• The Living and the Dead (Campany, R.)
• Magic, Science & Art in Africa (McNaughton, P.)
• Hallelujah Hallelujah: Language and Religion (Port, R.)
• Comedies and Tragedies of Communication (Smith, C.)
• The Daoist Body (Bokenkamp, S.)
• Yo Quiero Latino Popular Music (Jaquez, C.)
• A Question of Love (Mickel, E.)
• Chivalry: Medieval Visions of Good and Evil (Wailes, S.)
• Ebonics: The Controversy over African-American English (Davis, S.)
• Cloak and Dagger: Detectives and Spies from Sherlock Holmes to James Bond (Bondanella, P.)
• God and Evil (O'Connor, T.)
• The Semiotics of Advertising (Fowler, G.)
• America in Russian Pop Culture (Milman, N.)
• Dreams in Literature and Life
• What is Myth? (Schrempp, G.)
• S103 Clocks, Cars, and Composers (Hawkes, C.)

E103 The Living and the Dead (Campany, R.)

Members of human societies, when they die, do not completely and immediately disappear. From the perspective of the living, the dead live on in a number of ways, and the living engage in many sorts of relationships and interactions with them from the moment of death onward. Religious traditions have sought to characterize the state of being of dead persons and often provided ways for the living to relate to them. The main question to be asked in this course is: how are the dead conceived of, represented, and given a voice in religions and cultures? Other questions follow from this one, such as: What sorts of relations have the living engaged in with the dead? What is each side of these complex relationships seen to want or need, and why? How are conceptions and images of the dead related to other aspects of religions and cultures? Through what variety of media have cultures expressed their views of the dead? Are there explanations for the many similarities (and for differences) in the conception and treatment of dead humans across cultures and religions?

The course explores these and similar questions through a series of case studies drawn from a wide variety of religions, cultures, and historical periods. Materials include samplings from religious scriptures and ritual texts (for example, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or a scene from the biblical book of Samuel); scholarly studies from disciplines such as religious studies, history, anthropology, folklore, and archeology; excerpts from the literary works, folk narratives, and journalistic accounts (for example, the Odyssey narrative of the hero's journal to the underworld, or ghost stories and "near-death" narratives both recent/local and ancient/Chinese); audiovisual sources (scenes from movies as well as field footage and slides of religious activities and tomb architecture); and a bit of local fieldwork. A primary goal of the course is to introduce students to increasingly sophisticated and interesting ways of thinking, speaking, and writing about such materials, thus equipping them to think and write about other complex aspects of religions and cultures.

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E103 Magic, Science & Art in Africa (McNaughton, P.)

Why do so many Americans and Europeans see science as being very different from art while so many Africans find those differences negligible? This class will explore the complex and extremely interesting interconnections between science, magic and art in Africa, and examine how they have become disconnected in the West. Our point of departure is the vast array of African art types that so many books and museums call fetishes and spirit manifestations. All those sculptures with nails and knife blades sticking in them seem like magic to Westerners, but they are something quite like Western science to Africans, and this class will explore why. We will meet a spectacular array of deities and spirits and hopefully gain a richer comprehension of how humans deal effectively with life's important experiences. In the process we will expand our sense of art's roles in the world, and see how complex societies plan social and spiritual strategies and make sense of the world and respond to intellectual and social challenges aesthetically. Teaching methods range from lectures to participatory exercises in small groups. The course meets for two lectures and one discussion section per week. Requirements usually include three examinations (short-answer plus essay), five short (1-3 page) papers or "microthemes," participation in discussion, and regular attendance.

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E103 Hallelujah Hallelujah: Language and Religion (Port, R.)

This course will encourage students to critically examine the various ways in which language and religion influence each other. We hope to provide students with the analytical tools to critically synthesize and analyze religious discourse. Along the way, they will learn something about both the major components of human language and also something about human religious practice.

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E103 Comedies and Tragedies of Communication (Smith, C.)

This course focuses on how two attitudes toward communication clash and blend in everyday life. The tragic attitude toward communication suggests that people seldom if ever genuinely understand one another, that our attempts to understand one another are thwarted by various forces, and even that we don't really have the desire to understand one another. As a consequence of this attitude, feelings of doubt, confusion, anxiety, and fear are magnified. What we don't understand, we may seek to destroy, thus getting rid of symptoms of insufficiency or anxiety that trouble us and make us suffer. One particularly tragic attitude toward communication tells us to use force rather than language to resolve conflict, to go to war when understanding between parties falters. And yet a tragic attitude communication may encourage respect for the dignity of another person or group's difference, their unknowability. The comic attitude toward communication suggests that misunderstanding is a resource for enjoyment, not conflict, fear, and aggression. But the consequences of this attitude are mixed, and include delight in the pain of others, lapses in self-respect, and a paralyzing inability to appreciate the severity of and urgency of certain situation. While a splendid corrective to the tragic attitude toward communication, comedy has its own pitfalls.

