use a range of compositional (and de-compositional) forms to help us explore, analyze, and reinvent education. We will end the course by reading Chris Cleave’s Little Bee, a contemporary novel that will take us beyond the classroom -- as we ask what kinds of alternative scenarios we might discover,
Section 22 Innumeracy
Instructor: Amy Myers
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
Which of the following pronouncements would you be least likely to hear at an informal social gathering? (A) “I was never any good at math.” (B) “I simply don’t have a head for numbers.” (C) “Reading was always difficult for me---I never quite figured it out.” Very few people living in the United States today would openly admit to option (C), yet large numbers of us shamelessly proclaim options (A) and (B). Where does American innumeracy come from, how innumerate are we, and why should we care? We will use Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (a New York Times bestseller for 18 weeks) by John Allen Paulos (a math professor at Temple University in Philadelphia) as a basis of discussion for this unsettling phenomenon. Other readings include “The Case for Quantitative Literacy” by Lynn Arthur Steen and several short essays. Throughout the course students will write about their own experiences, opinions, and reactions to assigned readings through an explicit process of drafting, peer review, and revision
Section 23 Place
Instructor: Jeffrey Cohen
Mon 2:30 -- 4:00
One of the favorite subjects of people has been place. In words and images, films and websites, works in many media reflect the human fascination with specific and imagined locations. They bring us to sites imbued with layers of memory, characterized by nature, embodying identities and social meanings, built in accord with changing visual ideals, devised as new settings for better ways of living, or even invented as fictional backdrops that offer incisive commentaries on the manifold ways in which we inhabit and attach ourselves to spaces.
In this section of the Balch seminar, we will explore and respond to many types of works within this broad realm. We will read about real and fictional places in writings that range widely from the expository to the situating and the deeply researched. A good deal of our attention will focus on the built environment, present and past, at scales that range from the architectural to the urbanistic. We will examine places in pictures and maps, read key texts, view media of different sorts, actually visit sites, and examine themes at play in this arena.
Section 24 Clash of Cultures (?): East and West in European and Middle Eastern Literatures
Instructor: David Kenosian
T/Th 11:15– 12:45
In this course we will examine European, Middle East and North African literature from the 1700s to the present to see how conflicts have shaped the cultural relations between East and West. While the primary focus of discussions will be novels including one by Orhan Pamuk, we will also look at excerpts from travelogues, an Iraqi blog, historical studies, and two films: Lawrence of Arabia and The Battle of Algiers. Questions for discussions include the following: How and why does the West see itself as different from its Middle Eastern neighbors? To what extent does imperialism prevent an understanding of shared cultural and religious history? Have conflicts provided the incentive to question one’s own culture.
The course is designed to help students improve their analytical writing. We will examine ways posing insightful analytical questions. One way of facilitating students’ ability to develop questions will be the journal in which students will write brief responses to and questions about the readings. In addition, we will stress the revision of writing as a means of refining and deepening the arguments presented in essays.
Section 25 Borders
Instructor: Jennifer Harford Vargas
T/Th 11:15-12:45
The border is more than a line separating one county from another. We are surrounded by many kinds of borders that divide people and establish a binary between insiders and outsiders, between “us” and “them.” This course examines the concept of the border using the lenses of race, nation, and language. We will explore such questions as: How is race constructed in the United States, how do individuals perform racial identities, and how do communities negotiate racial tension and racial mixture? How do the immigrant and the undocumented migrant reconfigure or challenge what it means to be a member of the United States? What are the multiplicities of languages spoken in the United States, how do these languages transform and enrich English, and what are the benefits and drawbacks of having a national language? We will look at different forms of representation such films, comics, performance art, short stories, and documentary narratives by and about people of color to analyze how borders are defended, crossed, blurred, and even dismantled. We will compare the efficacy of different media and ask how techniques such as parody, historical revision, documentation, and linguistic creativity reinforce or interrogate racial, national, linguistic, and other kinds of borders. Students will ultimately learn to be critically conscious of the various borders that shape their lives.
