| source Northwestern (X) |
level |
department Freshman Seminars for Winter 2008-2009 (X) |
This seminar will debate key issues surrounding the Aztecs. Is written evidence or archaeological evidence the best source of knowledge on Aztec culture? Were the Aztecs an advanced culture? Did the Aztec Empire promote the well-being of commoners? Was the Aztec Empire maintained by force? Were Aztec women oppressed? Why did the Aztecs practice human sacrifice? Did overpopulation in the Valley of Mexico lead to ecological destruction before the Spaniards arrived? Does the conquest of the Aztecs by the Spanish demonstrate the superiority of Western civilization? Is knowledge of Aztec culture important for people of Mexican ancestry (or people not of Mexican ancestry)? Does Aztec spirituality have something to offer Americans today? The class will include a required trip to the Field Museum to view The Aztec World, an exhibit of Aztec life curated by Dr. Brumfiel in association with other Aztec scholars in the United States and Mexico.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
This year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwins 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 Darwins time to the many questions that persist today.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
There are two books to read for this class. Each class will have a student discussion leader or two on each reading assignment. The discussion topics can be science issues, history related (the black hole book), or how you found the writing (e.g. exceptionally good or bad, and give examples and talk about why). At the end of the quarter, the discussion time will be replaced by 10 minute presentations by each student.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
The ancient Greeks founded Western civilization as an exercise of reason and rationality, but their writings show an equal fascination with the irrational: for every Apollo a Dionysus. Their poetry, their religion, their philosophies--all pay equal honor both to reason and to madness and intoxication. This course will sample some foundational Western writings on madness in order to examine this apparent paradox. Topics to be discussed will include the importance of wine in Greek and Roman culture, the role of irrational thought in Greek mythology, the roots of drama in Dionysian religious observance, and the presence of madness at the heart of all personal poetry. Class time will focus heavily on analysis and discussion with lectures devoted mainly to putting the readings into their historical, cultural, and literary contexts. All readings will be in English, but many ancient Greek terms will be learned. Texts will include Homer, several tragedies, Plato, Epicurus, Plutarch, Horace, Ovid, and the archaic Greek poets, as well as some secondary literature, including Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. There will be significant analytical writing required and a final research paper.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
"This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other." So begins the first Western work of historiography, Herodotus' account of the unsuccessful attempts of the Persians to conquer Greece. Geographer, ethnographer, historian, and story-teller par excellence, Herodotus takes his time before getting to his main story, the events culminating in the battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. He tells you about the origin of the Persian empire in the borderlands of modern Iraq and Iran, its spread into Turkey, Egypt, and the Russian steppe, but wherever he goes, he displays his insatiable curiosity about the variety and sameness of people in different places. No other ancient text gives you a similarly comprehensive and generous account of the Mediterranean world and its Eastern hinterlands. We will talk our way through this book with the help of Robert Strassler's Landmark Herodotus. The many maps and notes of this edition make it much easier to find your way around the people and places of the narrative.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
Over 200 years ago Adam Smith suggested that there is an invisible hand that, without government intervention, guides a competitive market to a level of production and consumption that maximizes net economic benefits. Yet governments often do intervene in many markets that seem to be inherently competitive, often by imposing taxes, granting subsidies, regulating prices or product quality, or limiting production quantities. Why do governments intervene? What are the economic grounds for such intervention? Who wins and who loses, and how are the lines for debate drawn in public policy discussions? We will examine these questions with current examples drawn from the banking, agricultural, energy, transportation, telecommunications, and housing sectors.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
Magic was often staged by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in two basic forms: (1) witchcraft, a crime associated with subversive female sexuality; and (2) occult philosophy, a masculine practice linked to controversial alchemical metamorphoses. This course will explore how the European witch craze and the flourishing of pseudo-scientific discourses took shape in the Renaissance playhouse. Together we will analyze how the performance of curses, conjurations, and miraculous transformations incited fear and wonder in playgoers who held firm beliefs in the supernatural. (Indeed, according to one contemporary report, the unexpected appearance of an extra devil during a performance of Marlowes Dr. Faustus sent the cast and playgoers fleeing in terror!) We will also strive to understand how the dramatic energy generated by magic spectacle was used to address other Renaissance concerns such as family, nationhood, art and language.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
