Electives: Fall 2004

H327 History of Cinema / Hoberman / W 6-9, TH 6-8
H331 Eros in Antiquity / Stieber / F 10-1
H347 Philosophy of Mathematics / Richardson / M 9-11, W 11-12
H354 Journalism / Brewster / M 6-9
H356 Issues in Contemporary Fiction: Autobiography / Sayres / W 6-9
H373A Seminar in Humanities (Topic: "Hybrids, Wonders, Miscreants, Freaks: Literary Monstrosity") / Hyman / M 3-6
H373B Seminar in Humanities (Topic: "The Realist Aesthetic in Art and Literature") / Bartelik / W 2-5
H377 General Linguistics / Weir / T 11-12, TH 9-11
H378 From the Modernist to the Postmodern Novel / Jeannet / T 11-12, TH 9-11
S321 American Presidency / Kim / W 6-9
S332 Politics and Collective Memory / Griffin / M 9-11, W 11-12
S334 Microeconomics / Sarich / T 6-9
S337 American Foreign Policy / Siegel / M 9-11, W 11-12
S345 R.G. Brown Seminar (Topic: "American Environmentalism") / Super / T 6-9
S358 Topics in Social History: "Food" / Buckley / T 11-12, TH 9-11
S361 Urban Archaeology / Janowitz / TH 6-9
S362 Study of Popular Culture / Stange / M 6-9
S369 Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory / Waxenberg / T 11-12, TH 9-11
S371 Women and Men: Power and Politics / Grossmann / T 9-12

H327 History of Cinema

This course surveys the history of the motion picture, along with some of the discourses it inspired, from the nickelodeon period through the late 20th century, considering avant-garde, documentary, and commercial films, with particular emphasis on the movie as urban entertainment and expression of modernity. Important figures include D.W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Dziga Vertov, Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Wells, Maya Deren, Alfred Hitchcock, Stan Brakhage, and Jean-Luc Godard. The theory of film spectatorship developed by the surrealists will be given particular attention.

Taking its cue from literature=s most famous drinking party, the Around-table@ debate about the nature of Eros in Plato=s Symposium, this course will focus on love in the ancient world, from Egypt through late Roman/early Christian times, with the major emphasis on Greece. Evidence will be drawn from the stories told by the poets, playwrights and visual artists of the love lives of gods and mortals, as well as from documents based upon real life, in order to explore the range of ancient attitudes toward married, heterosexual love and homosexuality, fidelity and infidelity, sexuality vs. asexuality, the body and the mind, and the roles of the sexes in various kinds of erotic relationships. Our aim is to seek in both the words and images of the ancients ways to understand the wide variety of their opinions about love, some of which are vastly different from our own, others, surprisingly similar. Readings drawn from, e.g., Sappho, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid will be supplemented by slides and video.

The common conception of mathematics is defined by several features: our experience of mathematical results bears a degree or kind of certainty different from conclusions drawn from empirical observation; mathematical knowledge is established by proof rather than evidence; this means mathematics bears some relation to deductive formal logic; mathematical knowledge bears a kind of objectivity not found in our knowledge of other things; all this must depend in some manner on the kind of thing known in mathematics, which things are abstract rather than concrete, etc. Given this conception, the philosophy of mathematics is an attempt to give a theory that explains these facts, or to explain them away. This happens principally in the debate concerning the foundations of mathematics that began in the late 19th century and extends to today, which is divided between three basic positions: logicism, intuitionism, and formalism. The questions under consideration are formulated in relation to the common conception: 1) what is the status of mathematical knowledge; 2) in what manner do mathematical objects exist, and what are they; 3) what is the relation that bears between mathematical knowledge and its objects, and is this relation different than that between empirical knowledge and its objects; and 4) what is the relation between formal languages and natural languages? The figures under consideration will include Brouwer, Cantor, Dedekind, Frege, Hilbert, Husserl, Kant, Putnam, Quine, Russell, Von Neumann, and Wittgenstein.

