ART, SEX & AMERICAN CULTURE
Sex is the ultimate forbidden public topic and yet from the New England Puritans' sermons to Bill Clinton's (in)famous affair, sex has often been publicly staged in dramatic, literary, religious, political, legal and social forums. In this seminar, we will explore how issues of sex and sexuality have insinuated themselves into the formation of American identity. We will examine texts from the seventeenth century to the present with a particular emphasis on the arts, politics and sex. Texts include Puritan sermons, Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter
, Tennessee Williams's
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, literature from Margaret Sanger's birth control movement, and theoretical works by Michel Foucault, Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler.
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Pamela Cobrin
CULPA: 6
Info
- 3 points
FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF ANGER
Of late, much attention has been given to the political role of feminist anger. However, not all feminist anger is received or interpreted in the same way; not all women have had the same freedom to express or represent anger. This course asks us to think critically about expressions and perceptions of anger. How do race, sexuality, gender identity, class, and ethnicity shape who is perceived as “angry” and whose anger is taken seriously? What other affects circulate and interact with anger: from rage and irritation to wonder and joy? We’ll begin with the figure of the “feminist killjoy,” as theorized by Sara Ahmed and will consider texts by authors including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Susan Stryker, and Nella Larsen, alongside manifestos, comics, film, visual art, and zines.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Meredith A Benjamin
CULPA: 5 Info - 3 points
Building Utopia
BUILDING UTOPIA
Building Utopia explores the rich tradition of utopian thinking across literature, social philosophy, architecture, and the visual arts. Here, utopia is examined in its modern form: as a call to transform the world through human planning and ingenuity. Aside from a vital excursion on Thomas More's pivotal novel Utopia (1516), the course focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers whose often wild and idealistic imaginings profoundly affected the shape of the real world. Students will delve into the works of Marie Howland, Edward Bellamy, the Italian Futurists, and Le Corbusier, among many others. The purpose of the course is to better understand the role that the utopian imagination has played in the construction of power.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Ralph Ghoche
CULPA: 1 h-index: 2 Info - 3 points
REACTING TO THE PAST
In these seminars, students play complex historical role-playing games informed by classic texts. After an initial set-up phase, class sessions are run by students. These seminars are speaking- and writing-intensive, as students pursue their assigned roles objectives by convincing classmates of their views. Examples of games played in First-Year Seminar Reacting class include: 1) The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C. explores a pivotal moment following the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, when democrats sought to restore democracy while critics, including the supporters of Socrates, proposed alternatives. The key text is Plato's Republic. 2)
Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor
examines a dispute between Confucian purists and pragmatists within the Hanlin Academy, the highest echelon of the Ming bureaucracy, taking
Analects
of Confucius as the central text. 3)
The Trial of Anne Hutchinson
revisits a conflict that pitted Puritan dissenter Anne Hutchinson and her supporters against Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop and the orthodox ministers of New England. Students work with testimony from Hutchinsons trial as well as the Bible and other texts. 4)
Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor and the New Woman
investigates the struggle between radical labor activists and woman suffragists for the hearts and minds of Bohemians, drawing on foundational works by Marx, Freud, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Mark C Carnes
CULPA: 50
Info
-
Instructor:
Ellen Morris
CULPA: 10
Info
-
Instructor:
Laurie Postlewate
CULPA: 17
Info
- 3 points
DRAMA, THEATRE, AND ART
Drama, Theatre, and Art will consider the ways in which the performing arts and the visual arts help change the ways we see art and life. Beginning with reimagined classics and Shakespeare’s plays, we will move to the 18th-21st centuries and note how views of individual agency, social justice, and collective responsibility have changed over time. We will also ask what the performing arts and visual arts of the past have to say about issues confronted in the arts of the present. This will help us to understand how evolving aesthetic movements such as realism, impressionism, and modernism promote and critique our cultural perspectives and our social values. Plays may include Sarah Ruhl’s
Eurydice,
Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s
Our Country’s Good
, Anton Chekhov’s
The Seagull,
Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
, Lorraine Hansberry’s
A Raisin in the Sun
and
Les Blancs
, Yasmina Reza’s
Art
, Suzan-Lori Parks'
Fucking A
; novels include Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
; musicals include Stephen Sondheim’s
Sunday in the Park with George
. Art from the Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and other sites will promote student engagement, visual and verbal interactions, and cross disciplinary conversations.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Patricia D Denison
CULPA: 10 Info - 3 points
Artful Adaptations
ARTFUL ADAPTATIONS
Can the violent fantasies of a fairytale shape romantic comedy? Can dance tell the same story as classical tragedy? What does Bollywood have to do with Renaissance England? Can ancient mythology animate American slave narrative? As biologists ask why does life appear in such a dazzling array of forms, this class asks why do certain stories get told and retold in such a dazzling array of varieties? Using as possible textual anchors Snow White, Medea, and Romeo and Juliet, this course will explore poems, short stories, plays, novels, paintings, films, musicals, dance, illustration, advertisement, song, memes, and other cultural objects to consider the accretion of meaning that results when stories cross, historical, cultural, and generic borders.
