I can’t really express how excited I am for my last semester—not because it’s my last, but because I have basically fulfilled all my requirements, and can take whatever I want. Yay! Last night I was taking a look at the course offerings, and realized I needed to think about what I want out of my last semester, since otherwise I’ll never make any decisions.
So I set some goals:
- I want to learn about different cultures. I want to take at least one class focused on an area of the world other than Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa, preferably a class that delves into its literature, art, religion or other aspects of its culture. On a related note, no classes on topics I already feel relatively well-versed in.
- No big lecture classes. If there are more than 30 people, I’m not interested.
- In terms of requirements, I still need one more class for my French minor, and I’d like to keep up Swahili for another semester. I might need to take a senior seminar in Human Rights, but let’s hope not.
- Less politics, more literature.
- If possible, it would be great to not have all my classes on the same day
As usual, I’m going to shop as many classes as possible during the first two weeks. Arguably the best part of college is going to those first lectures, when the professor presents a nice concise summary of the ideas s/he hopes students will learn, but you don’t have to commit to all those readings yet. And, of course, a class is only as good as its professor…
So here’s my current list (in roughly alphabetical order by dept). Thoughts, opinions, recommendations most welcome, and if anyone wants to come shop these with me, that would be great!
CONTEMP ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
Unfortunately, this class fails the big lecture class rule.
A survey of the contemporary intellectual currents in modern Islamic societies, with a special emphasis on the societies of the Middle East, and on the cultural issues not covered in classical Islamic Civilization courses. The course complements the Introduction to Islamic Civilization currently given jointly by MEALAC and the Committee on Asia and the Middle East by focusing on the texts of the contemporary world.
HINDU GODDESSES
This class looks so incredible!! And the professor has great reviews on CULPA. I’m so upset that I haven’t taken any classes in Indian culture or religion.
Prerequisites: One course in Indian culture or religion or permission of the instructor. Study of a variety of Hundu goddesses, focusing on representative figures from all parts of India and on their iconography, associated powers, and regional rituals. Materials are drawn from textual, historical, and field studies, and discussion includes several of the methodological controversies involving interpretation of goddess worship in India.
COLLOQUIUM ON MAJOR TEXTS: MIDDLE EAST/INDIA
Readings in translation and discussion of texts of Middle Eastern and Indian origin. Readings include the Qur'an, Islamic philosophy, Sufi poetry, the Upanishads, Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, Indian epics and drama, and Gandhi's Autobiography.
COLLOQUIUM IN LITERARY THEORY
Examination of concepts and assumptions present in contemporary views of literature. Theory of meaning and interpretation (hermeneutics); questions of genre (with discussion of representative examples); a critical analysis of formalist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist, and feminist approaches to literature.
MAGIC AND MODERNITY
Examines literary treatments of magic produced at five pivotal moments in (mostly) European intellectual history, and inquires: How does the depiction of magic relate to the idea of “modernity” and its attendant anxieties? How do texts produce magical effects? How does magic function as a way of understanding the world? Readings include works by Ovid, Apuleius, Marie de France, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Bulgakov and others, as well as folklore and theoretical texts.
THE MOD NOVEL: BALZAC,FLAUBERT
Can’t find the blurb on this one, but if I’m going to take a French class, I’d love to spend it reading Balzac and Flaubert. No clue if this will actually fulfill the minor requirements, but I’m going to ask the dept if I can just read the texts and write my papers in French.
Comparative Literature Seminar: DARK CHRONICLES—RECENT NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS
OMG I want to take this so badly! I hope I get in…
Admittance by permission of Instructor. In this course, we will read and discuss the fiction, non-fiction, and acceptance speeches of the most recent recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The writers to be examined, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (2008), Orhan Pamuk (2006), Harold Pinter (2005), Elfriede Jelinek (2004), V. S. Naipaul (2001), Gao Xingjian (2000), and Gunter Grass (1999) record cultural shifts and social forces central to their societies as well as our civilization, addressing the world wars, immigration, postcolonialism, class inequities, gender oppression, and often, the fragility of identity. Although coming from vastly different backgrounds and countries, the recent Nobel laureates share a difficult and challenging view of human nature. We will analyze whether and how their art, potentially disturbing, challenges the traditional cultural understanding of narrative representation, evident in their experimentation with language and modes of representation. We will also explore the relationship between the authors’ personal point of view and national concerns with global and universal themes and issues that they address. Finally, we will explore the tradition of prize-giving as a vehicle of literary canonization and the global recognition that Nobel brings to its winners. The assignments will include: a final essay, comprehensive take-home midterm exam, participation, and one short presentation for the writer of your choice from the list.