Section 26 What's Out There? Exploring the Unknown
Instructor: Michael Tratner
T/Th 11:15 – 12:45
This course will examine experiences that are valuable for an unusual reason: they bring people into contact with the unknown. We will examine three such experiences, mostly through reading about them: 1) traveling to escape the familiar world, seeking what seems amazing or strange in other cultures or in nature; 2) probing what is hidden inside each of us in the unconscious; and 3) seeking to communicate with the “supernatural,” most commonly in the form of the divine. For each of these kinds of experiences, we will study intellectual methods which are used to write about and make use of what seems unknowable. Thus, we will read the nature writer Annie Dillard, whose wondrous descriptions of a rural creek provide a guide for discovering a glowing, incomprehensible, transcendent universe all around us. Then we will read the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, who will show us how to interpret strange thoughts in our heads as evidence of minds inside us that we do not know. And we will read the religious writers Soren Kirkegaard and Paul Ricoeur who search for features of the world which seem to tell us about a consciousness beyond human understanding. Finally, as one prime example of facing the unknown, we will look at the moment of first contact in the New World, as described in the diaries and chronicles of the European Christopher Columbus and the Mayan Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and we will study the way professors have tried to make sense of these conflicting accounts.
Section 27 What Does It Mean to Be Educated? Ancient Division
Instructor: Alice Donohue
T/Th 11:15 - 12:45
What do we mean by an “educated person”? How does a person become “educated”? This course invites consideration of our modern idea about both the knowledge and the processes that form that intellectual ideal by examining the ancient Greek and Roman practices that shaped modern Western education. Examination of primary textual and archaeological evidence from classical antiquity (eighth century B.C. through second century A.D.) will allow us to observe the often surprising content, methods, and technologies of ancient learning and to weigh them against our own experiences and expectations. Students will have the opportunity to experiment with ancient modes of learning as well as to comment in discussion and in essays on the implications of both ancient and modern practices for the role of the educated person in society.
Section 28 Anxious Masculinity
Instructor: Raymond J. Ricketts
T/Th 11:15 - 12:45
Certain figures of masculinity grab center stage in our cultural memory, whether they are actual or mythical, heroic or vicious: the chivalrous knight, firemen, stoic cowboys, dandies, the mob boss, the tomboy, the bad boy, the player, the family man, the computer geek. Far from expressing any timeless “essence” of masculinity, these examples reveal the highly contingent, anxious nature of masculinity, especially in relation to history, politics, the body, sexuality, and popular culture. In this course, students will focus on this malleability through interrogating how we often define masculinity in relation to femininity, and in starkly polarized ways; we’ll explore the ways in which social and cultural forces construct both genders. In examining the ongoing cultural construction of masculinity, specifically, we may conclude that its only “timeless” aspect is its constant vulnerability to subversion and change.
Topics will include the important connections among masculinity, race, and class; the roots of recent phenomena such as the sensitive man, the men’s movement, “bear” culture, and the efflorescence of female-to-male transgender expression; homoeroticism, queer masculinity, and female masculinity, and representations of masculinity in popular culture. We’ll explore the intersection of masculinity and consumerism in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club; the cultural context of how American men experience masculinity in Susan Faludi’s Stiffed; and Dude, You’re a Fag, a significant new study of masculinity and power dynamics in high school by C.J. Pascoe. We’ll also read Judith Halberstam on female masculinity, Yen Espiritu on experiences of Asian American men, and Gary Cross’s cultural study of “boy-men,” among other texts; and we’ll read and watch autobiographical accounts of female-to-male transgender people. Students will write frequently and will have the opportunity to revise their work.
Section 29 The Beginnings of Philosophy
Instructor: Robert Dostal
T/Th 11:15 - 12:45
The leading question for this course is "what is philosophy?" We address this question by examining the historical beginnings of the western philosophical tradition in Greece. To introduce the beginnings in Greece we look briefly at short selections from epic poetry, history, and the so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers. We then take up three accounts of Socrates--Aristophanes (comic drama), Xenophon (history), and Plato's dialogues -- and consider the question "Who is Socrates?" We pursue Plato's explicitly philosophical identification by reading several dialogues which tell the story of Socrates trial and death: Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. We read part of the Republic and conclude our reading of Plato with the Phaedrus which defines philosophy as a kind of erotic madness. We see how Aristotle develops this tradition of philosophy by reading selections from his works: Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics. Throughout the semester we consider questions that are both theoretical (what can we know?) and practical (what ought we do? what is best? what makes us happy?). We also consider the relation between knowledge and action, theory and practice. As in all Balch Seminars, students will write regularly about course texts and will participate in class discussion