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Monica F Cohen
CULPA: 8
Info
- 3 points
TECH & SOCIETY: GOOD, BAD & OTHER
Computing and information technology has improved our lives in many ways, contributing to significant advances in science and medicine; making it easy and efficient to communicate with people across the world; and enabling online business and recreational activities; and more. However, the same technologies can also have negative impacts, such as the move to a surveillance society and surveillance capitalism; major disruptions in the workforce of the future as automation becomes more widespread; and social media contributing to depression in young people and the weaponization of disinformation. This seminar will explore technical, cultural, legal, and economic factors that can impact how computing technology is used, while raising the question of how to encourage and ensure that these technologies are used for good, while eliminating or mitigating the potential negative impacts.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Emily Black
Info - 3 points
Activism, Performance, Social Movements
ACTIVISM, PERF, SOCIAL MO
This seminar examines how activism shapes the political process through performance, and how social movements often spread by theatrical means. We start our exploration with the notion of "the publics" as introduced by the twentieth-century German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and then expand our view of this concept to the contemporary political setting. We look at both how elected representatives use theatrical tropes to shape their public personas, and also how popular protests stage large-scale public interventions. How might performance as a series of citational strategies allow us to think about the political process? How do we assess the success or failure of a tactic in a social movement?
We will draw heavily on the works of feminist scholars like bell hooks, Judith Butler, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Peggy Phelan, to discuss movements such as ACT UP, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo. Equally, we will look at histories of student activism such as the 1968 Morningside Park gym construction, campus anti-apartheid actions, Carry That Weight at Columbia and Barnard, and Friday School Climate Strike and March for our Lives. Students reflect on their own histories or experiences with activism, as personal involvement and/or politics of the places they come from. Through the semester students are exposed to various techniques of protest performance including zines, podcasts, art campaigns and poetry circles. Based on shared interests and affinities, students work in groups to class devise activist performances as a final project.
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Shayoni Mitra
CULPA: 5
Info
- 3 points
Approaching Trauma
APPROACHING TRAUMA
Trauma today is evoked in a variety of contexts. But what precisely are we referring to when we use this term? Drawing on psychoanalytic and anthropological approaches, our seminar will interrogate the politics of diagnosing, treating and healing from disturbing past events. We will watch films and read case histories of hysteria, studies of infants, and attempts to integrate mind, brain and body. The course will also examine the rise of PTSD, attend to questions of intergenerational transmission, and learn about responses to national and racial trauma. Featured authors include Sigmund Freud, Beatrice Beebe, Allan Young, Marilyn Ivy and Resmaa Menakem.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Nicholas A Bartlett
CULPA: 5
Info
- 3 points
Here/There: Migrant Narratives
HERE/THERE: MIGRANT NARRA
This first-year seminar brings together texts, films and contemporary art that focus on migrant, immigrant, refugee, expat and exile experiences. We will explore how migrant subjects negotiate dominant discourses of nationality and citizenship, and how their identities as migrants intersect with their other positionalities, with a particular emphasis on race, gender and queerness. Some questions we will consider: How are immigrant, migrant and refugees marginalized, racialized and queered by dominant discourses? How do immigrants, migrants and refugees negotiate belonging when they cross cultural, national, linguistic and religious borders? How do these authors, filmmakers and artists resist erasure and complicate our understanding of home, belonging and identity? Texts are subject to change but will likely include authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Kazim Ali, Fatimah Asghar, Ocean Vuong, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Masha Gessen, Viet Thanh Nguyen, as well as selected films, documentaries, visual art and other media.
