University Bulletin 2001-02
Objectives
The University Seminars in Humanistic Inquiries (USEM) are special courses specifically designed for first-year students and intended as a foundation for their studies at Brandeis. The primary objective is to offer a small seminar environment where students, under the close guidance of faculty, can engage major texts from ancient times to the present. The topics and texts of the seminars are extremely broad-ranging and come from every school of the University; such diversity allows students and faculty to focus on subjects in which they have a particular interest. The seminars are also quite consciously interdisciplinary: although taught by faculty from regular departments, the seminars seek to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and to address important problems from a much broader perspective. That approach is indeed integral to the mission of humanistic inquiry, which seeks to address fundamental and enduring questions of human existence.
The seminars are also skill-oriented. At one level, they seek to develop writing and analytical skills; seminar discussions, under faculty guidance, will help students to formulate key questions and to construct a critical analysis of the author's assumptions, evidence, and argumentation.
University Seminars that are designated as "USEM+W" (e.g. USEM 90a+W) may be used to satisfy Option I of the first year writing requirement. These courses provide an additional hour of writing instruction per week and periodic individual tutorials under the guidance of a trained teaching assistant. This targeted writing instruction should appeal particularly to students who wish to sharpen the writing skills required for academic work at the University, as well as for their later professional careers.
Courses of Instruction
USEM 1b Jewish Literatures in Eastern Europe
Enrollment limited to 17.
The emergence of a modern literary consciousness was one of the results of the breakup of traditional Jewish society. We examine some of the leading Jewish writers in Eastern Europe who wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, or Russian.
Mr. Polonsky
USEM 2a Bad Girls
Enrollment limited to 17.
Explores our fascination with the bad girl. As a character and a social type, the bad girl turns up throughout Western culture in a variety of guises and toward a number of ends. Sugar and spice and everything nice?
Ms. Harder
USEM 3a Nature and Natural Law
Enrollment limited to 17.
Students in this course will analyze and discuss material concerning the concept of the natural, its immutability or alterability, and the ethical and religious questions posed by the concept of a natural law. Authors to be read include Cicero, Philo of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas, Clarence Thomas, Pope John II, and Elizabeth Minnick.
Ms. Brooten
USEM 3b Color--Art and Science
Enrollment limited to 17.
How do we experience and express color in our own lives and in the natural world, and in painting, literature, music, and language? How do we see, perceive and describe color? How is this evolving? And is our human experience unique?
Mr. Henchman
USEM 4b Becoming an Educated Person
Enrollment limited to 17.
We will read texts about education from a variety of cultures, eras, and individuals in an attempt to help students reflect upon the central issues of their experience at Brandeis. Questions we will ask include: How do we learn? What do we learn? Why? Who teaches us? What is the role of writing and the printed word in different educational traditions? Is the purpose of education to transmit or to change culture, or both? Students will be asked to define their own educational goals for college and beyond within the context of writings from Plato to Dewey, and from Australia to Senegal.
Ms. Hale
USEM 4b+W Becoming an Educated Person
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
See USEM 4b for course description.
Ms. Hale
USEM 5b Conceptions of the "Good Life"
Enrollment limited to 17.
This course explores competing conceptions of the "good life" and of moral right and how these conceptions vary within different cultural periods in history; it also explores standards for what is good and for justifying claims that one way of life is better than another. Included are conceptions of the "good life" as pleasure (Epicurus), as virtuous activity (Aristotle), as renunciation, as reason (Kant), as utilitarianism (J.S. Mill), as self-assertion (Nietzsche), as faith (Kierkegaard), as aesthetics, and as spirituality.
Ms. Hayim
USEM 6a+W Anatomy and Gender from Antiquity to Modern Times
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
This seminar traces changing perceptions of the body and sexual difference from the ancients to Freud and Foucault. It examines relations between men and women, notions of gender and sexualities, and the social construction of decent and indecent behavior in Western culture.
Ms. Kelikian
USEM 7a The Twentieth-Century Political Novel
Enrollment limited to 17.
Novelists have illumined the ethical complexity and the ideological pressures entangled in political choices. Such texts can also be read as showing how political acts are heightened versions of the tragic limitations embedded in social experience.
Mr. Whitfield
USEM 7b+W The Concept of Time
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Explores the changing concept of time from human and scientific points of view. Topics include ancient and medieval view of time, the Newtonian concept of universal time, and changes brought by relativity and quantum mechanics.
Mr. Bensinger
USEM 8a Textual Transformations
Enrollment limited to 17.
This course examines how literature responds, internally and externally, to the challenge that change poses for the individual and society. Metamorphosis, the transformation of one object into another, will be the primary focus within each text studied, but considerable time will also be spent in determining how each text relates to the others with which it shares characters, plots, and themes. As we will read multiple versions of a few particular stories, only students with a tolerance for repetition and an appreciation for variation should consider enrolling.