Divisions between people which make understanding difficult, or even impossible, may be met either tragically or comically. Our differences in race, gender, class, sexuality, and religious heritage may be addressed with various attitudes. When we select an attitude toward difference, we begin committing to ways of acting, believing, valuing, and knowing. For this reason, tragedy and comedy are not merely genres of human action nor is each merely a private impression one has about other people. Tragic and comic attitudes toward communication furnish equipment for living, understanding, and acting in the complexities of the social world. We will consult various resources to explore the cultural and communicative contexts in which tragic/comic attitudes may be employed to get leverage on life and situations. History, fiction, film, non-fiction, virtual reality, city streets, and coffee shops-all are sites at which you may encounter and experience the tragedies and comedies of communication.

There will be two tests in this course, a mid-term and a final examination. Both will be take-home, essay exams. In addition, there will be two shorter writing assignments based upon class readings, lectures, and discussions. A variety of in-class exercises will be performed, some of them asking you to imaginatively "occupy" the perspective of a person you devalue and to try to see the world through their eyes. Is life tragic or comic? What do you yourself look like from other points of view? The exams, writing assignments, and in-class exercises will all ask you to entertain the complexity of human social life and communication, and will supply you with the opportunity to regard tragedy and comedy as lifestyle choices and equipment for living as we approach the next millennium.

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E103 The Daoist Body (Bokenkamp, S.)

The goal of this course is to enable students to learn strategies for approaching subject matter alien to their ways of thinking and perceiving the world. The Daoist religion represents a system of thought that is culturally and conceptually unfamiliar to most of us and will certainly seem so to most first year students. The very "outlandishness" of the material on which this course will focus will prove an advantage in that it will enable students to see more clearly the utility of scholarly approaches in charting out new terrain. In addition to reading, note-taking, and writing skills, the course will also emphasize cultural and literary sensitivity.

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E103 Yo Quiero Latino Popular Music (Jaquez, C.)

The imagery and diverse conceptions about Latino culture in popular contexts raise a number of questions. How does this visibility reflect upon U.S. Latino communities in daily life? What cultural stereotypes are invoked and what do they mean? What does it mean when Latino culture is attributed with certain qualities - i.e. "hotness" or "spiciness?" How can popular music expression influence social change and our conceptions about certain groups of people? Students will be introduced to ethnographic research methods such as participant/observation as well as learn critical analysis of popular culture images and contexts. They will develop music listening skills in analyzing musical expression through developing vocabularies and basic understanding of key musical concepts.

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E103 A Question of Love (Mickel, E.)

In the topics course, "A Question of Love," we shall explore our understanding of the various emotions and relationships we cover by the word love. As a basis for understanding the different aspects of love in human relationships as represented in western tradition, we shall read and analyze an anthology of fundamental passages from several classical and medieval works, ranging from Plato and the Bible to Ovid and the Romance of the Rose. We shall use our discussion of these texts to analyze the representations of love in two medieval romances, Chretien's Erec and Enide and Gottfried's Tristan, one seventeenth and one eighteenth century French novel, The Princess of Cleves and Dangerous Liaisons, an English novel of Jane Susten, Sense and Sensibility.

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E103 Chivalry: Medieval Visions of Good and Evil (Wailes, S.)

Medieval stories of knights and ladies embody the system of behavior and values that is known as "chivalry." These stories create a fantastic mixture of the real and imaginary, appealing to interest in history, myth, sex, love, religion, political thought, and most of all to the love of a good tale. They can bewilder the modern reader, however, who may not understand at first why knights seem so dependent on the good opinion of others for self-respect (medieval "honor" is not the same as the modern concept) and why ladies are content to be fought over, carried off, and rescued without ever seeming to direct their own lives. In this course we will learn the kinds of questions to ask of chivalric stories to allow them to speak with the subtlety and depth they possess, and we will read love songs of the troubadours or court minstrels for further insights into the values of the medieval nobility.

The course will meet twice a week for lectures and once for discussions. Before each discussion, students will hand in their one-page, written responses to a central question on the week's reading. These responses will form the framework for the following discussion. There will be two 3-5 page papers in which one of the weekly questions is examined at greater length, and a final exam consisting of two essays on topics from a list distributed at the start of the course. The final grade will be determined by these weighted factors: active participation in discussions, 20%; average grade on submitted responses (two lowest grades dropped), 30%; two 3-5 page papers, 25%; and final exam, 25%.

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E103 Ebonics: The Controversy over African-American English (Davis, S.)

This course deals with the controversy over Ebonics (African American Vernacular English). There is the basic question of just what is Ebonics. Is it a separate language, a dialect, slang, bad grammar, or really not a distinct entity? There is the issue of its portrayal in the popular media. There is also the matter of its origins and history. Are its origins traceable to the language systems of Africa, or is it a variant of Southern English? Further, there is a practical question of how to approach the education of African American children whose home speech is Ebonics. Should a goal in the education of these children be the purging of Ebonics so that it does not interfere with the mastery of Standard English, or should Ebonics be used as a vehicle for learning Standard English? This course will deal with these and other issues through readings, films, group discussions, writing assignments, and lectures. The course grade will be based on homework assignments, discussion participation, and three exams.

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E103 Cloak and Dagger: Detectives and Spies from Sherlock Holmes to James Bond (Bondanella, P.)