Creativity and Inspiration
CREATIVITY AND INSPIRATIO
Where do creative ideas come from? The Muses, according to Plato. The unconscious, according to some later thinkers. One thing both answers share is the thought that creative ideas come from something “other than” or “not controlled by” the creator – or, as we’ll put it, that creativity requires inspiration. In this class, we will explore this and related ideas in Western thinking about creativity. In doing so, we’ll examine how creative people themselves, from painters to mathematicians, have described their own creative process and experiences. We’ll examine approaches to creativity from the Taoist tradition, comparing them with the Western approaches that will be our main focus. At the end of the class, we’ll think about whether computer programs can be creative, and what it might mean for claims about inspiration if they can be. Readings will include selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Boden, Chung-yuan Chang, bell hooks, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and others.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Christopher P Prodoehl
Info - 3 points
Reading Dance
READING DANCE
Dance as action takes place in a variety of places and by organisms, and is represented in literature, film, the proscenium stage in just as many ways as there are forms of dance. Reading Dance will explore how authors employ movement to enrich narrative, reflect the human condition, view class and gender, experience how choreographers use text to support a silent form of communication and consider choreography itself text. Primary sources will include Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Ntozake Shange, T.S. Eliot, Zadie Smith, Martha Graham, Michael Jackson, and Brian Friel.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Kate A Glasner
CULPA: 31
Info
- 3 points
Storytelling
STORYTELLING
Why do we tell stories? Why do we feel a need to relate the things that happen to us? Why do writers and artists make things up? In this section of First-Year Seminar, we will explore these questions as well as others connected to the fundamental practice of storytelling. We will read and discuss short stories, novels, and memoirs that reflect on or call into question the narrator’s reasons for telling the story. We will also consider essays by literary critics, psychologists, and scientists on the human impulse to narrate. Literary texts may include works by Henry James, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, Haruki Murakami, and Carmen Maria Machado. Critical and theoretical texts may include works by Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion.
- MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Michael Shelichach
Info - 3 points
Poetry, Identity, Word Sorcery
POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SO
Poetry is a very complicated series of words found in perpetually dust-covered books written by white men who died a half of century before you were born. Or is it? Poetry is archaic. Poetry is academic. Poetry is hard. Or in the words of Ntosake Shange, it’s “razzamatazz hocus pocus zippity-do-dah.” The magic of poetry is not in its mystery, but in its ability to connect with people, and to connect people with people, even across space and time. In this class we will explore how poetry speaks to identity, speaks to history, and speaks intersections of race, gender, sexuality, tragedy, triumph, and trauma. We will read poetry – mostly contemporary poets, mostly female-identified poets, mostly poets of color, and mostly poets from the margins – read theories on poetry, and maybe try our hand at a little poetry writing. Readings will include such authors as Tina Chang, Yolanda Wisher, Jillian Weise, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Tracie Morris, Audre Lorde, Laylia Long Soldier, and the word sorceress herself Sonia Sanchez.
