| source Northwestern (X) |
level |
department Freshman Seminars for Fall 2009-2010 (X) |
What does our language use reflect about us as individuals and as societies? This course will provide the student with a broad introduction to areas of research and investigation within sociolinguistics, incorporating personal reflection on language as a theme for written assignments.
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What does animal communication have in common with a Catholic Mass? Do Americans have rites of passage? Could spirit possession be good for you? Why do humans seem compelled to collectively organize experience and social relations through the process of ritualization? We will address these questions and others like them in this course exploring the origins, function, and meaning of human ritual. This course will examine what we mean by ritual, what constitutes ritual behavior, and what the differences and similarities are between large-scale collective rituals and the rituals of everyday life. To that end, we will explore a wide and varied range of human ritual behavior in both its secular and sacred forms. Using a combination of ethnographic examples and theoretical analyses, we will explore evidence for the evolution of ritual, the place of ritual in human development and the relationship of ritual to play, the social and political functions of ritual, ritual and stress, ritual and mental illness, and symbolic healing in ritual contexts.
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This year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles DarwinÂs birth. But what would he think of our world today? We have a sophisticated understanding of genes and the ability to trace our ancestry over generations. Yet despite this knowledge, conclusive and irrefutable proof that we have or are continuing to evolve has not been found. In this course we will address where we might have come from and where we might be going. We will cover some of the major issues in evolution ranging from those of originating in DarwinÂs time to the many questions that persist today.
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The possibilities of extraterrestrial life and intelligence have long fascinated the public imagination. Recently, discoveries of a variety of extrasolar planets within a few hundred lightyears and the Martian Rover evidence of a watery past on Mars have heated the debate on whether we are alone in the universe. In this seminar, we will discuss the scientific foundations of this debate as well as the technology and strategies behind current and planned searches for extraterrestrial life and intelligence.
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Citizens of the United States have an obsession with food, are growing fatter each year, but suffer any number of eating disorder. What is up with us? Is what you eat healthy? Are you eating too much or too little? What about those trans fats? Should you buy organic food? Have you ever wondered where the food you eat comes from and what happens to it on the way to your table? We will explore the ecology, physiology, sociology, and business of food using the book ÂThe OmnivoreÂs Dilemma (Pollan, 2006) as our gateway into this fascinating subject.
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"Biodiversity" is a buzzword familiar to most people, but relatively few possess "Biodiversity" is a buzzword familiar to most people, but relatively few possess a clear idea of what it means and why it is important. This course investigates the importance of biological diversity from different standpoints - scientific, practical, and aesthetic. We examine core concepts in ecology and evolution, such as the definition of "species" and recent research on how more diverse ecosystems function better than less diverse ones. We address applied questions such as, "what benefits do humans gain by preserving biological diversity?", and we deal with the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of biodiversity. A field trip to a nearby prairie restoration site enhances our understanding of what biological diversity means in people's everyday lives and how people are working hard to preserve it.
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Topics for discussion and exploration will include (but not necessarily be limited to): The history, ecology and sociopolitical impact of cacao cultivation and chocolate production; the biology and psychology of gustation and olfaction (taste and smell); the biochemistry of the components of chocolate, and their physiological and neurobiological effects; chocolate in fiction/literature.
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Birds are a distinctive, yet familiar, part of the natural world. They dazzle us with their showy plumage, delight us with their songs, and fascinate us with the ease with which they swoop through the air. In this course students will learn how scientists approach questions about the evolution of birds. What are the closest relatives of birds? Through what intermediate stages did flight evolve? What questions are clarified by the newest fossil discoveries? As students learn about avian paleontology, biology, and anatomy, plus some history of science, they will also learn how to effectively analyze and communicate scientific ideas, particularly in writing.
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In this course we will study the life and times of Cleopatra VII, women and society in the cosmopolitan culture of Hellenistic Egypt, and the reception of Cleopatra by cosmopolitan artists in the world of painting, film, and music in the 19th through 21st centuries. The first third of the course will focus on the ancient literary representations of Cleopatra VII and the social history of women and Ptolemaic queens in Egypt. Topics include: representations of Cleopatra in ancient Latin literature (Plutarch, Pliny, Virgil, Horace, Lucan); women in the culture and society of Hellenistic Egypt; the iconography of Cleopatra in ancient material culture; Cleopatra VII: historical realities vs. ÂOrientalist fantasies; the reception of Cleopatra in 19th century painters Rixens, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jean-Leon Gerome, the reception of Cleopatra in opera, contemporary music, and modern film.