Ms. Walker
USEM 8b Ancient Lives
Enrollment limited to 17.
The lives of others hold for us a compelling fascination, perhaps because others seemed to have solved the problems of identity, of separation from and integration with society and of shaping life into a coherent whole. The readings in this course focus on sharply depicted characters with the dual purpose of understanding how the techniques of literature inform their subject and of learning what ancient authors valued in humanity.
Ms. Walker
USEM 9a+W The Wandering Hero in Ancient Literature
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Focuses on the Epic of Gilgamesh. We examine such issues as friendship, social responsibility, the meaning of life, mortality and immortality, the difference between the human and divine. We also read texts from Mesopotamia, Greece, Israel, and Canaan, which intersect literally and thematically with the epic, such as: The Odyssey, Genesis, Aqhat, Ecclesiastes, and selected Sumerian narratives.
Mr. Abusch
USEM 10b Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic
Enrollment limited to 17.
Explores the role of mathematics and mathematicians through works of biography, philosophy, popular science, drama, and fiction.
Mr. Diamond
USEM 11a Risk: What Is It and How Do We Deal With It?
Enrollment limited to 17.
Risk has been an important feature of our lives for thousands of years. However analyzing risk in a formal way has been an exercise of the last few hundred years - with most of that limited to the last 50. What is "risk" and how has our understanding changed over the centuries? How are the decisions of individuals, groups, and societies altered in risky circumstances? We look at elementary probability, statistics and decision models, puzzles, and real world applications.
Mr. Dolbear
USEM 12b Not for the Fainthearted
Enrollment limited to 17.
Does "human nature" really mean white, middle-class, and male? How have various writers from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison dealt with issues of social, gender, and racial inequality? Authors to be read include Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Malcolm X. Films are also used.
Ms. Harth
USEM 12b+W Not for the Fainthearted
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
See USEM 12b for course description.
Ms. Harth
USEM 13a America in Black and White: A History of Race in the Workplace.
Enrollment limited to 17.
This seminar examines the relations between whites and African Americans from the earliest colonial settlements to late 20th-century postindustrial society. Special attention is paid to the encounters between black and white women and men in the work place. Texts include autobiographies, novels, and essays, as well as legal statutes, labor contracts, court cases, and government reports.
Ms. Jones
USEM 14a Imagining the Other: Encounters in North America from Columbus to the Revolution
Enrollment limited to 17.
Using North America after Columbus as a case study, this course examines the problems of understanding and representing people across cultural frontiers. The seminar focuses on the various ways authors have explored and defined boundaries of race, ethnicity, and gender.
Ms. Kamensky
USEM 15a Journeys to Enlightenment
Enrollment limited to 17.
Literature often symbolizes the meaning of existence as a journey from error to truth, from affliction to freedom and enlightenment. Works by Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Blake, Baudelaire, Hesse, and Hurston will illustrate visions of human existence that have been entertained from the Middle Ages to the present.
Mr. Kaplan
USEM 15a+W Journeys to Enlightenment
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
See USEM 15a for course description.
Mr. Kaplan
USEM 16b Science and Western Culture
Enrollment limited to 17.
The development of science since the 16th century has had a significant influence on Western culture, and Western culture has had a crucial influence on the development of science. We analyze these influences from both perspectives.
Mr. Pendleton
USEM 17b Representations of the City in Literature, Art, and Architecture
Enrollment limited to 17.
The city is an artifact housing a community of anonymous persons, one that has carried great creative and destructive potential across the ages. Works of the imagination--in literature, theology, and architecture--expose unquantifiable dimensions of that potential. We examine 10 such works with a view to what the city has been, is today, and can become.
Mr. Makiya
USEM 18a+W Understanding Evil and Human Destiny
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
This seminar is designed to introduce students to some of the Western classics that deal with the impact of evil on human destiny. Suffering, justice, and death will be studied in their relationship with God, the world, and history.
Mr. Kimelman
USEM 19a The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfection of our Nature
Enrollment limited to 17.
Eating is a necessity, yet we are forbidden to eat other human beings. Does this mean biology must admit something "immaterial," like a soul? What is the relationship between bio-logy and onto-logy, (Aristotle) the study of "being-qua-being"?
Mr. Yourgrau
USEM 20a How Do You Know What You "Know"?
Enrollment limited to 17.
I am fascinated by what we "know," but more so by how we know it to be true. We begin with the controversy of creation science versus evolution, two competing "truths." This controversy is all the more interesting because evolution is perceived as confronting religion. How did and do people react? We look at attempts to reconcile the two "truths" and to use the courts to force the issue. We end with what "truth" means.
Mr. DeRosier
USEM 20b Art and the Asian City: Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong
Enrollment limited to 17.
Studies the evolution of the urban environment in three modern Asian cities and its impact on the visual arts. Examines the city as the financial and cultural hub of the nation, as well as the site of clashing cultural identities, personal anxieties, and civic crises.
