Fall 2013 Course Descriptions

Course description will be forthcoming.

Course description will be forthcoming.

Course description will be forthcoming.

Course description will be forthcoming.

Course description will be forthcoming.

Course description will be forthcoming.

Course description will be forthcoming.

Course description will be forthcoming.

Not everyone is, was, or will be a parent, but everyone is (or was) a child. What the older generation owes its children—and what those children may owe in return—is thus a perennial question and a recurrent theme in western literature of all periods. What are the goals and obligations of child-rearing and the responsibilities of children to those who rear them? Do those obligations remain constant over time, or do they change with advancing years and the inevitable shift of competence and capability as the young grow old and the old grow older?

This course will draw from a set of texts that all deal in one way or another with the often fraught relationship between parents and their children. It has two goals. First, its focus on pre-modern literature inevitably raises the question of what texts so remote in time, style, and form have to say that remains relevant to the modern world, not to mention the practical matter of what reading strategies we must adopt to tease out their meaning. A second, more general goal is no less important, i.e. honing skills in how to read and think about literary texts and how to communicate those thoughts effectively to others. Accomplishing these goals will require spending significant time talking and writing about our target texts—and then critiquing our talking and writing. Class assignments will include weekly (required but ungraded) response paragraphs, two critical essays (one narrowly focused, one comparative), and a take-home final examination/project.

Core readings for the quarter will be drawn from the following authors and works: The Book of Ruth, Hesiod (Theogony), Euripides (Alcestis), Terence (The Brothers), Augustine (Confessions), Chaucer (‘The Physician’s Tale’), Montaigne (‘Of the affection of fathers for their children’), Shakespeare (The Tempest). We will probably also want to introduce additional, modern material for comparison and contrast as our conversation develops.

Whether a wave, sandwich, happening, or very long poem, we use “epic” to describe the huge, the monstrous, the supersized, the truly challenging that brings out the heroic in each of us. Our seminar learning community will imaginatively engage with The Odyssey and other works to see our own life stories illuminated and transformed through the lens of epic chronicles.

In the woods, on the wine dark seas, following the yellow brick road-- witches and monsters and tempters at every bend and even in the mirror: our course takes up a handful of famous classic epics: Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy—and how classic works like Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Thoreau’s Walden, or stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Wizard of Oz may express epic features. We will ponder how preposterous and outlandish scenarios can speak to us powerfully about our own lives today, whether thousands of years old clay tablets, stories chanted around a fire, or finely-crafted epic poetry, personal essays, lyric drama, or film musical. We will investigate these classics as case studies in the human imagination struggling to make sense of human challenges, consciousness, and conscience, using our own sense of life’s realities as our criteria for classics’ enduring power.

In activities ranging from our own dramatic enactments to rigorous analysis to reflections on films and written texts in journals and essays, old-school and new media, we will creatively engage with the way minds over time have interpreted and shared human experience. Through the magic mirror of works on love and war and identity and life dreams and goals, we may gain new understanding and appreciation of our own real life struggles--why classics matter utterly to us on our own journeys. Dante’s dark woods, the Walden woods where Thoreau tries to “live deliberately,” Dorothy’s whirlwind journey in Oz or Gilgamesh’s (like Dante’s) journey through hell, Odysseus’s turbulent seas, or the mirror in which Cyrano and the beast confront themselves, may reveal our own lives as epic terrain—and the wild and heroic in each person’s noble journey.

Course description will be forthcoming.

The texts are The Odyssey, Sophocles I, The Aeneid, Hildegard's "The Order of the Virtues.” Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Through these, we will study changing models of heroes, such as Odysseus, Penelope, Oedipus, Antigone, Aeneas, Hildegard's Soul, Dante the Wanderer, Hamlet, and Milton’s Adam and Eve. We will give attention to reading the poetic or prose texts closely, to some of the larger controversies raised by these great works, as well as to the continuing conflict between political and private commitments--as dramatized by the epics, plays, dialogues and stories. We will also look at some current literary criticism, particularly with regard to the theme of male/female roles, and the way the traditionally suppressed voice of marginalized people becomes recognized. The major emphasis of the class will be on discussion. There will be three short papers, several non-graded quizzes and a reading journal (a chance to explore your responses to the literature in a more informal context). We will have at least two in-class debates, one on the ending of The Aeneid, another on Milton’s God and Satan and the competition for the reader’s sympathy.

