New or Changed Courses - Fall
THE FOLLOWING ARE DESCRIPTIONS FOR FALL 2011 COURSES THAT ARE NEW OR CHANGED SINCE THE LATEST VERSION OF THE PRINTED CATALOG, OR THAT ARE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING;
New Course
"One Time Only" Courses
HIST 339: Religious Outsiders and the Making of America
Course will consider the political, legal and cultural responses to religious dissent and nonconformity in American history and how those impulses have in turn shaped American society.
Prerequisites: One prior course in history, politics or religion or permission of Instructor.
IDS 142: What is a Just Society?
This course engages students in a consideration of justice and the role of justice in the construction of polities. We will ask: what is a just society? How might justice be measured? Attained? Maintained? Beginning with Plato's Republic, the students will engage with philosophers and thinkers across many centuries who have pondered how best to construct a society that fosters justice. Touching as it does on many themes, the course will have students read works that encourage them to grapple with the related themes of the role of faith and reason in society, the possibilities for equality in human society, the nature of man, and the processes by which we might bring our ideal visions of society closer to fruition. Reading works from authors as diverse as Plato, Saint Augustine, Christine de Pizan, William Godwin, and John Rawls, students will -alone, together and in larger forums-engage in considered discussion of the nature of the human quest for justice.
This course is open to freshmen and sophomore students only.
IDS 207X Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Training (.25)
This course is an introduction to CERT for those wanting to complete training or as a refresher for
current team members. It contains six modules with topics that include an Introduction to CERT,
Fire Safety, Hazardous Material and Terrorist Incidents, Disaster Medical Operations, and Search
and Rescue. This course is a combination of 21 classroom and laboratory hours taught by a
certified CERT instructor. CERT is a program created to engage everyone in America in making
their communities safer, more prepared, and more resilient when incidents occur. Communitybased
preparedness planning allows us all to prepare for and respond to anticipated disruptions
and potential hazards following a disaster. Through pre‐event planning, people work together to
help reduce injuries, loss of life, and property damage. This pre‐event planning also helps utilize
existing resources until professional assistance becomes available. One time only. Stout and
various CERT certified instructors
IDS 453 The History of Enterprise: Business and Government in Developmental Perspective (1)
Once upon a time, hunger, vagrancy, disease, and social disorder held population in check. Then
both population and life expectancy started to rise – and continued to do so until the present. The
key questions the course will address are: Why did this great transformation occur and why did it
occur first when and where it did? How did our existing organizational and governance
mechanisms arise and why? What part have they played in transition? How will the world of
enterprise look tomorrow? The course has four modules: before the industrial revolution, the first
industrial revolution, the second industrial revolution, and the post‐modern era. Prerequisite:
Upper division status. One time only. Thompson (Atkinson Graduate School of Management)
THTR 320W: Playwriting Workshop
Do you want to write a play and need help starting? Have you already written for theater but need the push to take your work to the next level? This integrated multi-level workshop will teach you the basic skills and polish your already existing ones. Expect to gain a thorough understanding of storytelling for the stage while developing your skills with character, story, dialogue, and stage spectacle. You will create several short plays in the class and one longer one-act or section of a full-length play.This class will lead into next spring's new play festival class. Plays created in this class will be considered for that opportunity.
Pre-requisite: English 135 or instructor consent.