GENRE,GENDER,MOD JAPANESE LIT
This course engages in close readings of major works of Japanese literature from the 18th-century to the present with particular attention to the issues of gender and genre in the formation of modern Japanese literature. The course considers figures such as female ghosts, wives and courtesans, youth and schoolgirls, the new woman and the modern girl, actors/actresses and cross-dressers. Readings highlight the role of literary genres, examining the ways in which the literary texts engage with changing socio-historical conditions, especially with regard to gender and social relations. Genres include puppet plays, ghost stories, melodrama, Bildungsroman, domestic fiction, autobiographical fiction, and the fantastic. Related critical issues are the novel and the formation of a national community; women’s writings; media and the development of urban mass culture; colonial and imperial spaces; history and memory. All readings are in English.
MATH IN THE CITY
I’m getting more and more into education
In partnership with NYC public school teachers, students will have opportunities to engage in mathematical learning, lesson study, curriculum development, and implementation, with a focus on using the City as a resource. Students will explore implications for working with diverse populations.
DISABILITY & LITERATURE
Doesn’t pass the Other Cultures test, but it does relate to questioning my own privilege, which is similar. Not sure how big of a class this will be…
Writings about disability and eccentric bodies, from Oedipus of the swollen foot to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Texts will cover a range of periods, including medieval narratives of miraculous cure, the hunchback king in Shakespeare's Richard III, and a powerfully immobile and sexually magnetic woman in Trollope's Barchester Towers. While the course will focus on motor disability and bodily variety, students will be encouraged (and required) to seek out texts that address other issues such as blindness, deafness, or mental disability. Critical readings will be drawn from the emerging field of Disability Studies. Issues to be addressed will include the great historical shift from notions of the "ideal" or heroic, to the "normal" body; the social construction of disability; the cripple as icon or agent; disabled identity and the return of the memoire.
PUBLIC SPEAKING
I’m embarrassingly bad at public speaking, so this would be a really useful class for me, even if I don’t really want to take it.
Effective oral presentation in speeches, discussions, and interviews. We will explore the reciprocal relationship between active listening and extemporaneous speaking, structured writing and spontaneous remarks, rhetorical strategy and audience analysis, historical models and contemporary practice.
SEMINAR ON SPECIAL THEMES: BLACK INTERNATIONALISMS
This course locates itself in renewed, energetic debates around contemporary and deeper histories of transnationalism and Diaspora studies, particular the work of Brent Hayes Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism(a required text). African American and Africana studies have never been confined to national borders, but how has this Diasporic sense been reflected in the popular imaginary and other exchanges? We also engage the interdisciplinarity of knowledge production in these studies, and we ask what the current status is of black internationalisms are, and how and where they are most readily expressed in the arts.
ENGLISH LITERATURE 1600-1660
(Lecture). Poetry and prose from the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, through the civil wars and Cromwellian commonwealth, to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. We will consider the linked revolutions in English politics, religion, science, philosophy, and social and erotic relations, and will ask how these cultural transformations influenced literary form. Authors will include James I, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, Elizabeth Cary, Thomas Browne, Henry Vaughan, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes, as well as various Levellers, Ranters, Quakers, and perhaps a Muggletonian or two.
ADVANCED TRANSLATION WORKSHOP
Another of the few classes that might(?) fulfill my minor requirement
A practical introduction to translation from French to English (and vice versa), to translation theory and to comparative stylistics. The course will emphasize stylictic issues through close reading and frequent individual and group work on both prose and poetry.
THE AUTHOR AS LAWBREAKER
This class would definitely fulfill my minor requirement
A study of writers presenting themselves as "bad boys" or outcasts from the Middle-Ages to the Twentieth Century. Authors include Rutebeuf, Villon, Tristan l'Hermite, Rimbaud, Vall�s, Genet, Sagan.