Course description will be forthcoming.

HC 231 is the first section in the College’s history sequence and concentrates on Ancient and Medieval history. Because the Ancient World is a vast topic, in this course we will narrow our investigation to examine law in Ancient Greece by looking at famous and important trials. Through these trials, we will explore issues of domestic life, political speech, violence, citizenship, commerce, crime, corruption, slavery, and piety.

In tracing broad lines of inquiry into the Ancient World, students will have an opportunity to explore how systems of law and concepts of justice organize social, economic, and political practices. We will examine how law was used to create and erase social and political distinctions, to establish hierarchies, and to define ideals. By looking at specific cases, students will explore how law defined and resolved crucial moments of conflict in the Ancient World.

Over the course of the semester, we will read widely in primary materials. In addition to formal, written assignments and in-class quizzes, students will be graded on their preparation and participation.

Accounts of artists, builders, founders, and creators, both heavenly and human, situate human knowledge of and power over the world in different ways, and thus have long been the subject of controversy. We will discuss how the relationship between human, nature, and the divine was framed differently in connected cultures across North Africa, Asia, and Europe. Through a focus on ancient texts of history, poetry, religion, liturgy, philosophy, and magic, we will question how such texts and practices shaped, justified, or gave meaning to the founding of settlements, religions, and empires.

This course on global history examines how ideas about nature and practices of environmental management shaped pre-modern societies from ancient times to roughly 1450. It illustrates how scientific knowledge and innovations -- such as Greek physics, Mayan mathematics, Inca engineering, and Aztec botany -- were fundamental for the development of these societies. Students will see how science facilitated political power and imperial expansion. Science also led to cultural change and urbanization, while influencing agricultural and technological innovations. The course is globally oriented but focuses on non-western societies, especially those in the Americas. In particular, it seeks to demonstrate how the Mayas, Moche, Incas, Aztecs, and others created advanced and fascinating societies that deserve to be recognized and studied, instead of relegating them to the periphery as most Western Civilization approaches often do. There will be a significant emphasis on critical thinking and reading, writing, and oral communication.

"See how they wake without a question. Even though the whole world is burning” 

- W.S. Merwin

With growing concern about global climate change, ecological issues have come into new focus within the dialog that constitutes contemporary art. The strategies and modalities of creative production that artists use to the engage ecological concerns are wide ranging and compelling. They raise significant issues about the role of the arts in culture, in knowledge creation and in attempts to enact cultural change. Art has become a dynamic cultural site of interdisciplinarity, collaboration and activism. This course will consider historical precedents, such as Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oak, and his notion of social sculpture, and current trends, such as Natalie Jeremijenko’s hacking of toy robot dogs and repurposing them to find toxins in urban neighborhoods. We will consider this growing field of eco-art and whether some of the strategies coming out of the field are applicable to our individual fields of interests and scholarship as academics and students.

We will also consider our roles in this changing world and probe some possible strategies for our own engagement. We will use the Internet as a means of sharing research, reading responses, and work in progress. Students are required to keep a blog. The blogs should be specific to this class alone. The site should include related research and links to related sites and should help visitors (primarily members of our class) appreciate the themes and issues that are important to you.

Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Arts & Letters Colloquium, and an IP Multicultural class. If the student has already taken an Arts & Letters Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and an IP Multicultural class.

"women need to realize that SF is the only genre of literature in which it's possible for a writer to explore the question of what this world would be like if you could get rid of [X], where [X] is filled in with any of the multitude of real world facts that constrain and oppress women. Women need to treasure and support science fiction." (Suzette Haden Elgin)

Description: Science fiction has provided a space for feminist authors to explore relationships with science, technology, and identity, unfettered from the generic conventions of other types of fiction. The purpose of this course is threefold: to explore the oeuvre of feminist science fiction through key texts, from the post-war period through the present; to introduce students to archival research, through work in the UO Libraries’ significant holdings in the area of feminist science fiction; to simultaneously explore online fandom, expanding our understanding of archives to online domains and activities.