Ms. Wong
USEM 21b Language and Identity
Enrollment limited to 17.
Explores how who we are is reflected in the language we use and examines the ways in which language influences our perception of ourselves. Topics include the role of metaphor in the expression of identity, issues related to bilingualism, cultural identity, gender, and language.
Ms. Chevalier
USEM 22a+W Right and Left in Europe from 1900 to the Present
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Reviews the main political families of 20th-century Europe and their 19th-century ancestries. Using original texts, novels, and documentaries to examine the ideas and followers of each movement, it introduces the participants to analytical tools as well as to modern history.
Mr. Jankowski
USEM 23a Opera as Drama
Enrollment limited to 17.
This seminar explores the literary, theatrical, and musical dimensions of opera. The course may be organized in one of several ways, e.g., by historical period, by thematic considerations, by composer or group of composers, by librettist or librettists, or by literary sources.
Mr. Keiler
USEM 24a Greeks Bearing Gifts
Enrollment limited to 17.
Offers a metaphorical journey through several major literary works of the ancient Greeks to discover their artistic and philosophical contributions to Western thought. We focus on humanity, morality, and the enduring significance of these texts for our own moral consciousness.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow
USEM 25a+W Reading Between the Lines: Freedom of Conscience and Persecution
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Traces different cases of intellectual expression exercised under illiberal conditions of censorship and persecutions. Organized chronologically, beginning with Plato's account of his teacher's execution under Athenian democracy, and closing with 20th century reassessments of the freedoms of conscience and expression.
Mr. Sheppard
USEM 26a Property in the Information Age
Enrollment limited to 17.
Examines the history and future of such concepts as copyrights, copylefts, patents, licensing, public domain, fair-use, interfaces, caching, framing, work-for-hire, joint tenancy, digital cash, software freedom, upgrades, wares, electronic read-once books and DIVX movies, in a collective effort to understand what, exactly, is the information age doing to the core human idea of property.
Mr. Pollack
USEM 26b Everyday Activity
Enrollment limited to 17.
This seminar examines various frameworks for describing everyday activity. "Everyday activity" refers to such common behaviors as riding a subway, attending a movie, buying groceries, playing a CD, doing the laundry, and carrying on a conversation. The course will focus on models of skill acquisition and problem-solving, the nature of activity and planning, and the role of culture in everyday activity.
Mr. Alterman
USEM 27b Coming into One's Own: Sources of the Self in Modern Literature
Enrollment limited to 17.
With the collapse of the old imagery of hierarchy and harmony, individuals who have been cut loose from their social moorings require new images and symbols in order to orient themselves in the world. This course explores problems of acting in a world where the outward signs denoting inner life are no longer believed to be adequate and where definite limits and fixed principles are missing.
Mr. Teuber
USEM 28b Exploring the Boundaries of Identity: Family, Society, and the Construction of Selfhood
Enrollment limited to 17.
This course examines the family as an "embattled paradise": a site for the expression of love and power. Relationships between family members (parent and child, husband and wife, siblings) are examined historically and across the life cycle. Intersections between family and society in fostering and constraining autonomy are highlighted.
Ms. Antler
USEM 29a+W The Jewish Family: Past and Present
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Examines the transformation of the Jewish family in four different settings (Europe, America, North Africa, and the Middle East) from medieval to modern times, focusing primarily on the internal dynamics of family life and interaction with majority cultures.
Ms. Freeze
USEM 30b Development of Play, Art, and Creativity
Enrollment limited to 17.
This seminar will give students a sense of how psychological theory and research can help them understand creativity in art. The students will be encouraged to analyze and to integrate principles of human development and intrinsic motivation toward an understanding of how artistic creativity develops. Some classic writings regarding the theories and functions of play, intrinsic motivation, and the development of art will be included, as well as writings on artistic creativity.
Mr. Watson
USEM 31b Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East
Enrollment limited to 17.
Examines the relation between Islam and society in the Modern Middle East through reading and discussion of the writings of prominent Muslim thinkers and leaders. The focus is on Islam's reaction to modernity and on some social, economic, and political issues facing Islamic societies in our times.
Messrs. Levy or Mr. Nakash
USEM 32a Images of War in the Twentieth Century
Enrollment limited to 17.
War is what young boys glamorize, old men remember, poets celebrate, governments rally around, women cry about, and soldiers die in. The class investigates war and the vision of war at the front and on the homefront by looking at oral testimony, contemporary journalism, poetry and novels, still photography, cartoons, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, and music.
Ms. Moeller
USEM 32b Crime and Punishment in History
Enrollment limited to 17.
Examines how America and other Western political communities have defined, represented, and punished crime. Discusses diverse texts--speeches, court cases, memoirs, novels and films--to develop a critical historical perspective on such concepts as evil, responsibility, and justice.
Mr. Willrich
USEM 32b+W Crime and Punishment in History
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
See USEM 32b for course description.