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The death of the dinosaurs as well as theories and evidence for other catastrophic extinctions will be examined. Geologic time and the history of life on earth, plate tectonics, dinosaur classification and behavior, periodicities, cosmic occurrences, and the search for Nemesis, the ÂDeath Star will be included in the seminar.
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Chicago  the only place with access by water from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River - is a classic example of how societies are shaped by their geological setting. We will explore how this setting arose from the earthÂs changing climate, how it affected the cityÂs weather, location, history, and economy, and the challenges and opportunities the lake and river offer for the future. The course is designed for students with interests in science, society, and their interaction.
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This seminar will address the recent financial upheaval in the US and elsewhere (i.e the 'credit crunch'). We'll first try to place current events in a broader historical context, by looking at the intellectual history of some of the ideas underpinning financial markets (probability, risk, etc), at the origins and development of money and of banking, and at earlier financial crises. We'll then investigate the sequence of events on Wall St in the last couple of years.
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Many of the important economic and social questions we analyze today, such as the effects of free trade, the role of government in the economy, and the incentives created by different legal institutions, are not new and have a long history. So, too, do the economic concepts and frameworks we use to analyze and understand our economic interactions. In this class we will discuss core economic principles (mutually beneficial exchange, gains from trade, tradeoffs and opportunity costs, decentralized coordination, equilibration, and more) by analyzing their intellectual origins in the works of a group of writers whose ideas form the foundation of modern economics. The most famous of these writers is Adam Smith, and we will read extensively from his work, but we will also read contributions from some of his contemporaries, including David Hume. One of the most remarkable things in economics is how relevant their work continues to be, even after 200-plus years, so we will also read some modern work on complexity and emergent order in economics, and tie that work into the development of the concept of spontaneous order in the Scottish Enlightenment.
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The combination of a new administration and a global economic downturn has inspired many to rethink traditional government responses to particular economic problems. In this seminar, we will discuss a wide variety of recent events that exemplify the complex relationship between business and government. Bearing in mind the numerous problems inherent in both unfettered markets and regulators intervention efforts, we will debate the proper role of government in our modern economy. Potential topics include federal bailouts of select industries and firms (e.g., some banks, insurers, and automakers), sin taxes (e.g., taxing sugary sodas to combat obesity), product recalls (e.g., toys containing lead paint), banned foods (e.g., raw milk cheeses and foie gras), online use of copyrighted materials (Is it fair use or infringement?), antitrust enforcement (e.g., allowing rival satellite radio providers to merge), Internet taxes, and publicly provided goods (e.g., free wireless Internet access).
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Most people believe that understanding economics is important, but it is not clear how many people do understand it, or whether they appreciate the range of issues to which economics applies. This seminar provides a remedy for these two problems by: (1) providing a clear but non-mathematical outline of the major principles of economics, and (2) illustrating these principles in the context of a variety of practical contexts (including economic analysis of adultery, religion, psychiatric illness, war, rioting, and love, among others).
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This course will train and verse its first-year participants in two crucial disciplines: 1) honing the necessary strategies, styles, and structures of argument necessary for persuasive and accomplished college-level writing, and 2) practicing the techniques of full critical engagement with a text, including but well beyond its capacities for storytelling and entertainment. In the context of this class, our central texts will comprise a series of narrative films and a breadth of published writing related to the movies, ranging from historical overviews to scholarly interpretations, from popular reviews to essays in film theory. In turn, we will practice, edit, and revise a range of writing assignments that allow us to construct different varieties of argument on behalf of diverse readerships, within and beyond the academy.
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North Americans may think of the Caribbean as a vacationerÂs haven of beaches and palm trees. But the region has a long, painful, and complex historyÂand it has produced, since the middle of the 20th century, a distinguished and richly varied literature, including two winners of the Nobel Prize, Derek Walcott and V. Naipaul. This literary outpouring began in the 1930s and continues to the present day, despite the disillusioning realities of the postcolonial era. This class will introduce you to some of the best English-language Caribbean writers and to the cultural conflictsÂconcerning race, colonialism, language, and identityÂthat inform their work.
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ÂA map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, wrote Oscar Wilde. Since ancient Greece, authors have portrayed fictional utopias in order to stimulate thinking on ways to create an ideal society and to highlight the serious social problems of their own time. These utopias have offered thought-provoking visions for bettering education, government, working conditions, the standard of living, relations between the sexes, etc. We will read fictional utopias that explore these and other questions: Can society be organized to ensure a good life for all? What are the benefits and the dangers of attempts to create such a society? What essential elements of humanity must be protected at all cost from efforts to perfect society?