In this course, students will hit the ground running, beginning their work in special collections on the first day of class. The first part of the course will be devoted to reading primary texts. The second part of the course will feature student presentations on their archival work. The third section of the course will focus on online fandom and amateur archiving.

Bruno Latour provocatively asks “has critique run out of steam?” Latour is concerned that we have critiqued the world to death so that all that is left is either a bleak, hopeless wasteland or a handful of glittering fragments that we are condemned to endlessly re-arrange in trivial “new” patterns. Applied to the project of media literacy, Latour’s question suggests that we’ve gotten so obsessed with the deconstruction of meanings, images, and ideologies that we’ve forgotten media’s greatest strength: its ability to allow us to imaginatively experience, share and express ourselves in relationship to each other and the world. This course argues for a critical/contemplative engagement with media literacy education.

From the Contemplative Studies perspective, this approach is informed by a focal concern on the individuals’ experience of themselves (their awareness of their being in the world), of their experiential relationship to others and their experiential interrelationship with the human-built and natural worlds. From a Critical perspective, it is informed by a self-reflexive as well as an historical engagement with the “idea” of “media.” Stepping back from the seductive spectacle of “media” as communication machines, whether as books or as computers or as cell phones or even as language, one asks what is the patterned character of what we have called “media” and the quality of our experience of it. This is the conceptual and experiential move taken by Marshall McLuhan a half-century ago.

By combining these two perspectives the course will consider how to blend thoughtful media analysis and practice with democratic community building.

We will explore the profound conceptual challenges in thinking about nature brought about by two of the great revolutions in science of the twentieth century: special relativity and quantum mechanics. We will first explore each of these theories at a deep but simple level, using elementary examples. We will then explore the extremely strange things that happen when we try to put these theories together!

We will begin with readings from Newton and Leibniz on absolute space and time, itself a revolutionary idea when propounded in the seventeenth century at the dawn of modem science.

Next, we will explore the change in thinking about space and time brought about by the theory of relativity, especially Einstein’s revolutionary understanding of 1905. We will perform an intense reading of Einstein’s famous popular text on relativity, still one of the clearest expositions, and a fascinating insight into the mind of this great thinker.

Then we will explore the revolutionary changes brought about in the early twentieth century with the advent of quantum mechanics, the theory of the microscopic world. We will again pursue the most basic understanding, probing the famous wave particle duality with the two-slit experiment, following the renowned treatment of Feynman.

After dealing with the perplexing situation of the notorious “Schrodinger’ s cat” the course will culminate with an exploration of the mind-boggling things that happen when we try to put the relativity and quantum theories together. The predictions of each theory separately, and both together, have been verified in all experiments with astonishing accuracy. However, when we join relativity with quantum mechanics, conceptually things don’t really make complete sense! We will see that perhaps the deepest problem is what Einstein called the “spooky action at a distance” in “entangled” quantum systems that comes about when you include relativity. Quantum magic results, challenging our deepest ideas of “reality.”

This course is intended as a serious exploration of some of the most fascinating ideas that have come out of the modem scientific revolutions that took place first in the seventeenth century with the advent of Newton’s physics, and then in the twentieth century with the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. There will be an emphasis on original texts of leading thinkers; written composition; and mathematical treatment that is up to the task, but at an elementary pre-calculus level accessible to intelligent students of various backgrounds. The needed mathematics will be introduced in a tutorial fashion, either as review or new material, depending on personal background.

Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill both of the following requirements: a Social Science Colloquium and an AC Multicultural class. If the student has already taken a Social Science Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and an AC Multicultural class.

Did the American West function as a “Racial Frontier” that offered immigrants and migrants greater opportunity for political autonomy, economic prosperity, or social mobility than their respective places of origin? Or, did cultures of white supremacy, institutionalized racism, and racialized forms of conquest, colonialism, pastoralism, slavery, assimilation, exclusion, and ethnocide complicate such opportunities? How did indigenous and immigrant cultures encounter and adapt to one another? How did non-white individuals, families, communities and peoples exercise agency, resistance, and adaptation in the American West? Did broader structures and forces such as market capitalism, state imperialism, or the natural environment circumscribe the actions and decisions of individuals? How did race and ethnicity intersect with gender, class, nationality, religion, and other sites of oppression in the American West? How were race and ethnicity defined and understood over time and space? How did concepts and meanings of race and ethnicity shape immigration, citizenship, property, labor, and liberty? Within the context of race and ethnicity can the American West be understood as a geographic place, cultural region, social process, or imagined construct?

