Language and Power
LANGUAGE AND POWER
This course will address the relationship between language and power from a philosophical perspective. We will investigate questions such as: How does language influence the way we think of gender, race, society, and politics? What are the limits, if any, on free speech? In what ways, if any, can language be used to harm people? Topics may include hate speech, trigger warnings, slurs, dog whistles, propaganda, and silencing.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Karen Lewis
CULPA: 12 h-index: 7 Info - 3 points
BANNED: DANGEROUS ART
In this course we will engage with various forms of artistic production (literary, cinematic, pictorial, musical) that have been banned or censored by religious authority, governmental institutions, or by public opinion. While discussing these primary texts we will investigate who gets to censor art, to what ends, and according to which criteria. Who is protected from tasteless, subversive, or obscene art? How do these categories change with time, and from culture to culture?
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Karen Santos da Silva
CULPA: 4
Info
- 3 points
WITCHES
From ancient Greece to Wicked, the figure of the witch has fascinated and frightened, compelled and repulsed. In this seminar, well analyze written and visual texts from Homer to The Brothers Grimm and beyond to develop a deeper understanding of the witch and the anxieties about gender and power that she represents.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Wendy C Schor-Haim
CULPA: 11
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.
-
Instructor:
Meredith A Benjamin
CULPA: 5 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 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Kate A Glasner
CULPA: 31
Info
-
Instructor:
Jennifer L Worth
CULPA: 4
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.
-
Instructor:
Monica F Cohen
CULPA: 8
Info
- 3 points
Dead and Undead (Wkshop)
DEAD AND UNDEAD (WKSHOP)
What does it mean to be dead? Why the fascination—across time and culture—with conceiving of ways in which the dead can become un-dead? And how is being undead different from being alive? To investigate and trouble the boundaries between life and death (and un-death), we will analyze works from various genres and media, discussing near-death experiences, beating-heart cadavers, and a range of figures including zombies, ghosts, and other revenants. Objects of study include texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Ovid, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Nalo Hopkinson, and Mary Shelley; music by Camille Saint-Saëns; artwork by Hans Holbein and Breughel; television and film (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie); and more.
NOTE: This 4-credit version of First-Year Seminar (FYS)—FYS “Workshop”—is specially designed for students who believe they would benefit from extra support with their critical reading and academic writing skills. In addition to regular seminar meetings twice per week, students are assigned a Writing Fellow who they meet with for one hour every other week. APPLICATION REQUIRED BY THURSDAY, 11/7 @ 5PM:
https://forms.gle/FNjftqoHRSQTQUSW9
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Penelope Usher
Info - 4 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.
Border Stories (Wkshop)
BORDER STORIES (WKSHOP)
The topic of this Seminar course takes an interdisciplinary approach to thinking about, and traversing, the constructs of the border. The U.S.- Mexico border delimits more than nations; it is both a political and a social geography, marked by bodies of water, mountains, walls, ideologies, repression, and resistance. The crisis currently taking place at the border is an unfolding story with many narrators. We will study literary texts: fiction, poetry, and memoir written by those who know the border, and borderlands, intimately. We will also engage histories, social movement doctrine, and media coverage to mine the stories they tell.
NOTE: This 4-credit version of First-Year Seminar (FYS)—FYS “Workshop”—is specially designed for students who believe they would benefit from extra support with their critical reading and academic writing skills. In addition to regular seminar meetings twice per week, students are assigned a Writing Fellow who they meet with for one hour every other week. APPLICATION REQUIRED BY THURSDAY, 11/7 @ 5PM:
https://forms.gle/FNjftqoHRSQTQUSW9
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Francesca E Austin Ochoa
Info - 4 points
Race, Science, & Reproductive Justice
RACE, SCIENCE, REPRO JUST
This course is about reproduction—a biological and social process that is often the target of deep-seated ideas about identity, nation, culture, and definitions of life. With an emphasis on intersectional approaches to reproductive justice, we’ll read a variety of literary works, journalism, films and television shows, public health studies, and policy/legal texts, all of which differently narrate, debate, script, and theorize about reproduction. Questions we will explore include: what stories do we tell about reproduction? What role have innovations in reproductive technologies played in this process, from contraceptive uses of medicinal plants, to in-vitro fertilization and so-called “DIY” abortions, to population and development projects all over the world? How do long histories of obstetric violence inform modern definitions of reproductive health, rights, and justice? What kind of world does an intersectional and inclusive reproductive justice movement urge us to create? Please note that some of the material for this course includes references to or descriptions of obstetric violence.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Cecelia B Lie-Spahn
CULPA: 1 Info - 3 points
The Secret Life of Stuff
THE SECRET LIFE OF STUFF
“It has a mind of its own,” we shriek as the TV channels change without our input or the garage door opens when no one is home. Things can spark joy, grant authority, lead to our demise, and reveal our deepest secrets. They mediate social relationships, define political alliances, and provide economic opportunities. Sometimes it is not the presence of things but their absence – a misplaced phone, an expired passport, a childhood home – that more keenly shapes our reality. While people make objects, objects also make people.
