FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR

SPRING 2000

THE FIRST YEAR SEMINAR REQUIREMENT

All first year students are required to take two Seminars, one in the fall and the other in the spring semester. The Seminars are courses in which the student is introduced to the literary, philosophical, and artistic legacies of several interrelated cultures. Works are chosen to represent a wide range of intellectual discourses, from poetry, drama, and fiction, to history, philosophy, and polemic.

INTENSITIES - ENCOUNTERS WITH THE WORK

In the spring semester each section of the Seminar focuses on a single work of demonstrated historical importance. A work may be interpreted as, for example, a symphony, a painting, a scientific treatise, a city plan, a dramatic performance, a novel, an ethnography, a case study, or a political tract. Faculty will devote the semester to an in-depth study of the particular work they have chosen, students will engage with this work by writing frequent analytical papers.

CRN

10315

   

Course No.

FSEM II AB

Title

Gianlorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa: A Baroque Example of the Unity of the Arts

Professor

Anne Bertrand

Schedule

Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 301

This seminar will focus on the "Ecstasy of Saint Teresa", a sculptural work by Gianlorenzo Bernini produced for the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Bernini was one of the major artistic figures of seventeenth-century Rome. For this sculpture, Bernini united painting, sculpture and architecture in a beautiful totality, one that breaks down the barriers between the world in which we live and the work of art. We will use this work as a case study to explore the various facets of Bernini's artistic legacy. For instance, we will investigate Bernini's working methods, the importance of his studio and his relationship with both the leaders of the Counter-Reformation movement in Rome and with the movement itself.

CRN

10477

   

Course No.

FSEM II RB

Title

The Crime of Galileo

Professor

Ranny Bledsoe

Schedule

Mon Wed 7:00 pm - 8:20 pm OLIN 202

This course is designed for students who are interested in studying a great work of science within a larger context. Although the course title is taken from Giorgio de Santillana's wonderful book (which we will read, along with Brecht's play Galileo), the central text is Galileo's masterpiece, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. We'll read this in its entirety, and so some of the experiments described therein. Our object will be to ground ourselves in an understanding of Galileo's accomplishments, as well as to examine the historical, philosophical, and biographical nexus in which they can be located. We will thus consider Galileo's role in the particular scientific revolution to which her pertained from several points of view. We'll also look at recent scholarship regarding a historical equivalent to Judith, Virginia Woolf's imaginary sister of Shakespeare. She is Galileo's illegitimate daughter Virginia, who became the cloistered nun Suor Maria Celeste, subject of a new biography by Dava Sobel.

CRN

10310

   

Course No.

FSEM II LB

Title

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Professor

Leon Botstein

Schedule

Tu Th 5:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 201

A close reading of the entire text, focusing on the problems it presented for Nietzsche in his time, and still presents for us today. Weekly papers. Students with a reading knowledge of German or expectations to acquire one are welcome.

CRN

10309

   

Course No.

FSEM II DD

Title

Thomas Hardy's Wessex

Professor

Deirdre d'Albertis

Schedule

Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 308

Landscape figures in Hardy's writing not only as a backdrop to human desire, error, and loss, but as a powerful, if mute force of destiny in its own right. Critic Raymond Williams writes, 'The Hardy country is of course Wessex: that is to say mainly Dorset and its neighbouring counties. But the real Hardy country, I feel more and more, is that border country so many of us have been living in: between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and an experience of change." We will explore the geography of this imaginary district known as "Wessex", in relation to regionalism in nineteenth-century Britain, as well as to the complex cultural mapping described by Williams. This seminar is dedicated to close study of a few novels set in Hardy country: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). Frequent papers will be assigned.

CRN

10333

   

Course No.