WEST AFRICAN HISTORY
I’m trying to branch out from Africa classes, but in fairness, I don’t know that much about West Africa.
This course offers a survey of main themes in West African history over the last millenium, with particular emphasis on the period from the mid-fifteenth through the twentieth century. Themes include the age of West African empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhay), re-alignments of economic and political energies towards the Atlantic coast, the rise and decline of the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves, the advent and demise of colonial rule, and internal displacement, migrations, and revolutions. In the latter part of the course, we will appraise the continuities and ruptures of the colonial and post-colonial eras.
Russia and the Soviet Union in the 20th Century
Speaking of history I don’t know much about…
The course offers an introduction into the history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. It combines lectures and discussion sections as well as survey texts and a selection of sources, including documents generated by state/party bodies, various documents produced by individual authors (especially diaries, letters, and memoirs), and some film materials. Putting the Soviet phenomenon into its wider intellectual, cultural, and geographical contexts, we will also address questions of modernity and modernization, socialism and communism, and authoritarian practices in politics, culture, and society.
IMMIGRANT NEW YORK
So excited about this!!
For the past century and a half, New York City has been the first home of millions of immigrants to the United States. This course will compare immigrants' encounter with New York at the dawn of the twentieth century with contemporary issues, organizations, and debates shaping immigrant life in New York City. As a service learning course, each student will be required to work 2-4 hours/week in the Riverside Language Center or programs for immigrants run by Community Impact.
ETHNIC CONFLICT & UNREST
Post-1965 immigration in the U.S. has prompted conflicts between new immigrant groups and established racial and ethnic groups. This seminar explores ethnic conflict and unrest that takes place in the streets, workplace, and everyday social life. Focus is on sociological theories that explain the tensions associated with the arrival of new immigrants.
INTRODUCTION TO STATISTICS
Ugh, I know I should take statistics, but I just don’t want to. At all. Not even a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, I love calculus and other math/science classes that are cool in their own right, but stats is (from my uninformed perspective) just a tool that people use to do other stuff. Booooring.
LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION: TRADITION, INNOVATION, AND POLITICS (20TH CENTURY)
Knowledge of Russian not required. Survey of Russian literature from symbolism to the culture of high Stalinism and post-Socialist realism of the 1960s and 1970s, including major works by Bely, Blok, Olesha, Babel, Bulgakov, Platonov, Zoshchenko, Kharms, Kataev, Pasternak, and Erofeev. Literature viewed in a multi-media context featuring music, avant-garde and post-avant-garde visual art, and film.
DISASTERS AND DEVELOPMENT
This class sounds awesome, but I’m a little worried that it would be a lot like “Challenges of Sustainable Development”, only more about environmental science and less about development…
his course offers undergraduate students, for the first time, a comprehensive course on the link between natural disaster events and human development at all levels of welfare. It explores the role that natural disasters might have and have had in modulating development prospects. Any student seriously interested in sustainable development, especially in light of climate change, must study the nature of extreme events - their causes, global distribution and likelihood of future change. This course will cover not only the nature of extreme events, including earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and droughts but also their transformation into disaster through social processes. it will ultimately help students to understand the link between such extreme events, the economic/social shock they represent and development outcomes. The course will combine careful analysis of the natural and social systems dynamics that give rise to disasters and examine through group learning case studies from the many disasters that have occurred in the first decade of the 21st century.
CLIMATE CHANGE, RIGHTS & DEVPT
COMPARATIVE DEVELOPMENT
ELEMENTARY SWAHILI II
Definitely taking this
CITIES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Prerequisites: Must attend first class for instructor permission. Preference to Urban Studies majors. Examination of cities in developing countries, with a focus on environment, employment, and housing. Four cases will be studied: Sao Paulo, Brazil; Johannesburg, South Africa; Bombay, India; and Shanghai, China. We will consider urbanization patterns and the attendant issues, the impact of global economic trends, and governmental and non-governmental responses.
UNHEARD VOICES: AFRICAN WOMEN
I really want to take this!
How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a 'mythic unity'? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora. Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 14 students.