Special Topics Courses
ENGL 116W -01 -02: Latin@ Literature and Performance
Rather than focus on one particular medium, this course will examine the ways Latin@ identity is performed across a selection of experimental, popular and canonical works of literature, drama, performance art, television, theory, film and the Internet. Who is Latin@? How is Latin@ identity created and how is it contested? Who claims latinidad and why? What are the racial, sexual, and class politics that emerge in the creative expression, or performance, of latinidad? We will give special attention to countercultural forms of latinidad, including queer, feminist, and radical texts and movements. Authors and artists will include Junot Díaz, Achy Obejas, Miguel Piñero, María Irene Fornés, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Cristy C. Road, Nao Bustamante, Coco Fusco, and others. Among the literary and cultural theorists we’ll consult will be J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, Samuel Delany, José Esteban Muñoz, and Juana María Rodríguez. Students will contribute regularly to a class blog
ENGL 116W-03: American Woman Writers
This course examines selected prose works—-novels, short stories, and memoirs—-by American (European-American, African-American, Cuban-American, Chinese-American) women writers since the mid-nineteenth century, including such classics as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. We will explore the intersections of sentimentalism and slavery, realism and race, class and characterization, hybridity and history, fantasy and family myth. We will consider the forms of textual communication and the forms of culture they may express or help constitute, including ways that race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class shape ideas about womanhood, as well as the ways race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender influence ideas of American identity
ENGL 117W-01: Re-reading Shakespeare
In this class we will read three or four of Shakespeare’s plays (Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, and/or A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and try to capture the experience of re-reading them, even if you haven’t read them before. More than almost any other author’s works, Shakespeare’s plays reward re-reading by becoming more enjoyable and more interesting with successive readings because, once we get more familiar and comfortable with the language and the plot, we start to notice how strange they remain. They evoke ideas about who we are, what we know, and what we do, which will always be “strange,” no matter how many times we read them. We will also look at the ways that writers and film-makers have“re-read” Shakespeare’s plays by re-writing them. Likely adaptations will be Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Akira Kurosowa’s Ran, Christopher Moore’s Fool, and Robert Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos.”
ENGL 117W-02: The Victorian Pursuit of Happiness
This course will focus on two major Victorian prose writers: the moral and political philosopher, economist, and early crusader for women's rights John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and the novelist George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans, 1819-1880). Both Mill and Eliot made difficult breaks with their pasts and entered into unconventional relationships. Had it not been for Harriet Taylor, as Mill suggests in his Autobiography (1873), he might never have written his radical treatise The Subjection of Women (1869); had it not been for George Henry Lewes, Eliot might never have become a novelist at all. Mill's essays On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1863), in which he argues for the pursuit of happiness as the cornerstone of morality, and Eliot's novels The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871-72), one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century, raise ethical issues that remain relevant today.
ENGL 118W: Scenarios of Encounter
In 1611 William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the story of Prospero’s shipwreck on Caliban’s island, was first performed. In 1719 Daniel Defoe published the story of Robinson Crusoe’s shipwreck and his encounter with Friday. These early modern imaginings have offered an influential script for Europe’s imperial project, and the repeatedly enacted scenario of encounter between civilized Europe and the savage native has played an important role in Europe’s understanding of itself and its colonies. This course will begin with Defoe’s novel and Shakespeare’s play, reading them along with several postcolonial revisions of the shipwreck scenario. We will then continue to look at a variety of ways that postcolonial texts have rewritten the colonial encounter, as they consider the continuing power of inherited cultural scripts and imagine the possibility for new forms of encounter in cultural contexts that have been so thoroughly scripted. Texts will include William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Derek Walcott’s Pantomime, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, and M. Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone.
HIST 131: U.S. Consumer Culture From Sears & Roebuck to Facebook
This course will examine the emergence of American consumer culture in the 1880s and trace it's development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will examine and discuss primary documents including advertisements, political propaganda, and social commentary as well as secondary sources chronicling the historical significance of consumer culture. Topics of discussion will include the role of consumerism in American notions of class, race, gender, politics,& personal identity.
HIST 342: Topics: American Bodies & Nature
This course examines the relationship between human bodies and the nonhuman natural world throughout U.S. history. We will interrogate the lines--material and imagined--between bodies and nature, how and why those lines have been drawn, by whom (or what), and to what effect. The course will explore these concepts through topics such as western settlement, urban ecology, anti-vaccination campaigns, industrial pollution, and outdoor recreation. In class readings, discussion, and individual projects, we will consider how the particular relationship between American bodies and American nature has defined the American past and present.
REL 354 Topic: Asian Religions
Buddhism and Art is a selective examination of the complex and evolving role that architecture and the visual arts have played in the global development of Buddhism from roughly the second century BCE to the present. The course will include an overview of Buddhist art and architecture in Asia through the eleventh century; a focused examination of the differing roles of the arts in Chan/Zen and Tibetan Buddhism; and finally a critical examination of Western framing of Buddhism and Buddhist art in relation to Colonialism and Modern and Contemporary art.