Introduces students to one of the most basic concepts of literary criticism - literary genres - with specific reference to a specific popular genre, the so-called "thriller." "Thriller" is a term that came into use in the late nineteenth century and was applied not only to the detective story, the most famous examples of which were A. Conan Doyle's tales about Sherlock Holmes, but also to a closely-related literary genre, the spy novel, that also attained great popularity during the period. The term "thriller" is often unfortunately employed to denigrate books relegated to this generic category. The primary focus of my course will be to teach students how to understand the "rules of the game," the conventions and traditions that govern any literary genre, with specific reference to the "thriller" as exemplified by selected detective and spy stories in both literature and the cinema. It is my hope that students will apply the lessons they learn about genre in this class to any literary genre, not only genres typical of popular culture but also those associated primarily with "serious" literature (the epic, tragedy, the sonnet, etc.).

Students will be asked to read the detective fiction of Poe, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Umberto Eco. We shall also examine several detective films in the film noir tradition, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. For the spy genre, we shall read works by John Le Carré and examine two James Bond films - one before the end of Communism and one taking place after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Students will be asked to take a number of in-class quizzes and to write 3 brief critical essays plus discussion in groups.

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E103 God and Evil (O'Connor, T.)

The central topic of this course is the compatibility of God's existence with the widespread suffering of our world. We will spend some time getting clear on just what it is we are talking about, by carefully exploring the concept of God in philosophical theology. In the rest of the course, we will alternate between abstract philosophical writing and more 'popular' treatments (in essay, fiction, and film) of the question of God and evil. Some of these sources treat the issue generically, while others develop the issue in the context of traditional Christianity. By taking this course, students will not only be able to acquire a firm grasp of the issue at hand, but also have occasion to think about the nature of human freedom, time, and the concept of probability and how it is used in confirming theories, whether philosophical or scientific. Another 'bonus feature' is that one may learn how to spot and assess imaginative developments of certain age-old philosophical ideas in pop culture, thereby joining that elite 5% of Americans who actually think when they read and watch the flicks!

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E103 The Semiotics of Advertising (Fowler, G.)

Advertising is a perpetual fact of everyday life. As members of modern American society, we are constantly exposed to it, and increasingly our work calls for us to create it. In addition, advertising is inherently a laconic medium; and therefore its language must be at once highly effective (to communicate its purposes effectively in just a few words, or a few paragraphs) but also rather subtle. This course treats advertising as a laboratory for the exploration of applied language usage. Course goals include: to recognize and diagnose "button-pushing" by its producers; to appreciate the interaction between language and other aspects of advertising (typography, graphics, photographs, color, etc.); and to understand our general use of language better through examination of this highly distilled medium.

Course texts: William Wainwright, Philosophy of Religion; F. Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor; Albert Camus, The Plague; C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.

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E103 America in Russian Pop Culture (Milman, N.)

By approaching American and Russian cultures as juxtaposed in many different ways, the proposed course will be dealing with culture in its broader sense: as the total way of life of a group of people. The course objective is to encourage students to learn about another culture, to allow them to see how that culture interprets things that are familiar to them in unexpected way and to use that culture's biases and stereotypes to look at their own system of values.

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E103 Dreams in Literature and Life

This seminar has two, related goals: to study the use of dreams in literature, and to learn a method of producing and interpreting dreams. Throughout the semester the course will move along two parallel tracks: at one meeting each week, students will read and discuss selected texts (and some films) from ancient, medieval and modern times in order to learn about the debate over the meaning of dreams-divine message, bodily or mental dysfunction, or voice of the unconscious?-and to examine the function of dreams in narrative and poetry; at the same time, in the other weekly session students will learn and practice the methods of keeping a journal of their own dreams, "incubating" them and conducting "dream interviews" in order to interpret them. The final segment of the course will bring the two tracks together as we study modern psychological theories of the nature and interpretation of dreams. Grading will be based on class discussion, seminar presentations and several short papers.

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E103 What is Myth? (Schrempp, G.)

"Myth" refers to colorful stories that tell about the origins of humans and the cosmos. Attitudes towards myth vary greatly. Some regard it as a source of spiritual growth, while others see only falsehood. Some see in myth the distinct character of particular cultures, while others see universal patterns. Some regard myth as "contemporary" and "alive", while others think of it as "ancient" and/or "dead".

We will explore such issues in the context of an examination of the origin stories of four cultures: Maori (Polynesia), Native American, classical Greek, and Euro-American. Lectures and discussions will be supplemented by visual materials. The requirements will be three short essays and a mid-term and final quiz.

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S103 Clocks, Cars, and Composers (Hawkes, C.)(0139)

What effect did the invention of photography have on musicians? ...the light bulb? ...an accurate clock? What difference did it make whether they were living in a monarchy or a democracy or a dictatorship? Did it matter how big they thought the Earth was? ...whether they knew how their internal organs worked? ...whether they lived with paved roads or railroads or airplanes? Would Beethoven have been so great if he'd had a nicer apartment? The goal of this course is to come away with a "story" of what was happening in the world at large that had an impact on the kind of music people composed. Non-musicians welcome. (Formerly entitled "Changing Tunes: Musical Revolutions.")

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