Skip to main content
IUB Honors Courses Indiana University Bloomington

HON-H 228 – Interdepartmental Colloquium: Modern Madness

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#13128

GARETH EVANS

TuTh 11:15am-12:30pm

HU 108

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

 

“Modern Madness” examines how various forms of madness have been defined and treated between 1800 and the present. We will see madness described as the result of heredity, moral degeneracy, upbringing, trauma, fatigue, and body chemistry. The asylum has been an almost constant presence over the past 200 years, and we will pay particular attention to the different ways in which patients have been treated in, or more recently denied access to, such asylums. The writers we read are from America, England, France, Germany, Martinique, and the former Soviet Union. Because the work we read is international in scope, we will look at how country, political regime, and period shape the practice of psychology and psychiatry. The class, then, though part of its title is “modern,” has less to say about contemporary views of madness than it does about the cultural, social, and political implications of madness in periods and places different from our own. To those who live in them, every period is modern. What is more, as we shall see throughout the class, definitions of madness not only change, but they are also a topic of disagreement and debate within every decade. A simple title, then, for a complex topic. Success in the class depends in part on the ability to see the world in the same way as the writers you read.

REQUIRED READING

Greg Eghigian, From Madness to Mental Health: Psychiatric Disorder and Its Treatment in Western Civilization.
Roy Porter, A Brief History of Madness.

 

HON-H 234 – Literature of Time and Place: 21st Century American Fiction

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#6920
#11719

GARETH EVANS

MW 11:15am-12:30pm
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

HU 108
HU 108

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

 

In this course, we will read six 21st-century American novels. The novels we read vary in style and content, just as the authors vary in their race, ethnicity, gender, regional, and national background. All are concerned with the power of circumstance, however, and with the role that difference of, for example, class, gender, race, color and sexuality, plays in shaping a person’s life. The first book we will read is part of the transnational turn that is a key trend in 21st-century American fiction. That book, Americanah, is as much concerned with the country in which its author was born, Nigeria, as it is with the United States. We will move from Adichie to two novels by C.E. Morgan, All the Living and The Sport of Kings. All the Living takes place for the most part on a rundown Kentucky tobacco farm, and is concerned with the difficulties and intricacies of white working class life and love in rural America. The Sport of Kings, while in some sense about horse racing, is also a wide-ranging meditation on the role of gender, race, and class in the United States. After Morgan, we will read Tommy Orange’s There There, a book which culminates at a powwow in Oakland, but which also seeks to capture the complex nature of Native American identity. N.K. Jemisin is an African-American science fiction novelist, and we will read her The Fifth Season, a Hugo Award winning novel, which is partly a post-apocalyptic account of a world destroyed by climate change, but also a prescient analysis of the catastrophic ways in which people respond to difference. We will end the class with another novel about the white working class, Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, a novel the New York Times book reviewer referred to as “hillbilly noir.”

Range of method is one key to the class, then. I want us to think, too, however, about the connections between the books we read, our ability to connect, or otherwise, to the characters they portray, the different ways in which the novels explore their characters’ attempts to connect, and the connection between characters and the worlds in which they, and you, live. If you read the books in the way I want you to read them, you will put yourself in the heads of the writers you read, and the people you read about, however different they may be from you.

WRITING REQUIREMENTS

Two 6-8 page essays. 65% of the final grade. Seven blog posts. Either three or four of your responses will comment on a book we are reading, while the other three or four will respond to two comments made by other students in the class. I will grade two of your comments and one of your responses to the comments. You will receive a checkmark for each of your other contributions to the Blog. The lowest grade you receive for a graded Blog assignment will not count towards your final grade. 35% of your final grade will be based on your Blog responses, and on your participation in class.

READING

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah.
Tommy Orange, There There.
C.E. Morgan, All the Living; The Sport of Kings.
N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season.
Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone.