FSEM II KF

Title

Progress and Poverty

Professor

Kris Feder

Schedule

Wed Fri 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 310

Progress and Poverty is the 1879 masterwork of the American editor, political economist and social reformer Henry George. It earned immediate acclaim and has endured as a classic, published in many editions and languages. George marveled at the stunning advance of technology during the Industrial Revolution. Yet he observed that while some people had become rich, the distribution of income had grown more and more unequal as economic growth was jostled by cycles of boom and bust. It was "as though a great wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down." This, the "great enigma of our times," was the problem George set out to solve. He explored and rejected the prevailing scholarly and popular explanations, which held that hunger and conflict were mechanisms by which population was contained to within the carrying capacity of the land; that the persistence of poverty resulted not from any remediable defect of political institutions but from immutable natural laws. George found this explanation to be not only morally repugnant, but also theoretically flawed and incompatible with empirical facts. He argued that the root cause of widening inequality lay not in the laws of nature, but in social maladjustments which ignored them. His analysis led him to develop a new theory of public finance. Correct application of his theory, George argued, would lead to staggering improvements in productive efficiency, distributive justice, and political stability. The benefits of sustained economic development would be widely shared. Most economists long ago dismissed George's ideas, and redefined the very terms in which he couched his argument. Karl Marx derisively called the plan developed in Progress and Poverty "capitalism's last ditch." We shall ask whether he may have been right. Occasional secondary readings are selected from George's biography and from a literature spanning two centuries.

CRN

10410

   

Course No.

FSEM II DF

Title

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Professor

Donna Ford

Schedule

Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 306

"So you're the little lady who started the war," Abraham Lincoln allegedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe about her abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Despite its controversy and often poor reviews (even Charles Dickens attacked it for being overly sentimental) in the 19th century it sold more copies than the Bible and has never gone out of print. In our close reading of this text we will examine Stowe's use of sentimentality and romance within her highly politicized text. We will discuss and analyze how the archetypes of race and gender that Stowe created managed to become fixtures within American culture. In our discussion of the text we cannot ignore the broad scope of literary criticism that this novel has generated from the mid-nineteenth century until now.

CRN

10479

   

Course No.

FSEM II PG

Title

The Life Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman

Professor

Peter Gadsby

Schedule

Mon Th 7:30 pm - 8:50 pm OLIN 205

Tristam Shandy (published between 1759 and 1767) is a parody of the then new novel form, is perhaps the progenitor of the 20th century stream of consciousness novel, and has been called the longest "shaggy dog" story in the language. Through the thoughts and observations of our shrewd and bawdy hero, you will meet his devoted father, Walter, his uncle Toby, whose passion is for military fortification, the bewildered Mrs. Shandy, the argumentative Parson Yorick, the irrepressible household servant, Obadiah, and many other curious characters. We will spend the semester reading the work slowly to discover what, if anything, happens.

CRN

10483

   

Course No.

FSEM II JG

Title

Shoah

Professor

James Goldwasser

Schedule

Mon Wed 4:30 pm - 5:50 pm OLIN 203

This course would involve seeing the entire 9-1/2 hour film and studying it closely, as well as a series of apposite readings in history, literature and criticism, and philosophy addressing the specific events the film discusses, as well as the issues it raises with respect to the problem of representing the Holocaust, the differences between the perspectives of victims, bystanders and perpetrators, and broader problems of bearing witness to unspeakable events. (we may read P. Gourevitch's book about the Rwanda genocide.)

CRN

10309

   

Course No.

FSEM II FG

Title

The Communist Manifesto

Professor

Frederic Grab

Schedule

Tu Th 8:30 am - 9:50 am OLIN 307

Arguably the most influential secular text ever written, the Communist Manifesto recently celebrated its 150th birthday in an orgy of denunciations and nostalgia. We will explore the reasons for both reactions through a detailed examination of this seminal text. In addition to a few other works by Marx and Engels, we will read several novels dealing with social conditions in England in the mid-19th century (e.g. Dicken's Hard Times), and view Charlie Chaplin's classic film, Modern Times.

CRN

10484

   

Course No.

FSEM II MM

Title

Midnight's Children

Professor

M Mark

Schedule

Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm LC 118

Saleem Sinai, the extravagantly self-conscious narrator of Salman Rushdie's novel, is one of midnight's children, born in the first hour of August 15, 1947 - the first hour of India's independence. "The children of midnight," Saleem observes, "were also the children of the times, fathered, you understand, by history." Saleem, whose Muslim background doesn't prevent him from reveling in Hindu tales and Bombay talkies, conveys the wild profusion of his inheritance by merging his own fantastical autobiography with the story of his homeland. "To understand just one life you have to swallow the whole world, " he says. Midnight's Children maps the five decades since the partition of India and Pakistan began a cycle of conflict that continues into the twenty-first century. With its masala of global and local, modern and ancient, political and prophetic, Rushdie's epic suggests concrete ways of thinking about abstractions commonly deployed to make sense of life in the second half of the twentieth century. We'll move from a close reading of the text to the context in which it was written and is read, giving consideration to imperialism, postcolonialism, orientalism, postmodernism, magic realism, cultural relativism, and religious fundamentalism. We'll sample fiction and nonfiction, colonial and postcolonial, sacred and profane: selections from E. M. Forster and Paul Scott to Anita and Kiran Desai, Shashi Tharoor, Amit Chaudhuri, Vikram Chandra, and Arundhati Roy; Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to General Pervez Musharraf; V.S. Naipaul, Gita Mehta, and Sara Suleri to Homi Bhabha and Edward Said; the Bahagavadgita, Mahabharata, the Ramayana to the Koran, The Thousand and One Nights, and Sufi tales. We'll look at Indian painting, sculpture, and architecture, and we'll screen movies: Passage to India, Gandhi, Salaam, Bombay! and the eastern Westerns that Saleem loved to watch and to mock.

