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IUB Honors Courses Indiana University Bloomington

HON-H 237 – Hot Topics

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Sections offered SPRING 2022:

#7341

JOSEPH HOFFMAN

MW 9:30 AM–10:45 AM

LW 121

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

Class taught in a Hybrid manner which includes In Person and Online Instruction. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

 

This course is designed to introduce students to the fascinating and diverse world of law. Through the study of selected judicial opinions in legal cases covering a wide range of important and timely topics – including voting rights and election law, police use of force, sexual and reproductive autonomy, affirmative action, impeachment, immigration, religious liberty, the death penalty, federalism, and other issues – the course will illuminate how lawyers and judges use the law to try to achieve results that protect individual and public legal rights, while also furthering the best interests of society and the ends of justice. The course is intended for any student interested in learning more about law, about how legal decisions are made, and about the impacts of law in society. In Spring 2022, this course will be taught through a combination of in-person class meetings (60 minutes, twice per week) to discuss judicial opinions and other legal texts, and asynchronous lectures (30 minutes, once per week) that will be posted to Canvas. All reading materials will be provided free to students via Canvas. No prior knowledge of law is required.

Each week there will be one 30-minute asynchronous lecture that will be posted to Canvas, and that must be viewed before each Monday’s class meeting.

No textbook is required for this course. All reading materials will be provided free to students via Canvas.

HON-H 234 – Ghost Stories

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Sections offered SPRING 2022:

#34609

HERBERT MARKS

MW 3:00 PM–5:30 PM
FIRST EIGHT WEEKS

GA 1118

CLASS NOTES: Meets with CMLT-C 255; meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

 

Consulting the spirit world with the help of a ouija board, the poet James Merrill received an unsettling message: “Give up everything except the ghost!” If all art is haunted, as Merrill seems to suggest, and artists are spiritual conjurers, the barrier between the dead and the living grows thinnest when we approach it through the medium of the ghost story. Beginning with spirit photography and the vengeful phantoms of Japanese cinema, this course will pursue a succession of notable ghosts who have haunted the house of literature and the sister arts over the course of the last century. We shall be looking at the work of such conjurers as Ueda Akinari, Benjamin Britten, James Merrill, Kenji Mizoguchi, Edvard Munch, and W.G. Sebald, while considering some explanations, psychological and social, for our fascination with the uncanny—and perhaps a few occult techniques popular among modern spiritualists.

HON-H 226 – The Production of Culture

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Sections offered SPRING 2022:

#7344

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON

TuTh 3:00 PM–4:15 PM

HU 108

CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

Those who watch the Super Bowl may have a range of motivations for joining television’s largest audience of the year, but each of us probably knows at least one person who watches for the commercials. Advertisers certainly believe viewers value the commercials; in 2020 they spent nearly $6 million for a 30-second spot. You may admire the spirit of competition inherent in the game or the choreography of the half-time show, but the networks see the Super Bowl as a veritable license to print money. The Super Bowl is clearly more than just a marketing scheme, but the bottom line is that the television networks use football’s biggest game to capture our attention and then to sell that attention to advertisers, who target us with messages addressing us, first and foremost, as consumers. This business model – harvesting human attention through the media and reselling it to advertisers – serves as the economic foundation of all commercial media, from the tabloid newspapers of the nineteenth century to the social media platforms of the twenty-first, from The New York Sun in 1833 to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube today.

This marriage of culture and economics – using cultural experiences to capture and then sell human attention to advertisers – reached its full potential as early as the 1920s, when radio stations began offering content to listeners at no apparent cost to those listening in. Afterwards, each new medium would attain its commercial viability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange for its “free” content. This business model has become more deeply woven into our lives with the explosion of digital media and the internet in the 21st century, when most of us carry a smartphone that constantly find ways to commercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention

Although Facebook, Instagram and other social media are technically free for users to enjoy, these social media have adopted the same economic model as the mass media before them: they encourage us to give them our time and attention so that we might be sold to advertisers. In fact, critics of social media like to remind users that virtually nothing on the internet is actually free. If you don’t pay for a product, then you are the product. Given the almost indispensable role of social media in the everyday lives of billions of people, it is virtually impossible in the 21st century to imagine how one might live a life beyond the reach of commercial culture. Corporations make cultural participation widely accessible, but this also means that market values shape cultural values in ways that are clearly worth examining more closely.

 

Course Objectives

The object of this course is to understand how media function by discussing many of the defining features of commercial culture, including the role of corporations in producing and distributing cultural products – often on platforms of their own design, the social practices of users and the social organization of audiences, the influence of advertising and marketing in the cultural marketplace, and the expansion of global markets. The readings, assignments, and classroom activities are intended to help students develop competence in critical thinking about culture and society, as demonstrated through exams and short essays, and advanced skill in the writing of reasoned arguments, as demonstrated in formal papers. Students are not expected to have any prior experience with the topics to be studied in this course – just an interest in learning to think critically about contemporary media and culture.