HON-H 233 – Great Authors, Composers, and Artists: Accident, Catastrophe, and Trauma in Literature and Film

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#31979

JOHANNES TURK

MW 9:30-10:45am

HU 217

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

 

Accidents and catastrophes are dramatic and always possible events that challenge individual and collective life. They break the protective shields that ward off the threats surrounding us. Their traumatic impact calls upon psychological and cultural coping mechanisms and forces us to reconfigure our lives that will never be the same. How have cultures dealt with the unexpected breakdown of order and normality? This course imparts a critical knowledge about the models according to which narrations about these events are formed and asks how literature and film can help to cope with disasters. The stories we tell ourselves help integrate and make sense of what has previously mutilated us. They also anticipate possible future accidents and enable us to cope with them. Narratives therefore can have an immunological function. In Modernity, accident and catastrophe – both previously interpreted as destiny – change their meaning. They stand for contingency and represent a risk inherent in our way of life. Urban spaces, modern working environments, and new means of transportation such as trains and the automobile make accidents more probable and ubiquitous. The course will examine how filmic and narrative representations integrate the disintegration and violence inherent in our world. Accidents are sources for artistic productivity. We will read short texts from Thucydides and Heinrich von Kleist to Franz Kafka and Cortázar, and discuss films from Buster Keaton to Brian de Palma and Almodovar. The course is therefore also an introduction to major texts of the literary and filmic tradition.

Required texts:

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Oxford World’s Classics)

All other texts, paintings, photos, and materials will be provided.

HON-H 241 – Scientific Uncertainty and Discovery – Quick and Dirty Mental Operations: The Price of Adaptive Cognition

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#6922

LEAH SAVION

TuTh 8:00am-9:15am

BH 236

CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) N&M Breadth of Inquiry credit; IUB GenEd N&M credit – Natural Science

 

Human survival depends on effective gathering of huge amounts of information, adequate processing, fast learning, and controlling the environment to secure predictability and adjustment. Our brain selects what to attend to, categorize and integrate perceptual input, makes inferences, establishes emotional and physical reactions to environmental cues, and activating all other systems (affective, behavioral, and physiological) with staggering speed and efficiency. These cognitive feats are executed extremely quickly and accurately with the help of mental short cuts called “heuristics.”

The concept of cognitive heuristics has caught on fire recently, infiltrating areas such as economics, music, ethics, social behavior, perception, problem solving, legal reasoning, categorization, rationality, mental health, attention and learning, and even some self-help literature. This course presents students with an opportunity to investigate this relatively new and highly useful theoretical construct, from its conceptual analysis to theoretical and pragmatic applications of its models to self-awareness as a cognitive agent.

Course activities include:

  • Micro-thematic papers/tests: in-depth analysis of some aspect of the material covered in the book or in the original papers.
  • Final research paper: with an original thesis or synthesis in philosophy, psychology, or cognitive science, due in the last week of classes.
  • Team project/presentation of researched topic in cognitive science, sociology, philosophy, animal cognition, legal reasoning, economics, or linguistic. Team papers are due, if required, 5 days after class presentation.
  • Educational videos on belief perseverance, scientific frameworks, development, fallibility of eyewitness testimony, and cognitive gender differences.
  • Short Group presentation of the reading material and specific assignments.

HON-H 211 – Ideas and Experiences I: Images of Women in the Ancient World

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#2365
#9813

RICHARD CECIL

MW 1:00-2:15pm
MW 2:30-3:45pm

HU 108
HU 111

CLASS NOTES: Satisfaction of the English composition requirement; COLL Intensive Writing section; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

In this section of H211 we will read ancient to early modern dramas and epics with a special focus on the roles women play in those works, as well as a great memoir, the 14th century Confessions of Lady Nijo, and what many consider to be the first great modern novel, the 10th century The Tale of Gengi, both written by women. Beginning with the depiction of women in Gilgamesh, the oldest epic, as mothers, prostitutes, and barmaids, and ending with Shakespeare’s cynical depiction of a shallow, sophisticated, “modern,” faithless female lover, we’ll trace the history and development of female characters in fiction. There will be three 3-5 page critical essays, and a final, 6-10 page creative paper which will consist of a scene from the point of view of one of the women who appear in one or more of the text – a scene in which her version of the “facts” is dramatized. Each student’s creative assignment will be distributed to the class and discussed in the final two weeks of the course.