Mr. Willrich
USEM 33b+W Revisioning the Classics: Then and Now
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Participants in this seminar will read works from the canon of Western civilization and then analyze how these works have been rewritten artistically and reinterpreted theoretically from a 20th-century perspective. It is hoped that, by listening to the dialogue that takes place across the centuries between major texts, students will come to a deeper understanding of some of the political, social, and philosophical ideas that have shaped contemporary thought.
Ms. Ratner
USEM 34a Confronting Poverty
Enrollment limited to 17.
Students will examine how poverty has been defined, understood, and portrayed over the past 150 years. Drawing on works of fiction, history, photography, sociology, psychology, oral history, and autobiography, class discussion will focus on the nature of generalizations about "the poor," the various literary and social science techniques used to describe poverty, interactions between the privileged and the disadvantaged, and the moral, ethical, and spiritual dilemmas raised by the condition of economic deprivation.
Mr. Terris
USEM 34b Agrarian Ideal and Rural Reality in America
Enrollment limited to 17.
Once, the American farmer embodied economic and political independence. A pastoral impulse persists among urban people. For the last two centuries, however, economic competition and suburban sprawl have undercut country life. Are healthy family farms and attractive rural landscapes mythical, doomed, or an enduring American dream?
Mr. Donahue
USEM 35b Cultural Conflicts Generated by Scientific Milestones
Enrollment limited to 17.
Scientific milestones have generated major controversies throughout history. Delves into conflicts generated by Galileo's dethroning of the earth, Darwinian evolution, the development of nuclear bomb power and the potential uses of the genome project and animal cloning.
Ms. White
USEM 36b Drama and Social Issues
Enrollment limited to 17.
What are the values and purposes of drama? We explore what drama can tell us about violence and sexuality, about political relationships, and about ourselves, through plays by writers from Sophocles to Calderón to Dorfman.
Ms. Fox
USEM 37a Myth and Prejudice: Social Attitudes about Language
Enrollment limited to 17.
As Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle knew well, the minute we speak, we are judged and categorized as to our social class, competence, and even intelligence. We examine the sources of some prevalent beliefs about language and ask whether the value judgments that many of us make on the basis of those beliefs stem from valid assumptions about language or from destructive myths that perpetuate prejudice.
Ms. Maling
USEM 37b Creation
Enrollment limited to 17.
This course will examine works of art from diverse cultures that reveal mythologies and legends of creation of the planet Earth and of the species Homo sapiens. We will then consider works of art that aid us in envisioning the act of creativity within an individual's accomplishments.
Ms. Scott
USEM 38b Beyond Reality: Utopias and Dystopias
Enrollment limited to 17.
Throughout Western history, utopian writing has served as a powerful means of criticizing existing societies. Explores these critiques by considering issues such as the relationship between urbanism and utopia, the idea of the "noble savage," utopian reactions to the industrial revolution, and sexual alterity as imagined in various works.
Mr. Febles
USEM 39a On the Road from Homer to Ridley Scott
Enrollment limited to 17.
The voyage has always played an important role in European and American literature and culture. This course analyzes the theme of the voyage as it occurs in written works and in films, pondering questions about why the trip is made and what the "road" in the trip means. Why, for example, does Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey embark on his trip? Or why do the title characters in Ridley Scott's film Thelma and Louise set off on theirs?
Mr. Randall
USEM 40a The Future of the Book
Enrollment limited to 17.
Is there a future for the book? Will the Internet destroy printing as we know it? Popular wisdom now claims that linear narrative is yielding to hypertext, and that books will give way to comic-book screenshots and virtual picto-novellas. This seminar suggests otherwise. We study the history of the book and the social and linguistic transformations accompanying print in society. We trace these revolutions, giving the student a greater understanding of how digital technologies create possibilities and their social and cultural consequences.
Mr. Pustejovsky
USEM 41b The Romantic Rebellion
Enrollment limited to 17.
During the Romantic period in England the values of the pastoral ideal and individualism were seen by many literary figures of the time to be in peril as a result of the industrial revolution and the creation of the urban consumer society. The ensuing Romantic Rebellion, fought in print and in the streets, will be followed from its inception 200 years ago up to the present and beyond.
Mr. Canter
USEM 42b Experiencing Statistical Thinking
Enrollment limited to 17.
This course will use reading, writing, and discussion, on the one hand, and experimentation, on the other, to delve into the role of statistical thinking in current life. Throughout the semester, we will experiment with materials whose analysis and description will require seminar participants to develop statistical concepts for themselves.
Messrs. Fraden or Lange
USEM 43b Speaking Truth to Power?: The Intellectual and Social Responsibility.
Enrollment limited to 17.
Study of key 19th- and 20th-century intellectuals and their precursors from classical antiquity and after, in terms of questions of commitment, responsibility, and complicity. Special one-time offering.
Mr. Sanders
USEM 44a I Spy: Ritual, Spectatorship, and Violence
Enrollment limited to 17.