As recent headlines have made clear, financial crises are continually recurring and devastating phenomena in American history. Less clear, even to economists, is how they happen, how they may be prevented, why institutions and individuals respond to them the way they do, and what financial panics may suggest about prevailing social, economic, and cultural values. This course looks at depictions of actual and imagined financial crises in 20th century American literature and addresses the ways in which literary narratives, opposed to economic journalism, try to explain to wide non-specialist audiences how complicated economic transactions are made and how they can go terribly wrong. In doing so, these narratives also present incisive critiques of entrenched American institutions and myths such as the American Dream, the free-enterprise ethos, self-reliance, the social ladder, Manifest Destiny, and a non-imperial foreign policy. We will consider the role literature played in shaping public opinion regarding economic policies, as well as consider the complex relationship between how the economy is described in fiction and documentaries, and how these kinds of descriptions in turn influence investors and creditors who read them.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
Everyone knows that the American dream is wrapped up in the idea of having a perfect home. So why is American literature so haunted by the unhappiness a home can cause? Desperate Housewives are the subject of television's most popular contemporary series, but they're also recurring figures in American novels. This course will ask: what makes desperate housewives so interesting-so funny, so scary, so sad and sometimes, so powerful? What's special about the idea of a woman destroying--or being destroyed by--her home? How do stories change when it's the men who are desperate? We'll start with the television show's pilot, and then explore the ways its themes-home, loyalty, money, status, gender, family, politics, and desperation-emerge differently in gothic, sentimental, realist, modernist, and contemporary novels.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar will take up several of the most popular plays written during the reign of Elizabeth I. We will read the works of many different playwrightsnot just Shakespeareas we focus on the theater itself in Renaissance England. We will explore the interanimating relationship between Elizabethan theatrical performance and the culture in which it took place. How did the theaters operate in this culture, and who went to them? How were playing companies organized, and where did the playwright fit in? How do these plays draw attention to the theater itself, and why does this meta-theatricality matter? How does this sort of information help us, as modern readers, enhance our understanding of these plays? These are only some of the questions we will consider as we think about and discuss Elizabethan theater.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
When adolescence emerged during the nineteenth century as a separate and distinct state of being, it brought with it a new genre of literature that shaped and modified Western culture's expectations of the teenage years. YA literature has responded strongly-and often radically-to contemporary social issues, such as violence, sexuality, racism, and the evolving family. This course will examine the history of adolescence through a study of YA literature. Throughout, we will consider how and why definitions of what it means to be a "young adult" have changed.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
Since its conspicuous intrusion onto the literary scene during the nineteenth century, detective fiction has been a genre readers return to over and over again; its conventional mysteries offer an endless source of entertainment, while its equally conventional plots provide the satisfaction of arriving at an ultimate, if difficult, Truth. Paying particular attention to the relationship between form and content, this class will investigate how detective narratives instantiate and/or undermine notions of coherent, knowable identities. Reading both classic and contemporary authors, we will approach themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the (de)construction of that epitome of enlightened rationality: the Detective.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
There is no consensus as to when the Enlightenment began or when it ended. Enlightenment cannot be defined as a narrow set of philosophical principles or ideals. The term generally refers to eighteenth century French philosophy, but the movement spread throughout much of Europe, including Russia and Scandinavia. The Enlightenment, les Lumières, Aufklärung. In Shadows of Enlightenment, we will explore the movement, the attitudes, and the philosophical outlook that led the century to question so critically and insistently traditional customs and institutions. The readings are selected from various media including poetry, drama, fiction, autobiographical memoirs, and philosophical treatise. There are no prerequisites for this class. All texts are in English.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