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In this seminar we shall read selected fiction, poems, and essays and respond to them in writing as a way of clarifying our ideas and communicating them effectively to others. Writing assignments will include response papers to the reading and three essays of varying length. Some of the authors we shall study are William Blake, Franz Kafka, Alice Munro, Marjane Satrapi, and Raymond Carver.
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Most of us like to travel or would like to travel. Some of us get to travel, and some of us have even traveled to get to the US as immigrants or as international students. But all of us can travel through travel writing. In this course, we will trace the history and development of travel writing from the records of early explorers like Marco Polo to the heyday of British travel writing in the 1930Âs by authors like Robert Byron and to the popular travel writing of today. We will also explore issues of how journeys affect the traveler as well as how they affect the places and people of travel destinations.
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In 2005 and 2007, riots broke out in major cities throughout France, revealing to the world the deep tensions and inequalities that plague French society. At the same time, in Fall 2007, a majority of the prestigious French literary prizes were awarded to writers from ÂOverseas France and French-speaking writers from outside of France, following which, in March 2008, 40 well-known writers from all over the French-speaking world wrote a manifesto calling for a Âlittérature-monde in French (a world-literature that distinguishes itself from its Anglo-Saxon counterpart). Both these sets of events reflect the challenges that French national and cultural identity has been facing since the end of world war two, challenges posed by its colonial history and immigration, feminism, the advent of a public discussion of non-normative sexual orientations, the growing importance of the European Union, and globalization. Come and explore with us, through fiction and film, various facets of France as a multicultural society in order to better understand how events such as the riots and the upheaval in the literary world come to be.
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This class will examine fiction, film, and theory produced in the past several decades by and concerning Asians in diaspora. We will begin with theoretical essays that examine theories of diaspora, particularly as it intersects with gender and sexuality, focusing on the specificities of diaspora for authors from South East Asia and South Asia. Using these theories as frameworks, the course will consider several novels, short stories, films, and websites that depict Asians no longer located in what the authors might consider their homes. Framed by critical theory about race, ethnicity, sex and gender, discussions will focus specifically on ways in which they are articulated within these texts. The first novel, Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia, will be read and discussed on blackboard before the class commences.
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In recent years historians have developed a new technique called microhistory for capturing the lives of the people who have been lost to historyÂpeasants, heretics, poor women, gays, and con-conformists of all sorts. These were the people who because of their low social status, rural origins, illiteracy, or unpopular beliefs were ignored, despised, or persecuted by the dominant society. Microhistory is a method of investigation that usually relies on the evidence from judicial trials of otherwise obscure people who found themselves in trouble with the authorities. The method gives a voice to those who otherwise left no written record of their lives. The result of these studies has been a remarkable re-evaluation of the experiences and beliefs of the common people of pre-modern Europe. Microhistory gives life to an otherwise lost world.
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This freshman seminar will examine the U.S.-Mexico border from multiple perspectives. The border is both a barrier dividing two countries and a gate that links them. The surrounding region, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of California, is also home to millions of Mexicans and Americans. Through historical narratives, film, art, and music, our course will seek to build a layered understanding of what the border has meant across time, space, and various media. We will discuss efforts to define the borderlands as a bound geographic region encompassing the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-PeñaÂs claim that borders exist everywhere, and the ways in which writers have used the term to describe a wide range of phenomena. We will pay attention to the ways in which recent discussions about the U.S.-Mexico border have focused narrowly on immigration; we will also explore how artists, musicians, writers, and scholars from Mexico and the United States have used the border to engage rich inquiries about empire, human rights, labor, gender relations, cultural processes, and race and ethnicity. Approaching the U.S.-Mexico border from several disciplinary perspectives, this course will also provide an opportunity to explore the meanings, potential, and limits of interdisciplinary work.
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Abraham Lincoln is remembered as one of the greatest heroes of American history. But what do we really know about Lincoln, and how do we know it? In this course we will explore Lincoln's life and writings, and we will also look at how people have understood Lincoln since his death. We will focus on Lincoln's biography, his stance on slavery and emancipation, and his understanding of presidential power in wartime. We will also ask what we can learn about the United States from representations of Lincoln in monuments, music, and films. We will visit the Chicago History Museum and, if schedules permit, Lincoln sites in Springfield, Illinois.
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