First-Year Seminars 2003-2004

1. Beauty

When I say “this is beautiful,” I say something important.  This importance lies in the meaning of the enigmatic term “beautiful.”  If I describe something or someone as “beautiful,” I infuse it with great significance.  What do we mean by “beautiful”?  What is the importance of beautiful things, events or people for those of us who behold them?  Does beauty give life meaning or is the ultimate meaning of life obscured by beautiful things?

“Beauty” is both an idea and a feeling.  As an idea, it is a companion of such important notions as truth, justice, virtue, goodness and so on.  As a feeling, it is a companion of important, yet often suspect, passions and desires.  We both contemplate and enjoy beautiful things, and so beauty lives in two very different places: the mind and the heart.  From out of this double citizenship, beauty has lived a complex history of controversy ranging from praise of beauty’s transformative force to fear of its destructive power.  We will study this controversy through various sources from literature, psychology, art history, theology and philosophy.  Numerous issues will cluster around our study, including love, justice, the body, art, and the good life, all of which draw beauty out into the center of life’s meaning.

Our goal is to come to an appreciation of beauty in its complexity.

John Drabinski, Visiting Lecturer in English

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

2. Science and Gender

What can science tell us about gender?  Can we depend on science, a particular set of practices and a body of knowledge, to give us the truth about gender—about what is male or female, masculine or feminine?

We will start with an exploration of gender stereotypes–beliefs about the characteristics, abilities, traits and behaviors that distinguish women and men.  We will then examine the empirical investigations and scientific theories from the fields of biology and psychology that purport to describe and explain gender differences.  We will consider, for example, gender identity, sexual orientation, cognitive abilities, parenting, friendship, moral development and gender in cyberspace.  Here we will study the interwoven contributions of biology, environment and evolution.  We will encounter arguments that sex differences are large, that they are small if they occur at all, that they are fixed and stable properties of individuals, that they vary by situation and context.  We will attempt to make sense of these conflicting contentions by looking closely at the nature of the evidence, by considering the political and social contexts in which gender differences and similarities are studied, and by questioning whether the doing of science is itself a gendered activity.

The course will draw on scientific literature from the fields of evolutionary psychology, behavioral endocrinology, developmental biology, genetics and developmental psychology.

Rose R. Olver, L. Stanton Williams ‘41 Professor of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies and Catherine C. McGeoch, Professor of Computer Science

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

3. Evolution and Intellectual Revolution

Few thinkers have had such a broad and deep influence on their subject as Charles Darwin has had on biology; few scientific theories have had larger effects on western culture than his theory of evolution by natural selection.  This course examines the Darwinian theory of evolution, its genesis and its influence.  In so doing, we will study Darwin’s career, the scientific and non-scientific background to his work, and the debate over evolution as it was conducted in Darwin’s time and as it persists to the present day.

John W. Servos, Professor of History

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

4. The Japanese Aesthetic: From Samurai to Sony

Soon after the opening of Japan to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, “things Japanese” became objects of fascination among artists, collectors and even the general public in Europe and the United States.  The impact of a Japanese aesthetic was immediately seen in painting, architecture and the decorative arts.  To this day Japan continues to influence the arts and design in the West.  However, Japanese conceptions of what makes their culture unique and images of Japan familiar in the West often have little in common.  How to define the Japanese aesthetic has long troubled scholars in Japan and abroad.  Is there a Japanese aesthetic?  If so, how can it be defined?  Through a series of case studies we will attempt to answer these questions.  The seminar will examine a number of cultural phenomena considered to be definitive expressions of the Japanese aesthetic such as samurai, geisha, the tea ceremony and Zen.  Examples from Japanese film, literature, art, fashion and commercial design will also be used to facilitate our exploration of Japanese art and culture.  The course will consist of assigned readings, lecture, discussion and frequent writing.

Patrick Caddeau, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations (Japanese) and Samuel C. Morse, Professor of Fine Arts

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

5. Memory

What is memory?  Most people think they know.  But why do we remember some things (like insults) more accurately and vividly than others (like where we left our keys)?  Why are we sometimes wrong?  Is there a difference between forgetting and failing to recall?  How is memory defined by those who study it through scientific experiment?  How are brain structures involved in memory?  How reliable is eyewitness testimony?

How does the fallibility of memory affect the efforts of historians to write about the past?  Does history consist of what is remembered, or what is constructed to serve present needs?  How valid are historians’ claims to serve as the memory of society?

What roles does memory play in the creative work of artists?  Is it simply raw material for them?  If they take liberties with what they remember, can they still “write truly”?  What do they stand to lose by altering “the truth”?