In this course, students will become acquainted with some of the essential skills of the journalist’s profession: a keen sense of observation; an ability to convey difficult concepts in accessible prose; an understanding of the historical role of journalism in American society; a willingness to grapple with contemporary challenges through critique and reportage; and an ease with the art of storytelling. Journalism is, at its most elemental, storytelling, both guided and limited by truth. Students will be asked to do a substantial amount of writing in this class: some will be based upon students= informed opinions; other writings will come from reporting projects which the student will initiate. We will read and critique the work of contemporary journalists, dissect the art of documentary filmmaking through regular classroom screenings, visit a modern television news department; and, occasionally, enjoy the wisdom of surprise guest speakers. Join us.

This semester the topic for “Issues in Contemporary Fiction” is the first person narrator, broadly understood as the author. We will be reading, watching films, and writing our own short explorations in this very lively genre, now often called “auto-fiction.” There will be many aspects of these self-creations, self-portraitures to discuss: the nature of memory, witnessing, contesting, confessional forms, of offering exemplary tales, of grappling with the world through its tragical, comedic, satiric or farcical aspects; the reasons why we are reluctant to or why we must, what it means to reconceive a life through stylization, what it means to resist—and many more such concerns.

This class takes up the notion of modern monstrosity in fictional form, exploring its manifestations, permutations and implications in British and American texts from the 18th century through our own time, We will think about the monster as a construct of the social, the historical, the political, the economic- as an amalgam of popular anxieties and fears, a return of what is repressed, a lightning rod. What does the monster reveal about the world it terrorizes or saves? What do we project on the screen of monstrosity, and why, and to what effect? In the course of our reading, we will take up monstrosities of many kinds: of too much science and too little; of colonialism and its effects; of gender and of race; of repression and war and government. We will think about freaks and grotesques and aliens and boys next door, as they are written into monstrosity across the modern era in England and America.

The class will examine realism in the US, Europe, Russia and other parts of the world as a multi-disciplinary phenomenon and “method,” focusing on the visual arts, literature, photography, and film, and spanning the period between the early nineteenth century and the present. It will present realism as both an aesthetic and an ideology. The class will investigate the meaning of “the truthful representation of life” and “the vanishing of reality,” relating those phenomena to a number of texts. The class will also analyze the meaning of ideology, censorship, and irony in the context of art praxis and dissemination of art. Additional attention will be paid to the place of the Other viewed as a challenge to the political, ethnic, and cultural heterogeneity of the mainstream society. In-class discussions will be framed around readings of primary sources, critical texts, and fiction writings dealing with realism.

This course is an introduction to three major approaches to language: the study of diachronic changes in language as a historical phenomenon; the synchronic or structuralist analysis of language as system; and the examination of the cognitive or psychological features of language as a biological event in human evolution. The study of diachronic linguistics (or how languages change over time) will begin with the problem of defining natural language, and then focus on the various systems used to classify and describe the world’s languages. This part of the course will include brief descriptions of several ancient and modern languages, including Latin, Old English, Mandarin, KiSwahili, and pre-Columbian Mayan, among others. The study of synchronic linguistics (the analysis of language as a system) will proceed from a reading of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1915) to a discussion of some of the linguistics-based theories (structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction) that have developed in the human sciences as a result of Saussure’s ideas. The third part of the course will focus on Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar and on recent extrapolations of that theory by cognitive psychologists that have led to the new discipline of biolinguistics. Course requirements: a mid-term examination, a 10 page paper, occasional quizzes and exercises.

This course will deal with some of the changes that occurred in literature between the modernist and the post-modern eras, within the western canon.

Throughout the twentieth century, the novel has changed considerably and almost constantly, before and after the two World Wars, the colonial and post-colonial wars of independence, the revolutions that ensued and the emergence of new literatures. This course will deal with the following issues: is there an evolution and a logical “genetic” transformation of the novel as a genre from Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner to Lowry, Beckett Michel Butor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nathalie Sarraute, Jose Lezama Lima or Thomas Bernhard, to take but a few examples? Or is each of these authors’ endeavour entirely original and different from others? Up to what point can one speak of evolution in literature as one would of the local chain of research, in the exact or natural sciences, where one discovery may lead to another? Is great literature the product of preceding art, its assimilation and transformation, or the result of a rebellion against tradition?

In general, this course seeks to apply theories and concepts from political science to the American executive branch. It will examine (among other things) the theoretical basis of executive power, the relationship between the executive and other branches of government, and the strategies of the candidates during an election period.