CRN

10478

   

Course No.

FSEM II GM

Title

Cane

Professor

Gabriel Mendes

Schedule

Tu Th 6:20 pm - 7:40 pm OLIN 202

Published in 1923, Cane by Jean Toomer stands as one the most important works in the African American literary tradition, influencing such writers as Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison. In both form and content, Cane captures the multivalent structures and forces at work in African American history and culture. Hailed by some as the masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as acclaimed by the modernist literati at the time of its publishing, Cane yields a wealth of topics for an focused interdisciplinary investigation of a great work. Our reading of Cane will be informed by a diverse array of intellectual and artistic media, including music, film, photography, studio arts, and social scientific literature.

CRN

10328

   

Course No.

FSEM II DM

Title

The Villa: Architecture and Attributes

Professor

Diana Minsky

Schedule

Tu Th 4:40 pm - 5:50 pm OLIN 301

Using James Ackerman's The Villa as the central text, this seminar will focus on the characteristics and evolution of the country house from ancient Rome through Renaissance Italy and Georgian England to nineteenth and twentieth-century America. The villa, or country house, as opposed to a working farm, embodies an idyllic interpretation of country life, reflecting society's shifting understanding of the intersection of the natural and the man-made. In addition to Ackerman's book, we will read from fictional and documentary accounts of villa-life and visit many of the Hudson Valley villas to study how they express the characteristics of this architectural type.

CRN

10485

   

Course No.

FSEM II RP

Title

Mrs. Dalloway: Streams of Consciousness and Moments of Being

Professor

Ray Peterson

Schedule

Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 301

In this seminar we will consider different versions of a single day, and the way in which Virginia Woolf and her readers gain insight from such an approach. The three texts central to this study are: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Moments of Being; Michael Cunningham's The Hours, a contemporary fictional tribute to Mrs. Dalloway. Course writing will include memoir and fiction, some diary keeping, weekly computer conversations, as well as analytic essays.

CRN

10480

   

Course No.

FSEM II JP

Title

Wordsworth/Brakhage

Professor

John Pruitt

Schedule

Mon Th 4:30 pm - 5:50 pm PRE 101

The central focus of the seminar will be William Wordsworth's long and challenging autobiographical poem, The Prelude. Through a sustained and in-depth study of this highly influential work as well as through a brief examination of ancillary material, namely a few short lyrics by Wordsworth and his famous preface to Lyrical Ballads, we will try to come to terms with central issues of modern poetic practice as it was defined by a major figure of European Romanticism. Towards the end of our study, we will turn to a carefully chosen selection of works by the contemporary American filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, whose own radical aesthetics and interest in finding a cinematic/visual equivalent to poetic form via autobiographical meditation offer an intriguing and illuminating parallel to Wordsworth's much earlier achievement. Students who wish to take this course should have an interest in poetry per se; and should have a willingness to confront films which are clearly non-mainstream in the pop culture sense, and which carry at first glance no clear "entertainment value".

CRN

10326

   

Course No.

FSEM II JR / LIT I K

Title

Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum

Professor

Justus Rosenberg

Schedule

Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 306

A close examination of the most significant work by this year's Nobel-Prize winner in Literature, who more than any other contemporary novelist, has probed as deeply, relentlessly and with such artistry, the development of Germany from Nazism through cold-was division to unification.

CRN

10473

   

Course No.

FSEM II LS1

Title

The Nag Hammadi Library: Gnostic Philosophy and Myth

Professor

Leonard Schwartz

Schedule

Mon 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 308

Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 310

In this course we will study the Gnostic poetry, myth, and religious doctrine presented in the Nag Hammadi manuscript, accidentally excavated at Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945. We will also read some of the major studies of Gnosticism, including Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels and Hans Jonas' The Gnostic Religion. Can the modernist notion of alienation, as developed in writers as diverse as Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud, be understood in terms of Gnosticism?