This course focuses on a central aspect of Western culture: the connection between the I and the eye--the need to watch, to see and be seen; to peek and pry, to be a voyeur, to seek pleasure through watching.
Mr. Mandrell
USEM 45a Obligations of Social Solidarity
Enrollment limited to 17.
Do those who are more fortunate owe support to those who are less fortunate, and should the more fortunate be asked to transfer some portion of their comfort to mitigate the effects of social inequalities and the harshness of market outcomes? If so, how should these transfers be arranged? If not, why not? This seminar will consider differing answers to such questions from modern literature, social science, and social philosophy.
Mr. Ross
USEM 46b Cities and Cyberspace
Enrollment limited to 17.
How are cities and cyberspace related? How do anonymity and transiency, characteristics common to both, shape social identity and social relationships? These questions are addressed in an exploration of urbanism and the worlds of computer-mediated communication.
Mr. Jacobson
USEM 47b Growing Up and Growing Old: Concepts of Masculinity and the Adult Life Cycle
Enrollment limited to 17.
Using Erik Erikson's theory of the life cycle, we explore the difficult transitions in adult life and the various roles men play as they mature from adolescence into adulthood and old age. Topics include the creation of the autonomous self; the search for a vocation and success; the patterns of romance, intimacy, and parenthood; the mid-life crisis; old age; and the confrontation with death.
Mr. Holmberg
USEM 48b The Rational and Irrational
Enrollment limited to 17.
Rationality has often been viewed as humanity's most distinctive and prized possession. Reason is said to elevate us above other living things and to make human existence especially valuable. However critics and detractors have held that there is at bottom a core of irrationality that is indispensable to the meaning of our lives. We explore the scope and limits of human reason from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, and literature.
Mr. Hirsch
USEM 49a+W Text and Subtext
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
A close study of eight classics of Western literature and film that will explore how their surface contents connect with meanings that they convey only indirectly. The literary works to be examined range from Sophocles to Ibsen. Two film classics will be analyzed on the same basis.
Mr. Binion
USEM 50b Humor
Enrollment limited to 17.
Often thought of as light reading, humor can also be great literature. In this course we read and discuss humorous works by writers such as Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molière, and Mark Twain, among others.
Mr. Gessel
USEM 51a Faces: Understanding the Influence of Appearance on Social Perception and Social Development
Enrollment limited to 17.
An interdisciplinary examination of the ubiquity, origins, and consequences of using facial appearance to judge psychological attributes. Attention will be given to associations between facial appearance and character in literature and the arts, and to biological, social, and psychological analyses of these associations.
Ms. Zebrowitz
USEM 52a Race and Representation
Enrollment limited to 17.
As readers of literature and as viewers of film, do we have shared assumptions about the racial and ethnic identities encoded in the texts we receive? How do we learn to "read" categories such as "white," "ethnic," or "mixed," and how is this related to our status as citizens? In this course we will review narrative and cinematic strategies in 19th- and 20th-century texts, paying close attention to issues of assimilation and marginality, racialized constructions of gender, and the politics of interpretation.
Ms. Smith
USEM 53b Conflict and Concord in Near Eastern Myth
Enrollment limited to 17.
The course explores the themes of chaos and order, war and peace, sickness and wholeness, and death and life in various myths and related texts from ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, and Israel.
Mr. Wright
USEM 54a Ideas of Equality, Systems of Inequality
Enrollment limited to 17.
This seminar examines classic and contemporary accounts of equality and inequality in Western and non-Western societies. We first read influential philosophical texts on equality and inequality, and then confront these speculative accounts with empirical evidence from the ancient Near East and from so-called "egalitarian" societies. We locate the origins of an ideology of individual equality in the Western tradition and examine ways that obvious evidence of social inequality is rationalized in contemporary America.
Mr. Parmentier
USEM 55a Tales of Travel
Enrollment limited to 17.
Looks at the way travel creates meaning through writing, images, and film. Examines tales of fictional and non-fictional travelers in order to ponder themes of empire, tourism, national identity, natural history, and scientific imperialism.
Ms. Dávila
USEM 55b Music as Text
Enrollment limited to 17.
Is music a kind of text? We explore ways in which classical music conveys meaning by considering compositions based on other works of art (for example, an autobiography, novel, or painting). We consider the potential of music to narrate a story and investigate ways in which film uses classical music to help tell a story.
Ms. Owens
USEM 56b From Vitruvius to Venturi: Study of Architecture through Texts, Theories, and Treatises
Enrollment limited to 17.
Through texts as varied as the pattern books of Palladio; the memoir House by Tracy Kidder; the film and novel The Fountainhead; the life of Frank Lloyd Wright; the original notes of architects and the reviews by critics; we explore architecture from the ancient to the modern as a metaphor for other humanistic disciplines.
