Professor: Barbara Mossberg
4 credits
Influencers, influenced: our world today. Poetry, philosophy, and science merge, converge, blur, and blend in this study of influencers who rocked—and still rock—our world. Bursting and bending disciplines, joyously defying definitions of field--Einstein the scientist played the violin, urged people to study poetry and wrote poetry himself; Emerson the poet urged people to study science and history-- Emerson and Einstein are epic iconic minds and legends providing leadership in how we see and think about our world, the environment, and each other.
Emerson said, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” Yet despite the seeming inpenetrabilities of e=mc2 and “The American Scholar,” lectures, journals, and essays considered “genius,” Emerson and Einstein were celebrities, popular, and famous as public intellectuals who were understood more than not. Among the world’s most quotable—and quoted--people, it is as writers in the public realm and popular culture that they became movers and shakers; it is as metaphor-makers that they became change agents.
We will explore their metaphoric imaginations (and what this even means): how their metaphoric imaginations challenged and changed science and social sciences in how we think about our world and what “matters,” from transformative emergent complexity and chaos theories to civil and human rights and environmental policies.
Emerson and Einstein are examples of famous persons who made a difference in their and our worlds. But they began as just persons picking up the pen and writing down their thoughts, as they observed and reflected on the world. Asking what makes their writing so enduring and powerful, we will also ask, who has their role in our world today? What do you think?
In fact, Emerson and Einstein had ideas about how you think and how it matters. How should we educate? They cared what is going on in our classroom. So we will try to live up to their legacy in what will happen in our CHC classroom. This includes producing a play, teaching ourselves philosophy, teaching ourselves whatever you know best and most joyously, translation projects in which you enact e=mc2 and paint or draw or dance.
We will examine the paradox that such seemingly difficult thinkers express the power of knowledge in ways that seek a common world view, literally and morally, in terms of conscience, courage, empathy, kindness, and goodness. Feisty iconoclasts, Emerson and Einstein’s lives and writings inspire ways to see our world with imagination and insight as “miracle” worthy of excitement, awe, and wonder, and a rousing social critique to foster better behavior to one another and our earth.
And above all, we will examine how their writings and lives invoke and inspire and illuminate your own; I want our class to be a time and place to discover your own thoughts, and to do work that puts the “me” in meaningful. Every assignment is designed to provide you the opportunity to engage creatively with your own mind and spirit.
The format of our class structure as a Clark Honors College colloquium is based on the ancient concept of colloquiumitself: col—as in colleague, collaborate; loqui—to speak. We will gather as a real-world scholarly learning community of colleagues and collaborators, sharing and building knowledge, speaking with each other, and engaging with the spoken and written words of people around the world and over time. We will model the very meaning of genius: the synthesis of I, and you, and us.