CRN

10474

   

Course No.

FSEM II LS2

Title

The New American Poetry: 1945 - 1960

Professor

Leonard Schwartz

Schedule

Mon 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 304

Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 306

This work, edited by Donald Allen, was the seminal anthology that launched many of the most important breakthroughs in contemporary avant-garde American poetry. The seminar will study both the work of the poets in this book and the implications of this work for literary

language itself. Poetry to be considered includes The New York School( Ashbery, O'Hara, and Barbara Guest): the Black Mountain Poets (Duncan, Creeley): and the Beat poets (Ginsberg and others). Other readings (for example David Lehman's The Last Avant-garde and Marjorie Perloff's The Poetics of Indeterminacy will provide historical and theoretical perspectives on the anthology and the poets it first brought to the fore.

CRN

10487

   

Course No.

FSEM II ES

Title

TBA

Professor

Ed Smith

Schedule

TBA

Details to follow.

CRN

10313

   

Course No.

FSEM II AS

Title

Voltaire's Candide

Professor

Alice Stroup

Schedule

Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 204

A satirical best-seller - with 20,000 copies sold within two years after publication in 1759 - this picaresque novel asks whether happiness is possible in a cruel and unjust world. Voltaire's protagonists survive Inquisition and earthquake, discover an ideal society only to abandon it, remain optimistic despite cruel indignities, so that their adventures prompt questions about human reason and perfectibility. Yet these familiar Enlightenment themes are developed in a troubling and less-discussed context of scientific racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. We will examine the philosophical and social messages of Candide, drawing on two earlier radical utopian works that Voltaire owned or read, as well as Voltaire's Philosophical Letters. For assistance in interpreting these texts, we will consult contemporary literature on gender and race.

CRN

10482

   

Course No.

FSEM II VT

Title

Ingeborg Bachmann's The Good God of Manhattan

Professor

Valerie Tekavec

Schedule

Mon Wed 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 305

This seminar is devoted to the close study and production of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann's famous radio play, The Good God of Manhattan. Students will become familiar with Bachmann as a poet, fiction writer, and essayist during the early weeks of the seminar. We will also study the genre of the radio play itself, with some inquiry into its particular manifestation in post World War II Europe and the United States.

CRN

10429

   

Course No.

FSEM II MVZ / LIT I H

Title

Baudelaire

Professor

Marina van Zuylen

Schedule

Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am LC 118

Charles Baudelaire is the poet of Modernity. The Parisian Prowler (Le Spleen de Paris), his collection of prose poems published in 1869, constitutes one of the most dramatic turning points in France's literary history. Heavily indebted to Edgar Allen Poe's art theories, Baudelaire's collection of short vignettes about urban despair, document what Sartre saw as the beginning of Existentialism in France. Baudelaire rejected the idea that literature must thematize heroic gestures and inspire timeless ideals. Rather, his portraits of contemporary life are sketches of melancholy and transgression; among the fallen heroes are garbage collectors turned city-archivists, prostitutes communing with the Ideal, and smokers who convert their cigarettes into symbols of art for art's sake. All of these anti-heroes have discovered a paradoxical wisdom of failure. To do nothing, to vegetate, or to engage in gratuitous acts of good and evil is the lot of the Parisian Prowler. To Baudelaire, this existential boredom is the lot of Modern city-dwellers; having lost their ideals, their aimless wanderings become a way of life. As Baudelaire questions the relationship between art and its public (comparing the artist to prostitute), he inaugurates the Modernist notion that unless it is prepared to shock the reader into a new vision of the world, Art is not worth producing. Many of the poems will be read in conjunction with Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life, a collection of art and music criticism. There will be additional readings by Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Sartre.

CRN

10306

   

Course No.

FSEM II WW / LIT I J

Title

Othello

Professor

William Weaver

Schedule

Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 310

The course will involve a close reading of the Shakespeare tragedy as well as the Italian novella that was its source. Then students will be introduced to various adaptations and variations, from the neoclassical version of Ducis to the film of Orson Welles. The Rossini and Verdi operas will be seen and discussed. The problems of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on will also be examined, as Shakespeare's work is reinterpreted over the centuries.