HON-H 211 – Discursive Dualities and Democratic Citizenship

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Sections offered SPRING 2022:

#12220

ROBERT TERRILL

TuTh 1:15 PM–2:30 PM

HU 217

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; COLL Intensive Writing section

Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

 

We often assume that when we are communicating with one another in a democracy, that we should be clear, straight forward and sincere. We should mean what we say and say what we mean. Public discourse should lead us toward, and it should reveal, the truth about things. For example, politicians almost always campaign on some version of a promise to communicate in this way, and they almost always accuse their opponents of not communicating in this way.

But what if it is more complicated than that? What if a democratic culture, where we hold power together with one another, suggests that there are other criteria for communication? What if there are some situations in which working for the common good invites us to communicate with one another in ways that are not recognized as clear, straight forward, and sincere?

In this course we will explore these questions, and others. We will read about duality, duplicity, honesty, deception, role-playing, and authenticity, in works ranging from those produced by the ancient Greeks to those written by contemporary theorists. And we will examine case studies to determine if what we believe to be true about democratic discourse actually is true.

Students will explore these issues in several shorter writing assignments that then are revised and brought together into a longer essay. Students also will share their work with the rest of the class, both in the form of written drafts on writing workshop days and at the end of the semester in the form of a brief oral presentation.

HON-H 237: Liberal Democracy since the 2008 Financial Crisis

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Sections offered SPRING 2022:

#12222

STEVE RAHKO

MW 4:45 PM–6:00 PM

HU 111

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

 

What is Liberal Democracy and what should we expect of it? What should Liberal Democracy require or expect of us? Liberal Democracy has been the most important political concept in the American cultural lexicon since the end of the Civil War, but, given the challenges of the 21st century, it may be more important than ever to consider what it means and what it can mean as a solution to the most basic needs of the human condition: community, self-fulfillment, human dignity, and material subsistence. In this course we will consider these as well as other questions toward a critical engagement with Liberal Democracy. By “critical engagement” I mean that we will explore some of the most influential and important statements made about Liberal Democracy in at least the past decade; consider what conceptual vocabularies may or may not be most crucial to our self-understanding of what Liberal Democracy means; and consider if the concept of Liberal Democracy is in crisis in the United States and around the world. In particular, we will consider these questions with regard to how the world has changed in the decade since the 2008 Financial Crisis, an event that has been linked to major social transformations across the world, including the rise of authoritarian populism, significant geopolitical events such as Brexit and the Arab Spring, and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency. In this course, students will be asked to entertain these questions and more as we survey, in Michel Foucault’s words, a “history of the present,” and consider what Liberal Democracy is and ought to be, whether it is in crisis in the United States, and what might be required to reform it and renew its possibilities in order for it to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

HON-H 234 – The Global American Novel

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Sections offered SPRING 2022:

#12228

GARETH EVANS

TuTh 11:30 AM–12:45 PM

HU 108

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

 

By “Global American Novel” I mean novels written by authors who were not born in America, but who wrote their novels while they lived in America. None of the novels we will read are set only in America, while the novels by Danticat and Li are set wholly in Haiti and China. Hamid no longer lives in the United States, Hemon moved to the United States as a young adult, and Adichie and Danticat spend considerable amounts of time in Nigeria and Haiti. That said, American born novelists have long written fiction set in other countries, and immigrant fiction also has a lengthy history in the United States. The 21st-century American fiction we will read is different from such fiction, however, because it does not obviously fit into a single national tradition. It raises questions, then, about how one should define the American novel, while also inviting us to look at the impact of globalization on world literature, and at the relationship, literary and political, between the United States and the home countries—Bosnia, China, Ghana, Haiti, Nigeria, and Pakistan—of the authors we will read. Writers circulate, it is clear, but how does the literature we will read circulate? Given the history of dictatorship in a number of the countries I listed, and given the role America has sometimes played in such countries, the novels we read necessarily raise questions about human rights. Every novel we read was written in English, and with the exception of Hemon, all of the authors we read were educated in America. We will also look, then, at whether such facts mean that English is now a global language. All the previous questions lead to one culminating question: How does one read the global American novel?

Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah.

Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker.

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Yiyun Li, The Vagrants.

Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. 5th Edition.

 

NOTE: Please buy physical copies of the books.

HON-H 211 – Cracking the (Honor) Code

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Sections offered SPRING 2022:

#4170
#6154

RICHARD CECIL

MW 1:15 PM–2:30 PM
MW 3:00 PM–4:15 PM

HU 108
HU 111

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; COLL Intensive Writing section

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

“What is honor?” asks Falstaff in Act V of Henry IV, pt. 1, and that’s the question we will ask of each of the nine ancient to early modern masterpieces we read in this course. Beginning with Homer’s aristocratic warrior’s code of honor in The Iliad and The Odyssey, and ending with Madame de Lafayette’s sophisticated courtier’s code of honor in The Princess of Cleves, we will investigate the hidden and open assumptions about human behavior that underlie each of these masterpieces’ unstated codes of honor.