In collective memory the shtetl (small Jewish town) has become enshrined as the symbolic space par excellence of close-knit, Jewish community in Eastern Europe; it is within this idealized shtetl that the international blockbuster Fiddler on the Roof is enacted. Our image of the shtetl derives from Yiddish literature; Fiddler on the Roof itself was based on a Sholem Aleichem story. In this seminar we shall analyze the varying depictions of the shtetl in Yiddish literature from the nineteenth century to the post-Holocaust period. We shall also focus on artistic and photographic representations of the shtetl. The seminar will include a screening of Fiddler on the Roof followed by a discussion of this film based upon a comparison with the text upon which it is based, Tevye the Milkman.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar will focus on womens experiences of the French Revolution, from the politically tumultuous years of the pre-Revolution to the passage of the Napoleonic Code in 1804. Many scholars have viewed this period as one of the most formative and, alas, destructive eras in womens history, as gender roles became politicized to an unprecedented degree and women came to be relegated definitively to the margins of a new, masculine bourgeois public sphere. And yet, the French Revolution may also be seen as a golden age for womens active involvement in national politics, when they were able to draw advantage from the social and political upheavals of the age to carve out a new space for themselves as integral players in the Revolutionary drama. It is this complex phenomenon that we will be exploring during the course of this seminar.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
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. We will also look at how people have memorialized Lincoln, beginning during his own lifetime. What can histories, poetry, monuments, and films about Lincoln tell us about changing understandings of American history, the presidency, slavery, and the Civil War? We will explore Chicago Lincolniana--streets, schools, parks, monuments, and museums--and if schedules permit, we will visit Springfield.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
For many years, and for Americans from across the political spectrum, Ronald Reagan has been the face of the Republican Party, and the figure most associated with its rise to power since the 1970s. While most Americans agree that Reagan was a transformative figure, many disagree sharply on his record and legacy. This course examines Reagan's role in U.S. politics and culture, from his Hollywood years to his California governorship in the 1960s and 70s and on through his presidency and post-presidential years, including his continued influence today. We will discuss a range of materials, including Reagan's speeches and diary entries, reporting on Reagan and commentaries about him, memoirs and books by his critics and admirers, even his films. Through such sources we will seek to better understand this controversial figure and what he reveals about recent American life and politics.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
At the beginning of the twentieth century Italian Futurism, a radical, innovative movement of revolutionary poets and artists, spread revolutionary ideas that are the root of many avant-garde movements. Italian Futurists incited street riots to proclaim the destruction of all museums and libraries, the right to absolute freedom of expression, free sex, the abolition of marriage and all cultural traditions, and scorn for parliamentary politics and romanticism. Their path-breaking artistic practices marked all European avant-garde revolutions and influenced contemporary avant-garde expressions, including Pop Art, Arte Povera, and the Punk movement. In this course, we will explore the philosophical and aesthetic undercurrents of Futurism and investigate to what extend its ideas and practices are still relevant for us today. The course takes into consideration different aesthetic and expressive forms, such as visual art, literature, and music.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
Are there Extra Dimensions under your bed? Current theories of Space-Time and their relation to mathematics and experimental physics. Particle physics, the Universe, Grant Unified Theories.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
We often hear that (t)he test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). The popular and scientific press are chock-full of exciting information about the remarkable capacities of infants and young children. But what about the invisible children of our nation, the 13 million children growing up in poverty? In this seminar, we will focus on these children, and on a side of America that is all too often ignored or shunned. What is life like for children growing up in poverty in America? What are the consequences for the children, their families, and our nation of growing up poor? How has our nation responded to the challenges posed by children in poverty? What more can be done? How much should be done? Students will take advantage of a wide variety of academic and not-so-academic resources (including research articles, popular press books, guided interviews with children and with agency representatives, observation, and documentary films) to explore these issues and to discover the consequences of a dream deferred.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will examine the sociological story of black social life in America in the early to mid-twentieth century. Using classic sociological texts, we will explore the racial, sexual, class and gender contexts in which these popular novels were produced. We will pay special attention to the representation of regions and communities the role they (do or do not) play in the overall story. Using these novels as a source of evidence and data, we will also seek to complicate the conventional historical /sociological story of that time, including the segregated South, the Great Migration(s) and life in northern cities.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page
Why are some diseases so dangerous? What makes societies vulnerable to epidemic disease? How do pathogens exploit these vulnerabilities? In this course we use the tools of epidemiologists to examine epidemics from the germs perspective, and the tools of social scientists to think about epidemics from the societal perspective. Course topics include avian flu, HIV/AIDS, and cholera in John Snows London.
Score: 12.612895 Details | Listing | Web page