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Quincy Jones
Info - 3 points
Writing and the Environment
WRITING AND THE ENVIRONME
Beginning with the Popol Vuh, the Mayan myth of creation, which records the first moment of contact with the Spanish conquistadors about 1555, we will explore American nature writing up to the present. Description and interpretation of nature has shaped artistic representation from the very beginning of human history. We will look at indigenous narratives, at activist texts, and at writing and images from the Americas in relation to selected European works, moving from Crevecoeur’s “Letters from an American Farmer” (1765) to excerpts from Wordsworth’s “Prelude” in England (1798), which in turn influenced Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836) and Thoreau’s writing in Walden and “Civil Disobedience” (1851). Twentieth century works include selections from John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939); Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962); and John McPhee’s “Encounters with the Archdruid” (1971). Painting, photography and films will be included, with images from the Hudson River School, photographs of National Parks, and contemporary environmental films. An essential element is the study of activist organizations alongside international collaborations (COP27), the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and issues of environmental justice. Finally, we will both write and analyze contemporary environmental journalism, including Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature” and Liz Kolbert’s
The Sixth Extinction
.
- MW 5:40 p.m.-6:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Linn C Mehta
CULPA: 18
Info
- 3 points
On Friendships Between Women
ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WO
How do we reflect on the intimacies of friendship, and what might be particular to such intimacies between women? What makes a friendship good or bad? What tensions or correspondences might we trace between friendship and adjacent categories of relationality—’frenemies,’ sisterhood, lovers? In this course, we will apply close analytical examinations of literary and cultural texts in order to theorize the various shapes friendship may take. Throughout the semester, we will question how the friendships we encounter are situated within and/or against a variety of cultural and socioeconomic contexts. In doing so, we will explore friendship’s conceptual role in narratives of emotional development, education and intellectual life, work, community, and domesticity. Literary and theoretical texts may include works by Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Kamila Shamsie, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Jean Chen Ho, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Anahit Behrooz, Roxane Gay, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. Selections from film and television may include the tv dramatization of Elena Ferrante’s
My Brilliant Friend
and Keira Knightley’s portrayal of Georgiana Cavendish in
The Duchess
, among others. In discussions and writing assignments both formal and creative, we will consider how the (un)friendly relationships represented in these texts shift, break, and thrive given the conditions under which they are conducted.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Elizabeth Weybright
Info - 3 points
Transnational Feminism
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM
What does it mean to be a feminist? In this course, we will examine the link between feminist activism and social policies from the eighteenth-century to the postMeToo era through the example of the UK, Iran, Argentina, and France. How does activism influence law making and how do social policies influence feminism? How does activism differ from one country to another? What do these differences reveal about our own culture? We will focus on issues such as the history of women’s suffrage, the fight for political representation, access to child care and education, reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, parental leave policies, and gender-based violence. We will examine these matters through novels, scholarly works, newspaper articles, political pamphlets as well as comics and street art.
- MW 5:40 p.m.-6:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Elsa Stephan
CULPA: 3
Info
- 3 points
Impostors and Impersonators
IMPOSTORS AND IMPERSONATO
In this class, we will look at the fascination and the fear we have about impostors who construct false identities and impersonators who take on the identity of someone else—from folk and fairy tales to popular shows like
Inventing Anna
and the
Tinder Swindler
to conversations about identity deception in deep fakes and ChatGPT. We will examine the stories of con artists, doppelgängers, catfishers, identity theft fraudsters and those with impostor syndrome to understand: How do we construct what is real and what is fake? How do we determine what is deceptive and what is authentic? We will also look at current advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning and interrogate legal rulings on identity deception to understand how we authenticate and determine the originality of the self. Texts may include
Fantomina
by Eliza Haywood,
Doppelganger
by Naomi Klein,
Passing
by Nella Larsen, and
The Fraud
by Zadie Smith. Visual media may include
Parasite
,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
, and
Kagemusha
.
- MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Vrinda Condillac
CULPA: 28
Info
- 3 points
Adultery: Realism and Desire
ADULTERY: REALISM AND DES
"Rising from the most basic human needs, marriage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations." So writes the United States Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), finding in marriage the "keystone of our social order" -- the means by which individual desire is stably fixed within the family unit and, thereby, linked to civility and law. This course studies a rich counter-tradition of film and literature interested in adultery. These works suggest ways in which human desire and identity exceed social bounds; they also examine ways in which private desire is not only limited but formed by social forces.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Andrew L Lynn
CULPA: 17
Info
- 3 points