Mr. Bernstein
USEM 57a+W Freedom and Repression
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Looks at various models of freedom, as well as at how states engage in repression to preserve systems of privilege. Specific cases examine democracy in the United States, colonialism in Africa, and totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
Mr. Cunningham
USEM 57b Tomorrow is Another Africa
Enrollment limited to 17.
Humankind itself was born on the giant continent of Africa. Gloriously varied in background and environment, Africans face difficult challenges. Poverty persists. AIDS spreads. Many institutions are in disarray, the legacy of the slave trade, colonial rule, and of being the last to be incorporated in the world's systems of markets and states. We explore these challenges as Africans build for tomorrow.
Ms. Morgenthau
USEM 58b Animal Kingdoms
Enrollment limited to 17.
The term "animal kingdom" suggests an analogy between the human and animal worlds. We explore the meaning and significance of the analogy--aesthetically and ideologically--in a wide variety of cultural activities and artifacts. We focus on "high" and "popular" cultures.
Mr. Morrison
USEM 59a Majorities and Minorities
Enrollment limited to 17.
This course explores how political philosophers and practitioners from ancient Greece to the contemporary era have dealt with the problem of reconciling the rights of individuals, majority groups, and minorities in democratic political systems.
Mr. Burg
USEM 60b Art and the Bible
Enrollment limited to 17.
From prohibition to inspiration, the Bible has had a profound influence on the development of art. This course explores the rich and complex relationship between sacred text and image in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic art from antiquity to the present.
Mr. McClendon
USEM 61a Illness Narratives
Enrollment limited to 17.
How do people make sense of illness and caring for sick people through stories? Beginning with a historical overview of Western medicine, we analyze illness narratives as a coping device and a means to restore one's biography. The different viewpoints of health care providers and patients will be linked to the broader structural characteristics of the modern health care system.
Mr. Timmermans
USEM 61b+W Stigmatized Identities
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Society creates stigmas that can stain one's reputation. We examine sources and forms of stigmatization and managing stigmatized identities, focusing on deviance, disabilities, and the Hollywood "blacklist." We investigate stigma through text, film, and firsthand interviews.
Mr. Conrad
USEM 62b How Science Is Really Done
Enrollment limited to 17.
Science is seen by many as the "culture of our times," yet popular misconceptions about science abound. In this course we examine a variety of discoveries to learn how scientists actually go about their work and whether there exists, in fact, a "scientific method." We also discuss ways in which science as a creative activity is linked to pursuits in the humanities.
Ms. Cohen
USEM 63a The Work of Citizens
Enrollment limited to 17.
This course will examine the meanings of active citizenship as the foundation of democracy in America. It will examine classic texts, as well as speeches, documents, biblical inspiration, and "stories from the field" of contemporary civic action and democratic empowerment.
Mr. Sirianni
USEM 63b The Name of This Course Has Two Mistakes!
Enrollment limited to 17.
Figured it out? You will by the end if the course! The course covers in outline form a mathematical proof of certain limitations of what we can express in precise formal languages. For student interested in mathematical and logical problems.
Mr. Berger
USEM 64b Madness in Western Civilization
Enrollment limited to 17.
Explores the meaning of "madness" in Western civilization--how its definition changed over time, how societies have sought to address the problems it raises, and how it has been reflected in literature, art, and law.
Mr. Freeze
USEM 65a Eros and Marriage
Enrollment limited to 17.
Examines the way love and marriage are reflected in art especially in plays, novels, films, opera, essays, and poetry. Is marriage itself a work of art, unique and original or is it a conventional contract? Does marriage confine the self and make it socially useful or does it release new creative energy? What are the consequences for those who flout conventional sexual arrangements? These and other questions are explored through selected works.
Mr. Dowden
USEM 66a Civil Disobedience
Enrollment limited to 17.
What are the responsibilities of the state? Of the citizen? When is revolution justified? Encourages students to develop their own political philosophies. Readings include works by Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Abbie Hoffman, among others. A mock trial and research paper on a recent civil disobedience controversy are required.
Ms. Irr
USEM 66b History of Utopia
Enrollment limited to 17.
Why imagine utopias? How and why have utopian ideals changed over time? Students read and discuss Plato's Republic, the Christian gospels (King James version), More's Utopia, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, and an additional utopian novel of their choice.
Ms. Irr
USEM 67a Politics as Seen through Fiction
Enrollment limited to 17.
How modern fiction helps us understand the dilemmas of politics, the tensions between ideas and actions, social change, leaders and followers, societies in transition and decay, revolution, law, bureaucracy, and ethnicity. We read Koestler, Twain, Sartre, Oz, Solzhenitsyn, Kafka, and Greene. Format will be a highly interactive seminar with several short writing assignments.
Mr. Levin
USEM 67b Political Biography
Enrollment limited to 17.
Examines political leadership as seen through works of biography, autobiography, and biographical fiction. Uses political biography as a source of political ideas and pictures of political and social life.