This class will investigate the secret life of stuff, from maps to cups and buildings to body parts, to explore how inanimate objects can be seen to have an agency and power of their own. Our discussions will draw on a wide array of authors from a variety of fields, including Bill Brown, Martin Heidigger, Anni Albers, Neel Ahuja, Katherine Ott, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing. To accompany these texts, we will also turn to other, less traditional sources of information, from podcasts to museum exhibits and our own personal histories with things.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Camilla Sturm
CULPA: 2 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.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Michael Shelichach
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.
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Elizabeth Weybright
Info - 3 points
American Exceptionalism
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
In this course we probe the ideology of American "exceptionalism." We treat the literary history of this idea as a transtemporal conversation involving its founding architects, ardent critics, and experimental reformers, concerned with the question of what should be valued on the American continents and within American experience. We become cartographers of this conversation and interlocutors within it, as we explore how habits of conceiving truth, power, and the relationship of human beings to the natural world have controlled what counts as exceptional and what ordinary. Where should we direct our awe? Readings will include James Baldwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, bell hooks, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, Henry David Thoreau and William Carlos Williams.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Kristi-Lynn Cassaro
Info - 3 points
The End of the World
THE END OF THE WORLD
According to the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” What, then, is the world? Is it an object? An interpretation? An inheritance? A point of view? Is the world a social and linguistic construct? If so, how many worlds are there? If Wittgenstein is right and every world ends at the limits of its language, then what lies beyond? What happens after the end? This course will consider these questions by investigating the end of the world in a variety of texts and contexts from the fourteenth century to the present: as a recurrent literary theme, religious fixation, philosophical conundrum, source of endless entertainment, and spring of existential anxiety. Contrary to what the phrase portends, we will find that there is no singular “end” of the world. Worlds end all the time. We therefore will approach the idea of the end as a question of ruins and remnants, an encounter with the void at the end of history, but also as a site of new beginnings, of futures we have yet to imagine—or can only imagine, if this means to glimpse what might be beyond the patterns of thought, belief, and action, the terms and conditions, the very language of the decaying world we inhabit. Authors, texts, and other materials will include fiction by Giovanni Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, and Jeff VanderMeer; plays by Samuel Beckett; films including
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Aniara
,
Melancholia
, and
Manufactured Landscapes
; and studies in cultural anthropology, environmental humanities and radical ecologies.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Nathan Gorelick
Info - 3 points
Transnational Feminism
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM
What does it mean to be a feminist in a global context? In this course, we will examine the link between feminist activism and social policies from the eighteenth-century to the postMeToo era in several countries such as the UK, Iceland, 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
Cults
CULTS
As a former member of one so-called cult said (and many others have repeated): "Nobody joins a cult." What, then, does this designation mean and how has it been used in the past? How has "cult" become a way to demarcate "good" and "bad" religion, to condemn communities and practices that defy established norms, and what are the consequences of the “cult” label for marginalized groups? In this First-Year Seminar, we will evaluate the history of the term "cult" and its varied uses in the US and elsewhere. We will consider a variety of groups that have been labeled "cults," as we ask how the members of such New Religious Movements (NRMs) responded to and revealed the fractures of modern economic, political, gender, racial, and social relations.
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Gale L Kenny
CULPA: 5
Info
- 3 points
The Family
THE FAMILY
No matter our particular family histories or relationships, the family plays a central role in shaping each of our individual lives, and as an ideal the family form promises each of us a sphere of care and love. But how well does the family live up to this ideal in practice? And how might the family contribute to propping up social hierarchies along the lines of gender, race, and class? Might we imagine—and even desire—futures beyond the family? This course will consider critical engagements with the family form, spanning from Plato’s early skepticism, to 19th-century socialist utopian visions of the commune, to the rich variety of analyses offered by feminists of the 20th and 21st century. At the end of the class, we’ll consider what science/speculative fiction has to offer in its imagining of alternative possibilities for organizing care. Readings will include political writings, novels, and academic texts drawn from philosophy, sociology, critical race theory, and critical indigenous studies.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
- TR 5:40 p.m.-6:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Caroline D Bowman
Info - 3 points
Hidden in Plain Sight: Ideology and Self
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT
How does culture create and codify beliefs and norms so that they appear natural and difficult to identify without close analysis? In this course, we will explore aspects of our society that are hidden in plain sight through the forces of ideology. We will study works that challenge us to look closely at the things we
think we already know
. We will probe the aspects of society which seem to be true, natural, and common sense, and learn to unpack them. In doing so, we will dive into pop cultural moments (such as brat summer and the like) and probe their power relations and identity formations which otherwise remain hidden. We will analyze music videos, songs, poems, short stories, as well as popular phrases.
We will learn about structures of power through theories on race, gender, sexuality, identity, and culture itself. We will ask how we were given our genders, races, and other aspects of ourselves, and think critically about how that process works at both the granular and societal level. This course includes a field trip to Van Cortlandt Park wherein we will learn about how racial ideology is expressed through architecture and landscaping.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Samuel Davis
Info - 3 points