In writing autobiography, is the author chiefly a historian, or an artist, or something else, perhaps a witness?  How does selective memory work in autobiographical writing?

The course draws on a wide variety of scholarly and creative work to let students respond to such questions, and raise others, in a series of essays, experiments and practicums.  The course ends with a reading of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited.

Peter Czap, Professor of History and Susan R. Snively, Associate Dean of Students and Director of the Writing Center

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

6. Drugs: History, Society and Culture

This course examines the changing ways that human beings have used psychoactive drugs and societies have controlled that use.  After examining drug use in broad historical and cross-cultural perspectives and studying the physiological and psychological effects of different drugs, we look at the various ways in which contemporary societies both encourage and seek to control drug use.  Among the issues we address are the drug war, the disease model of drug addiction, the proliferation of prescription drugs, the images of drug use in popular culture, and America’s complicated history of alcohol control.  Above all, we examine the contradictions of a society that energetically both promotes and represses drug use.

Francis G. Couvares, E. Dwight Salmon Professor of History and American Studies and Jerome L. Himmelstein, Professor of Sociology

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

7. The Art of Mathematical Thinking

Emphasizing the view of mathematics as an artistic endeavor requiring creativity and imagination, the course will invite students to explore some of the great ideas of modern mathematics.  The course will begin with a number of classic puzzles and games.  Students will investigate these conundrums collaboratively and, through experimentation, find their own solutions.  Motivated by these discoveries, fundamental questions about infinity, finding numerical patterns in nature, symmetry, making and breaking codes, knots and links, chaos and fractals, and surprising chance occurrences will arise.  Students will choose which topics to investigate as a class and which to pursue in individual and small group projects.

Susan Goldstine, Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

8. War

This seminar investigates war from approximately 1700 to the present, with special attention to the causes and consequences of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century warfare.  Topics to be examined include: the transformative impact of technology (e.g., more efficient guns, new surveillance capabilities, air power, and weapons of mass destruction) on military tactics and strategy as well as on the concept of a “just war”, war and human rights (particularly the problem of war crimes and of non-combatant fatalities); the relationship of international law to war; the problem of representing and remembering wars past; the role of women and gender in military organization and culture; and war and peace in an era of globalization and of increasing scarcity of key resources. Our scope will be global and a range of conflicts will be considered, if not exhaustively covered.  We will draw on a diverse array of sources, including social and military history, literature, women’s studies, popular culture, and international human rights and refugee reportage.

Margaret R. Hunt, Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies and Lisbeth K. Brandt, Assistant Professor of  Asian Languages and Civilizations and History.

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

9. National Identity

This course explores the many meanings of national identity for individuals and for collectivities.  Among the questions we will ask are:  What are the roots of ethnic solidarity?  How have national states been created as both cultural and political communities?  How has the concept of national citizenship been variously defined?  How have sovereign states responded to ethnonational diversity within their borders?  These questions and others will be addressed comparatively.  To this end, we will focus in particular upon a comparison of French, German and American concepts of citizenship; an examination of tensions between state and nation in Israel and India; and a consideration of the issues of race, ethnicity and immigration in the United States.

L. Alan Babb, Willem Schupf Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations and Anthropology and N. Gordon Levin, Dwight Morrow Professor of History and American Studies

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

10.  Terror

Attacks in Oklahoma City, at the World Trade Towers, at American embassies in Africa, and in many other places throughout the world constitute basic popular images of terrorist acts.  Because these images generally invoke a sense of fanaticism, the hate of modernity or an apocalyptic vision rooted in religious radicalism, there is a tendency to automatically demonize those who resort to terrorist violence.  But what constitutes terrorist violence?  Is it the intentional killing of civilians? What about the deaths of civilian populations caused by stray bombs?  Can terrorism ever be explained by conditions of utmost hopelessness or extreme social injustice? Can we ever justify terrorism?  The purpose of this course will be to situate terrorist acts within the global context, historically, politically and morally. We will discuss terrorist actions committed not only by oppressed  groups, separatist movements and radicals seeking political changes, but also by totalitarian and liberal states. The theoretical readings will include Aristotle, Hegel, Sorel, Arendt, Koestler, Fanon and Walzer. 