HON-H 212 – Ideas and Experiences II: The Pursuit of Happiness

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#31980

FREDERIC LIEBER

MW 11:15am-12:30pm

HU 111

CLASS NOTES: Satisfaction of the English composition requirement; COLL Intensive Writing section, COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

 

The Declaration of Independence considers the pursuit of happiness a right along with life and liberty. Two hundred-plus years later, happiness is still a popular pursuit. Happiness books appear frequently on best seller lists. There is a Journal of Happiness Studies.

We conduct our own pursuit of happiness in philosophy, history, religion, psychology, social science, literature, and the arts. We are guided by three questions: what are common themes and meanings in the history of happiness, how have they developed, and how do we evaluate them? Students will investigate happiness in their major or minor disciplines, or a discipline of interest.

We read Aristotle, St. Augustine, the Bible, Descartes, Montaigne, Kant, Rousseau, Beethoven, Blake, Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, Matisse, Freud, Max Weber, Willa Cather, Camus, the Dalai Lama, Wallace Stevens, James Wright, Robert Nozick, and Jonathan Haidt.

Students write two five-page papers and a final paper. There are no exams.

 

HON-H 212 – Ideas and Experience II: What is a Good Education?

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#5885

ROBERT KUNZMAN

TR 9:30am-10:45am

HU 111

CLASS NOTES: Satisfaction of the English composition requirement, COLL Intensive Writing section, COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

For education majors, this course also counts as a substitute for H205: Introduction to Educational Thought – a requirement for both Elementary Education and Secondary Education majors.

 

What Is a Good Education?

Embedded in this question are many others we will explore: What is the purpose of education? How do we come to know things? What is the difference between education and indoctrination? What does it mean to learn to think for oneself? What are the relative interest of parents, the state, and children themselves? Should all children be educated equally? In this course we will draw upon insights and arguments throughout the ages, then turn our gaze to contemporary visions and controversies.

Comments from former students:

  • “It gave me an opportunity to consider my own education with a depth that wasn’t previously possible.”
  • “If you are looking for a class that challenges your ideas and misconceptions, this class is for you.”
  • “I honestly came into this class trying to get my intensive writing and honors credits, but was surprised at how it became one of my favorite, most engaging classes. Our discussions opened my eyes to the world of education, and they are the reason I am going to be an undergraduate assistant instructor in the spring.”

HON-H 234 – Literature of Time and Place: What is the Good Life?

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#33855

HERBERT MARKS

SECOND EIGHT WEEKS
TR 4:00pm-6:30pm

HU 108

CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; IUB GenEd A&H credit. This class meets with CMLT-C 200.

 

How do you define the “good life”? How can one live “authentically”? These questions engaged the ancient Greeks, who developed such concepts as “pleasure,” “happiness,” and “virtue,” no less than the op-ed columnists of today. We’ll begin by comparing the answers of classical philosophy, especially Epicurus, for whom true happiness meant freedom from anxiety and pain, and biblical “wisdom,” especially Ecclesiastes, which dismissed all striving, whether for wealth, love, or learning, as “mere breath” or “vanity.” Most of our time will then be devoted to two writers whose ideas about how to live were inseparable from their thoughts on writing itself: Montaigne, who responded to the political crises of his day by developing the “essay” as a vehicle for self-reflection, and Henry James, who in his novels depicted the conflict between new-world virtue and old-world pleasures with incomparable subtlety and nuance. Written work: two short papers and a class presentation.