Mr. Levin
USEM 68a+W Heaven, Hell, and the Space in Between
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Western art and literature have long used heavens and hells in a variety of ways: as symbols for theological beliefs, as expressions of metaphysical truths, as depictions for the individual's psychological ecstasies and agonies, and as allegories for social and political commentary. Spanning antiquity to the present, we examine such heavens and hells as they are viewed from the "space in between," in literature, art, and music.
Mr. Swensen
USEM 69b Walking on the Dark Side: Vice, Evil, and Nasty Emotions
Enrollment limited to 17.
Using films as well as philosophical, political, psychological, and literary works, we examine the tangled history of conceptions of greed, envy, anger, hatred, and sloth. Do they serve any useful function? We explore these questions using texts and artwork from across the ages.
Ms. Rorty
USEM 70a Aliens! Foreigners! Immigrants!: Conflicts and Resolutions
Enrollment limited to 15.
What conflicts are experienced by immigrants and their children? Are these conflicts resolved? How does our society respond to the issues of immigrants? How are these conflicts reflected in the literature of our time and in the popular culture? Through selected texts and interviews with immigrants, we explore the conflicts of language and culture, of generational differences, and of economics. We also study the ways in which people and our society struggle with these conflicts and how they are portrayed by these texts.
Ms. Older
USEM 71b Right and Society
Enrollment limited to 17.
Explores theories of the best society, the nature of public and private obligation, the authority of law, and the nature of justice. Focuses on a handful of key texts from the classical and modern periods and examines their different visions of the nature of public duty and public life and their different theories of the role of political life in human destiny.
Mr. Burt
USEM 72a+W Victorianism
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Examines the myths and realities of a cultural concept in its 19th century and in its more recent usage. We shall examine aspects of Victorian society and institutions; beliefs; science, thought, and education; literature, art, architecture, and music; and humor.
Mr. Black
USEM 73a+W Thinking about Infinity
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Explores the attempts of the finite human mind to think about infinity. Readings in mathematics, history of science, philosophy, literature, and art, including Euclid, Plato, Cantor, Poincaré, Einstein, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Wordsworth, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, and Raphael.
Mr. Flesch
USEM 74b Population Size and Human Welfare
Enrollment limited to 17.
A debate on the relationship between human population size and human welfare has been in process since at least 1798. Food supply is a major component of welfare, and so we pay special attention to the production and distribution of food.
Mr. Hunt
USEM 75b+W Nature, Art, and Illusion
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
How the physical stimulus, its representation on the eye, and our phenomenal image of it are related, has challenged philosophers, scientists, and artists. We will explore this problem historically and in laboratory experiments examining visual illusions in nature and art.
Mr. Morant
USEM 76a Law and the Search for Authority
Enrollment limited to 17.
Examines how societies seek to justify their basic legal rules. Readings drawn from political, historical, and philosophical works that search for ultimate legal principles in written constitutions, totalitarian authority, custom and tradition, or the fallible capacities of human reason.
Mr. Gaskins
USEM 77b+W Nature and Your Place in It
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Where do humans stand in relation to nature? Does our environment shape or even determine us physically, culturally, or psychologically? Or is nature merely the helpless victim of our depredations? We look at how our ancestors have answered these questions.
Mr. Hellyer
USEM 78a Varieties of Religious Experiences in Modern Fictions
Enrollment limited to 17.
Dilemmas of religious belief in the modern world as reflected in novels and short stories. Themes include: the secularization of consciousness, personal salvation and messianic ideologies, art as a usurper of religion, the metaphysics of radical evil, religious authority, and personal autonomy.
Mr. Mintz
USEM 78b Jews and Gender
Enrollment limited to 17.
A look at the construction of Jewish sexuality in literature, films, illustrations, caricatures, and posters in the last 150 years as a response to modern theories of race, ethnicity, and nationality.
Mr. Peleg
USEM 79a Environment as Modern Myth: Books, Movies, and Marketplace
Enrollment limited to 17.
What role does the natural environment play in our vision of the world? Is it a warm and welcoming womb; a savage, fearsome force; a worldly embodiment of a higher power; a precious resource needing protection from man's destruction; a convenient source of images for product marketing? We will explore these divergent images as portrayed in fiction and non-fiction, film and popular culture; and analyze the relationship between these concepts and our treatment of the natural world.
Ms. Goldin
USEM 79b Midrash and the Religious Imagination
Enrollment limited to 17.
Interspersed with some brief introductions to the Midrashic process, the course will examine classical and modern Jewish readings of four moments in the Biblical narrative: Cain and Abel, the binding of Isaac, the wrestling of Jacob with the "angel," and Ruth and Naomi.
Mr. Green
USEM 80b Memory and Democratic Prospects in State Damaged Societies
Enrollment limited to 17.
Examines the prospects for democratic governance in state-damaged societies. We examine how the social memory of catastrophe (war, famine, repression, and genocide) enables or hinders the process of democratic construction or reconstruction. We explore the applicability of the concept of psychic trauma to state-damaged societies and the formation of collective memory.