Pavel Machala, Professor of Political Science

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

11. Life in Extreme Environments: Past, Present and Planetary

When Orson Welles broadcast a radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds”, panic broke out among listeners who believed we were under attack from Mars.  Sixty years later, Hollywood is still enamored by the concept of extraterrestrials, but how likely is such a scenario?  In this seminar we will explore the possibility of life beyond Earth using the scientific method–a way of knowing about the natural world based on reproducible observations and experiments.  Science tells us that the most likely inhabitants elsewhere are also the first to have appeared nearly 4 billion years ago in extreme environments on this planet: the microbes.  Today microbial communities that thrive in harsh habitats (hydrothermal systems, high radiation fields, ice, anoxic habitats, acidic waters, brines) provide analogs for astrobiological study and offer insights into the origin of life here.  It has even been suggested that certain bacteria can handle the vacuum of space and may have been carried here on meteorites or comets from other worlds.  This course will examine the profound effects these microbes have had on our environment: initiating an oxygenated atmosphere, providing key nutrients, and metabolizing organic pollutants.  Students will also have the opportunity to explore some basic field and laboratory techniques for identifying these remarkable organisms.

Stephen A. George, Professor of Biology and Anna M. Martini, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professorof Geology

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

12.  Friendship

An inquiry into the nature of friendship from historical, literary and philosophical perspectives.  What are and what have been the relations between friendship and love, friendship and marriage, friendship and erotic life, friendship and age?  How do men’s and women’s conceptions and experiences of friendship differ?  Readings will be drawn from the following: TheEpic of Gilgamesh; Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus; selections from the Bible and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; essays by Montaigne, Emerson and C.S. Lewis; Mill’s On the Subjection ofWomen; Whitman’s poetry; Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs; Morrison’s Sula; Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Herzog’s My Best Fiend.

Robert C. Townsend, Professor of English

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

13.   Eros and Insight

What would it be like to experience yourself, those around you, and the world through deliberate and disciplined contemplation?

This seminar will define and then explore contemplative knowing as attentiveness, openness and the act of sustaining contradiction.  By this means we will seek common ground between the seemingly opposed realities of art and science, erôs and insight.  We will conclude by re-imagining together Plato’s famous Symposium on the question of love.

Joel M. Upton, Professor of Fine Arts and Arthur G. Zajonc, Professor of Physics

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

14. Western American Lives: Personal Narratives as Public History

Through close readings of memoirs written by a wide range of western Americans during the twentieth century, this course explores the ways in which personal histories function as cultural histories.  Reading authors as diverse as Nat Love and Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston and Richard Rodriguez, Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner, we will consider the writers as both storytellers and historians as we look at how each has tried to fashion a place for him or herself within the broader social and political spaces of the American West.  We will look at the utility of family stories and a sense of place in a region marked by constant movement, and consider the impact of popular myth on westerners’ own sense of self.  Finally, we will also consider other ways of assessing personal experiences through an examination of census records, family snapshots and other documents.

Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of American Studies and History

Monday/Wednesday 8:30-9:50

15. Secrets and Lies

Politics seems almost unimaginable without secrecy and lying. From the noble lie of Plato's Republic to the controversy about former President Clinton's "lying" in the Monica Lewinsky case, from the use of secrecy in today's war against terrorism to the endless spinning of political campaigns, from President John Kennedy's behavior during the Cuban missile crisis to cover-ups concerning pedophile priests in the Catholic church, from Freud's efforts to decode the secrets beneath civilized life to contemporary exposés of the private lives of politicians, politics and deception seem to go hand-in-hand.  This course investigates how the practices of politics are informed by the keeping and telling of secrets, and the telling and exposing of lies.  We will address such questions as: When, if ever, is it right to lie or to breach confidences?  When is it right to expose secrets and lies?  Is it necessary to be prepared to lie in order to advance the cause of justice?  Or, must we do justice justly?  When is secrecy really necessary and when is it merely a pretext for Machiavellian manipulation?  Are secrecy and deceit more prevalent in some kinds of political systems than in others?  As we explore those questions we will discuss the place of candor and openness in politics and social life; the relationship between the claims of privacy (e.g., the closeting of sexual desire) and secrecy and deception in public arenas; conspiracy theories as they are applied to politics; and the importance of secrecy in the domains of national security and law enforcement.  We will examine the treatment of secrecy and lying in political theory as well as their appearance in literature and popular culture, for example Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Primary Colors, Schindler's List and The Insider.

Austin D. Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of  Jurisprudence and Political Science

Monday/Wednesday 10:00-11:20

16. Performance

This course will explore the basic elements of performance as an art form, including the relationship between action and environment, time and space, and perception and memory on the stage.  Students will attend a broad range of performances, from traditional theater and opera to contemporary dance and installation work, and record their understanding of what they have seen in weekly papers.  In addition, readings and videos will serve not only as a springboard for class discussion but also as a starting point for a final project.  Folklore texts from a variety of cultures will provide a narrative framework for the creation of designs or performance pieces, allowing students to develop and adapt their ideas within established contexts.