Written work for the course will consist of 5 daily written discussion questions, three critical papers of 3-5 pages, and a final 6-10 page creative paper — an original story in which one of the characters from one of the ten works we read encounters a situation which forces her/him to question the code everyone else lives by. These stories will be photocopied and distributed to all members of the class for discussion.

Course texts:  Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, Sophocles’s Antigone, Virgil’s The Aeneid, Seneca’s Trojan Women, Njal’s Saga, Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, Shakespeare’s Henry IV pt.1, and Madame de Lafayette’s Princess of Cleves.

HON-233 – Young Adult Fiction

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Sections offered SPRING 2022:

#7329
#8118

GARETH EVANS

MW 11:30 AM–12:45 PM
MW 3:00 PM–4:15 PM

HU 111
HU 108

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

 

Young Adult Fiction (YAF) is all the rage these days. While roughly 3,000 Young Adult titles were published in 1997, 10,276 were published in 2012.  What’s more, YAF is being bought and read by adults as well as young adults.  The term YAF, however, was not invented until the 1960s.  That does not mean there was no fiction written for young adults before the 1960s, but it does mean it took the book trade a long time to recognize that young people, teenagers, made up a specific market at which fiction might be aimed.  In Young Adult Fiction, we will read books that have either been aimed at young adults from the 1840s until the present, or are currently taught to young adults in the United Kingdom.  We will begin with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a novel that was extremely popular with what would now be called young adult women. We will next read two novels—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go—15 and 16 year olds were or are supposed to read for school in the United Kingdom between the 1970s and the present. We will end the class with four recent examples of YAF: Bearmouth by Liz Hyder, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling.  Questions we consider will include the following:  What do books written, and sometimes taught, in different periods tell us about what authors and publishers expect teenagers to be capable of reading and enjoying?  To what extent do expectations about teenagers and adults change between the 1840s and the present?  To what extent do expectations about teenagers and adults change between the 1970s and the present?  What, if anything, are readers supposed to learn from reading Young Adult Fiction?  Is the increasing popularity and changing nature of Young Adult Fiction positive or is it alarming?

READING

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go.

Liz Hyder, Bearmouth.

Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Writing Requirements

Either three 6 to 8 page essays, or one 6 to 8 page essay, and one research essay of 12-15 pages. Seven blog posts, and participation in a group that teaches one of the sessions on either The Hunger Games or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Essays count for 65% of final grade, blog posts count for 25% of final grade, and group teaching counts for 15% of final grade.

EDUC-K 205 – Introduction to Exceptional Children

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#40825

ANA MARIA BRANNAN

TR 9:25–10:40am

ED 1204

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; Department consent required

 

The goal of EDUC-K 205 is to provide students with foundational knowledge about the history of disabilities generally and special education in particular. K205 is an issues course. As such, we will engage in the discussion of controversial topics in the education and treatment of individuals with exceptionalities (i.e., disabilities and gifts and talents). Issues will be discussed within the context of legal, political, medical, educational, and ethical considerations. Course material will be relevant for undergraduate students pursuing professions within fields such as education, social work, therapy, and psychology.

COLL-C 103 – Humor and Wit in the Italian Renaissance (Honors Discussion)

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Sections offered SPRING 2021:

#40799

MASSIMO SCALABRINI

F 11:15am–12:05pm

SY 106

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

For permission to enroll in above class, email rsteele@indiana.edu and include university ID number.

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

Renaissance artists and writers were as committed to advocating the dignity of humankind and its central place in the universe as they were to making fun of or laughing at themselves and each other. This course will examine the comic literature of the Italian Renaissance. We will explore the nature and various expressions of comedy in genres such as the short story, the facetia (‘witty anecdote’), the apologue, the comic play, the epic and satiric poem and the treatise. In doing so we will address the following questions, among others: What is the relation of laughter and ignorance, error, moral and physical deformity? Does laughter bring people together or does it set them apart? How does comedy articulate the ethical concepts of innocence and guilt? How are conflicts dealt with in comic texts? We will read texts by Boccaccio, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Aretino, Castiglione and Della Casa, among others, and we will also discuss a selection of relevant historical and critical/theoretical materials, particularly the reflections on comedy by Plato, Aristotle and Cicero. While this course is firmly grounded in Italian Renaissance literature, we will also read texts from other European traditions that were inspired or prompted by the Latin and vernacular models produced in the Italian peninsula. Students will write three short essays, take six quizzes and a final exam.

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