These questions frame the use of “race” and “ethnicity” as categories of historical analysis, rather than simply topics or areas of content. Sociologist James Loewen is fond of quipping that “sociology is history without the work, and history is sociology without the brains.” His aphorism intentionally exaggerates the traditional epistemological inclinations of the two disciplines—history toward empirical evidence, archival research, and narrative reconstruction, and sociology toward critical theory, structuralist analysis, and long-term socio-historical processes. The emergence of the so-called “New Western History” in the 1980s and 1990s—exemplified by the scholarship of the “Big Four” -- Patricia Nelson Limerick, Donald Worster, William Cronon, and Richard White—began to interweave social history with critical race theory, intersectionality theory, whiteness studies, and world systems theory.

These fundamental reinterpretations confronted the subfield of western history with postmodern and postcolonial historiography and comparative historical sociology, and ultimately subverted the dominant Anglo-centric, triumphalist “Frontier” meta-narrative of American historical development that had largely endured since Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” of the 1890s. Since the 1990s, scholars like Jeff Ostler, Quintard Taylor, Arnoldo DeLeon, Peggy Pascoe, and their peers have advanced the field by continuing to recapture forgotten voices while interpreting the experiences of historical actors through interdisciplinary theoretical lenses.

This course invites students to participate in an “apprenticeship” in the historian’s craft, and perform community-based research projects organized around a central case study of the cultural history of the Northern Great Basin, encompassing Euro-American, Chinese, and Basque immigration, as well as a particular focus on the Northern Paiute. In preparation for the research, students will critically examine the ethics, methodology, and historiography imperative to academic historians engaging in inquiry with community partners. Additionally, students will learn appropriate protocols and guidelines for researching and working with cultural heritage collections and local community members in collaboration with Jennifer O’Neal, University Historian and Archivist, and David Lewis, Cultural Liaison of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. Ultimately, the course will position undergraduates to create new knowledge and contribute original arguments to the existing scholarship on this region through interaction with visiting scholars, including native and non-native historians, and members of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Burns Paiute Tribe. Students’ research will enjoy a course afterlife through dual exhibits hosted by the Des Chutes County Museum and the UO Libraries, as well as public presentations delivered at a prospective Northern Great Basin Symposium in Winter 2014. Finally, a field research experience in central Oregon will contextualize students’ research, and afford an in-situ learning environment for living community memory and oral history. At sites such as the Warm Springs Reservation and Museum, Smith Rock State Park, Crooked River Canyon, and the High Desert Museum students will enjoy access to unique archival and oral sources, highlighted by interaction with Wilson Wewa, spiritual leader of the Northern Paiute and Washaat longhouse; Minerva Soucie, artist and historian of Northern Paiute; and Jim Gardner, author of Star Spangled War Dance: The Hidden History of the Northern Paiute.

Thesis Prospectus (2 credits) guides student work with a primary thesis advisor to develop a prospectus and timeline for thesis work throughout the year. Students present prospectuses orally to the class, with primary thesis advisors present. Course requirements include submitting a revised Thesis Prospectus and completing a Graduation Audit. Thesis Prospectus is graded Pass/No Pass. NB: HC 477—Thesis Prospectus requires pre-authorization. Complete the Thesis Prospectus Application form, which is available on the CHC Blackboard site, only after taking the time necessary to formulate, in collaboration with a primary thesis advisor in the major, the outline of a thesis project. The form requires the primary thesis advisor’s signature (verified electronic signatures are accepted). Provide the completed form to Academic Coordinator Miriam Jordan in person (122 Chapman Hall) or electronically (mjordan@uoregon.edu). The Academic Coordinator requires the form at least two weeks prior to a given term’s initial registration period. Enrollment is based on a first-come, first-served basis. Space is limited. Students who do not file applications in a timely manner will be asked to take Thesis Prospectus the following term. Address questions about the thesis process to your CHC advisor. Address questions about Thesis Prospectus enrollment to the Academic Coordinator. Students who need to submit an application from abroad should email the Academic Coordinator.