Mr. Thaxton
USEM 81a Choice and Compulsion
Enrollment limited to 17.
Is it common to wonder why people behave as they do? Less common is consideration of the implications of even supposing that the question might be answerable. We consider causal accounts of human actions, and consequences for notions of responsibility and punishment.
Ms. Herzfeld
USEM 82b+W War in World History
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
How has war affected the course of world history? How different does war look across the ages? How has technological innovation influenced the conduct of war and the evolution of societies? These are the broad questions we address.
Mr. Art
USEM 83a The Social History of the Detective Story
Enrollment limited to 17.
Traces the development of detective, emphasizing how changing ideas of justice and morality are reflected in the character of the detective and the evolution of the "hard-boiled" mystery story. Writers such as Poe, Doyle, Chesterton, Freeman, Post, Christie, Chandler, and Heyer will be studied.
Mr. Petsko
USEM 83b Science in Art
Enrollment limited to 17.
How do we know whether that painting or that sculpture is "genuine"? Usually it's because we take the word of the museum or of the art dealer. But many works of art are discredited every day as new methods are applied to determine the "fine structure" of a particular artifact. We will begin to look at art objects critically, from the point of view of the conservator, who has to determine a piece's value before it is bought or is displayed.
Ms. Ringe
USEM 84a Classics of Western Thought
Enrollment limited to 17.
Explores some of the main ideas of Western thought dealing with the nature of the good life, the nature of reality, and the possibility of our knowledge of either the good life or reality.
Mr. Greenberg
USEM 84b The American Immigrant
Enrollment limited to 17.
The story of America, from colonial days to our day, is the story of immigration. This seminar explores that story using letters, memoirs, fiction, and film. Through these sources, we accompany selected immigrants as they leave home, journey to a new land, secure a job, interact with a new culture, and clash with their Americanized children.
Mr. Sarna
USEM 85b Breaking the Rules: Deviance and Non-Conformity in Pre-Modern Europe
Enrollment limited to 17.
Explores the ways in which "deviant" behavior was defined and punished by some, but also justified and even celebrated by others in pre-modern Europe. Topics include vagrancy, popular uprisings, witchcraft, religious heresy, and the status of women.
Mr. Sreenivasan
USEM 86b The Art of Seeing Things Invisible
Enrollment limited to 17.
Our world is largely a creation of vision's capacities. To learn what vision could tell us about ourselves and about other life forms, we explore a variety of perspectives on vision from psychology, art, biology, speculative fiction, comparative zoology, philosophy, and computer science.
Mr. Sekuler
USEM 86a+W What Happened to the American Dream(s)?
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Explores complex goals and paradoxes of American aspirations through four centuries of literature and legal expression, including case law and film. From the "I" of autobiography to the "we" of oratory, it analyzes immigrant dreams, dreams of liberty, individualism, and personal success.
Ms. Davis
USEM 87a Be a Mensch! Write!
Enrollment limited to 17.
Creativity, memory, emancipation: from fairy tales passed on orally to globally communicated cybertales, humans all over the world create, interpret, and critique stories to leave their indelible mark. We investigate the meaning of reading and writing in Homer's Odyssey, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, and others.
Ms. von Mering
USEM 87b Time
Enrollment limited to 17.
The approach of a new millennium often causes us to reflect upon our understanding of "time." Through readings of ancient and contemporary literary and non-literary texts, we explore the ways in which humans develop, express, research, and project their concepts of "time."
Ms. von Mering
USEM 87b+W Time
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
See USEM 87b for course description.
Ms. von Mering
USEM 88a Islands
Enrollment limited to 17.
Islands are worlds unto themselves, capable of developing singular ecologies and singular "forms of life," yet vulnerable to invasion and swift destruction. We study the wealth and the fragility of islands, as mythical and as actual places.
Ms. Quinney
USEM 88b Free Will
Enrollment limited to 17.
Explores the debates over free will and the limits of human choice that have pervaded literary, philosophical, and religious writing since ancient times. Readings will include selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament; Augustine, Luther; Calvin; Shakespeare; Milton; Locke; Edwards; Dostoevsky; Kafka; Beckett.
Ms. Targoff
USEM 89a+W Modern Ideas and Modern Identities: America in the 1920s
Enrollment limited to 17. Satisfies Option I of the first-year writing requirement. Meets for four hours per week.
Present debates about ethnic and gender identity are only the latest in a long argument about the relationship of individuals to their pasts. We examine some notions of identity in American social thought and fiction of the 1920s.
Mr. Engerman
USEM 89b What Does It Mean to Be Conscious?
Enrollment limited to 17.
What does it mean to be conscious? How is being conscious different from being intelligent? Could computers be conscious? Animals? We consider aspects of the theory of consciousness, based on traditional and contemporary philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.
Mr. Jackendoff