The notion of a collective memory is frequently invoked, but it is examined far less often. Yet a common public memory often plays an essential role in establishing national and social identitites, justifying public and communal institutions, representing past reality, and influencing political decisions. Although it often arises spontaneously, it is perhaps more frequently the product of official, authoritative efforts to control public sentiment. There has been a growing interest in collective memory in recent years as today’s scholars seek to revisit the cataclysm of World War II and to examine the construction of public memory in its aftermath; there have also been efforts to recall and identify some of the communities destroyed by these events.

This course will consider some of the theoretical understandings of collective memory and also focus on examples of the roles it has played in recent political history. Special attention will be paid to the function of a common memory in shaping the politics of identity.

This course presents an overview of the principles of economics B scarcity and choice; supply and demand; output and price. It utilizes marginal analysis as well as theories of the firm. It considers the market system in terms of both its virtues and vices. It focuses especially on the distribution of income and the labor market of the United States but also includes a section on the stock and bond markets. In addition, it covers the role of government in the economy.

The twentieth century has been defined by a series of challenges to Western liberalism. Earlier challenges came from fascism and communism. The most recent challenge has come from Islamists and terrorist movements on the one hand and the European Union on the other. This course will look at American foreign policy since the collapse of Communism.

This interdisciplinary course explores perspectives on the relationships between humans and the natural world that have become deeply rooted in our national culture and consciousness. Starting with a brief historical overview, we will consider the ideological foundations of environmentalism, including Native American ethics and the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, as well as the early U.S. conservation movements associated with John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot. We will proceed to survey important 20th-century ideas in environmental philosophy and policy as expressed through classic works of social criticism, advocacy, law, economics, literature, art and popular culture. Counter-environmentalist movements will also be considered. Major topics and themes include wilderness, land use, pollution, animal rights, vegetarianism, sustainability, radical environmentalism, environmental justice, consumption vs. conservation, and individual liberty vs. the common good.

This course presents a social history of food from the Renaissance to the Present. It will employ two methods; the first uses labor and ecological history to begin an investigation of the ways various food stuffs—sugar, coffee, corn, chocolate, rice and the humble potato—transformed European habits of consumption as well as changing the nature of labor in the colonies. The second track is more anthropological and cultural in focus. We will look at what food “means” and has meant to people in various settings, how, for instance, eating has been ritualized in dinners and feasts and how it has been placed in the changing economy of desire. Students will be required to complete three projects: the development of a joint bibliography of food history, a research paper on one particular food material not covered in the readings, and one paper on a food custom or folkway.

This course will be an introduction to the field of urban archaeology in general and to the archaeology of New York City in particular; it will also introduce students to the requirements of legally mandated cultural resource management projects. The emphasis will be on archaeological excavations that have taken place within New York City, in particular Lower Manhattan. The course will consist of class lectures, walking tours of several neighborhoods, and field trips to museums.

This course studies popular culture in a primarily twentieth-century context. Using both creative and theoretical texts, it considers developments in contemporary popular culture including the rise of mass media and consumerism, the elaboration of pop-cultural theory, and the trend toward multiculturalism. We will sharpen our critical perspective on our cultural surroundings by questioning boundaries between the popular and other cultural categories, notions of creativity in the high and popular arts, and the bases of our own preferences.

This course is intended to introduce students to forms of psychoanalytic thinking and theory making. We will trace the development of psychoanalytic ideas beginning with foundational texts by Freud, Ferenczi, and Klein, proceeding to our responses to classical theory from Horney, Winnicott, and Lacan, among others. In our discussions, attention will be paid to ways different theorists conceptualize and invoke psychoanalysis as a theory of mind, research tool, therapeutic process, and utopian vision.

The course offers an introduction to women’s and gender studies, and to feminist theory. Students will engage in an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which gender (that is, femininity and masculinity) has been constructed by visual media, literature, political theory, and social, political, and economic institutions; the historical bases for these constructions, and the activism that challenges some of these gender constructs. We will pay particular attention to the interlocking of gender with other forms of hierarchy, including race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, that are constructed in culture. We will read “classic” texts and current scholarship in works of literature, film, history, social science, postmodern and queer theory.