HON-H 233 – Great Authors, Composers, and Artists: Utopia/Dystopia (Utopias & Dystopias in Fact, Fiction & Film)

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#33529

EDWARD GUBAR

TR 4:00pm-5:30pm
R 7:15pm-10:00pm

HU 111
WH 003

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; IUB GenEd A&H credit. Class includes film showings on Thursday evenings.

 

What do you expect your future to be like? What would you like it to be? Do you want to be personally successful? Or do you want to live in a society that provides opportunities for all? Or both? Do you want to live a decent public and private and secret existence, if that’s possible? Humans have been considering and writing about individuals and societies for many centuries. About political and social organization, about equality, about love, about the environment, about war and violence, about misogyny, and about racism. What’s the best world to inhabit? What’s worst?

A utopia usually portrays an imagined society where things are perfect. Harmony, equality, happiness. Think Eden before the fall. A dystopia portrays an awful imagined society where people live dehumanized, unpleasant lives. Humans create literary utopias to enhance the possibilities of existence. We might not get there but it’s nice to think about and project better lives. Dystopias often show us worlds we might inhabit should various negative trends continue. Totalitarianism. Slavery. Ignorance. Extinction. On some level, utopias depend upon our human capacity for empathy. Conversely, dystopias often portray societies that lack empathy and welcome division and hierarchy. Ironically, one person’s utopia may be another’s dystopia, and one person’s dystopia may be another’s utopia. We will explore both genres.

Thomas More wrote the first literary utopia in 1516. He called it Utopia, a word that derives from Greek and translates as “nowhere”.

After reading More we will read both utopias and dystopias past and present. Writers may include Zamyatin, Kafka, Morris, Mitchell, Bradbury, Huxley, Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, Piercy, LeGuin, Atwood, Callenbach, Dick, Rogers, Saunders, McCarthy, and Ishiguro. We may also watch a variety of films that portray both genres, some based on the works of the writers mentioned above (Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.) Other films may be included, like Lost Horizon and Ex Machina. We may also read nonfiction essays and books and watch films that address current issues, like climate change and social media, often from a dystopic perspective: Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and McKibben’s Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? may be on our reading list.

Required writing will include several short writing assignments and a final longer essay as well as a final exam. Class participation is required and will count at least a third of your grade. All assigned films will be shown on Thursday evenings, but most films are available to stream. How you choose to watch a film is up to you.

HON-H 303 – Interdepartmental Colloquium: The Modern Self

Posted on by brigphil

Sections offered FALL 2019:

#1422

EYAL PERETZ

MW 4:00pm-5:15pm

WH 104

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit. This class meets with CMLT-C 347.

 

Who are we (that is, who are we human beings, what is our nature) and how do we BECOME who we are? This is the guiding question that this class will try to answer. What this question implies is that though we have a certain nature, it is not clear that we know how to fulfill it, thus that we know how to fully be ourselves, that we know how to live the life we are called to live. The basic hypothesis that will guide us is that the modern era, by which we will understand the era stretching from the Renaissance to our own days, has started to raise this guiding question, the origins of which are ancient, in a new way. Another hypothesis that will guide us is that one of the fundamental places in which humanity tried to learn to become what it is, and to fulfill its nature in a new way, is in works of art. Art, we will argue, in its modern development, and perhaps in a paradigmatic way in the modern projects of the self portrait in painting, film, and photography, and the modern project of autobiography, is nothing but the attempt to develop new means through which humanity can come to itself, and learn to live the life it is called to live but never knew how.

We will take a look at a very wide ranging selection of works, from the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt to the self portraits of Andy Warhol, from the autobiographies of Enlightenment writer Jean Jacques Rousseau to the autobiographical works of William Wordsworth and Marcel Proust, and from the self portraits in film of Charlie Chaplin to those of Orson Welles, from the theater of Shakespeare to that of Beckett, and many more works, photographs, selfies, YouTube clips, etc.

Skip to toolbar