Michael Birtwistle, Stanley King ‘03 Professor of Dramatic Arts (Theater and Dance), Emeritus

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

17. Pariscape: Imagining Paris in the Twentieth Century

In the hundred years that separate the inaugurations of Eiffel’s tower (1889) and that of Pei’s pyramidal entrance to the Louvre (1989), Paris has been one of the exemplary sites of our urban sensibility, a city that has indelibly and controversially influenced the twentieth-century imagination.  Poets, novelists and essayists, painters, photographers and film-makers: all have made use of Paris and its cityscape to examine relationships among technology, literature, city planning, art, social organizations, politics and what we might call the urban will.  This course will study how these writers and visual artists have seen Paris, and how, through their representations, they created and challenged the “modernist” world view.

In order to discover elements of a common memory of Paris, we will study a group of writers (Apollinaire, Calvino, Stein, Hemingway and others), philosophers and social commentators (Simmel, Benjamin, Barthes), filmmakers (Clair, Truffaut, Tati and others), photographers (Atget, Brassaï), painters (Picasso,  Delaunay, Matisse and others), and architects (Piano and Pei).  Finally, we will look at how such factors as tourism, print media, public works, immigration and suburban development affect a city’s simultaneous and frequently uncomfortable identity as both a geopolitical and an imaginative site.

Ronald C. Rosbottom, Winifred L. Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Professor of French and European Studies

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

18.   The Arts of Spain, From the Siglo de Oro to Saura

We begin with Goya, from royal commissions to the harrowing “pinturas negras”.  Other artists to be considered include Casas, Rusinyol, Gaudí, Picasso, Miró, Tapiés, Almodóvar and Saura.  Although the primary focus will be visual arts (painting, prints, architecture, film), we will consider poetry (García Lorca), music and dance (zarzuelas, flamenco) and religious rituals.  We will address the diversity of Spain’s political, linguistic and cultural centers, and consider how this complicates any discussion of nationalism or a Spanish “mentality.”  We will address the importance of concepts like machismo and duende, the legacy of literary themes and characters (La Celestina, Don Quijote), as well as the “anxiety of influence” toward Golden Age giants like Velázquez and Zurbarán.  Our period was marked by conflict: an empire lost, the defeat by Napoleon, civil war.  Holy wars, anti-clerical insurrections, economic vicissitudes, all came into play as did battles waged in nature’s realm, the cosmic order.  We close with the artistic efflorescence of Spain’s nascent democracy.  We will have a field trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which holds the most extensive collection of Goya works on paper outside of the Prado.

Natasha Staller, Associate Professor of Fine Arts

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

19.   The Trial

If media coverage is any evidence, it is clear that legal trials capture, and have always captured, the imagination of America.  Trials engage us aesthetically and politically by dramatizing difficult moral and social predicaments, and by offering a public forum for debate and judgment.  They also “perform” law in highly stylized ways that affect our sense of what law is and does.  This course will explore the trial from a number of different angles:  as an idea, as a legal practice, and as a modern cultural phenomenon.  What does it mean to undergo a “trial”?  How do various historical trial forms–trial by ordeal or by oath, for example–compare with our contemporary adversarial form?  What narrative and structuring roles do trials play in literature and film?  How do popular renderings of trials in imaginative texts and the media compare with actual trial practice, and perhaps encourage us to sit in judgment on law itself?  In

what ways do well-known trials help us to tell a story

about what America is?  In addressing these questions, this course will examine a variety of texts:  legal cases, historical and sociological materials, literary texts (perhaps Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Kafka’s The Trial), films (Anatomy of a Murder, Twelve Angry Men), television (Court TV) and perhaps an actual trial.

 Martha M. Umphrey, Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

20.   Novels, Plays and Poems

Why does any writer–an Amherst College student, Philip Roth, Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare–say what he or she says one way rather than another?  And what in the expression itself makes a story, a play, a poem effective, something a reader might care about, be moved or delighted by?  We will try to answer these questions by reading major examples of each genre, including much recent work, with close and sustained attention to details of expressive language.

Helen von Schmidt, Senior Lecturer in English

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

21.   Home

This course looks at some of the ways that writers and filmmakers have depicted shelter, domestic life, home, homelessness and sanctuary.  Sanctuaries and shelters may be material or immaterial, found or made; and in the words of the poet A.R. Ammons–sanctuary may even be “just a sound.”  Although the course will focus on novels and films, we will read a selection of poems and essays that explore the topic.  We will also look at critical and theoretical work to help us explore the distinctions between public and private worlds.  The course will include novels and stories by, among others, Toni Morrison, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee.  We will look at films by a variety of directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, John Cassavetes, Ousmene Sembene and Maya Deren.

Burlin Barr, Visiting Lecturer

Tuesday/Thursday 11:30-12:50

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