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Fall 2001 Arts and Humanities Seminar (S103)
S103 From Inuit to English: How do we make sense? (Dekydtspotter, L.)(0210)
1:25p - 2:40p MW GC 100B
This seminar will blend discussions of problems related to the sense ability with selected empirical problems
(of interpretation). Students will be introduced to tools of inquiry that will be useful in a number of domains:
phrase structure rules, first order logic and set theory. These will be introduced as needed and do not require
previous knowledge. The goal will be to show how these tools can be revealing of some aspects of language, and
raise further questions. We will characterize language fragments in class together. Student homework will be
short-guided exercises and reflective essays on the results achieved in class together.
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S103 Dangerous Minds (Cariello, M.)(0216) 2:30p - 3:45p TR RE 2120B
This course will be particularly valuable for first-year students at Indiana University for several reasons.
First, it will give students practice in reading critically their culture by closely examining written and visual
texts. Second, it will enable students to develop the written skills necessary for argument-based college level
writing. Third, by examining closely the presumptions that popular film and literature make about schooling,
students will be enabled to examine their own beliefs about the processes of teaching and learning. Such
self-reflection is empowering in that it allows us to reconsider the value and usefulness of critically-centered
education in a democratic society.
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S103 The Uses of Story (Hedin, R.)(0211) 3:30p - 4:45p MW MN 001A
We will focus on how the metaphor of story is the underlying structure through which western cultures make sense out
of every area of human life. Discussions will incorporate fairy tales (pervasive cultural stories), urban legends,
family stories, fiction, autobiography, and film. In each case, we focus on how the writer/speaker/culture/filmmaker
shapes the basic wishes and fears that drive the story through various kinds of narrative structure. It is precisely
by depicting events as a story - i.e., as comprising a beginning, middle and end that suggest that events are connected
and lead somewhere - that the storyteller "makes meaning" out of the stuff of human experience.
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S103 The Vietnam War in Literature and Memory (Wiles, T.)(0214)
1:00p - 2:15p TR WH 008
The Vietnam War was a turning point in American history-our longest war, our anti-Communist war, the only war we
lost-and it has had a great influence on literature, film and popular culture in the decades since the 1960s. This
course will investigate how the war has been remembered in various artistic media, and it is designed to bring
students from the present generation into closer contact with the legacy of the Vietnam era. We will read fictional
accounts and factual memoirs of the war; most of these books were written by combatants themselves, and a few of the
authors are Vietnamese. We will also discuss several popular films that depicted the war, and contrast them with
other visual images that have become imprinted on our culture's collective memory-images ranging from wartime
photography to the "look" and the iconography of war memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Monument in Washington.
Several class sessions will be devoted to a historical survey of the war, to provide a context for our literary
readings. The class will read Jerold M. Starr's history text. The Lessons of the Vietnam War and each student will
also research an individual topic from Vietnam era history. The midterm and final exams will contain both factual
questions and essay-style questions.
While we will do extensive reading in this course, a good deal of our class time will be devoted to your own writing.
Students will write short response papers to analyze sections of Vietnam era fiction and film. You will also do
historical research for a factual paper on one aspect of the war, and write a second paper on literary and/or cinematic
depictions. For the final paper, you will have the opportunity to draw on your own memories, family histories, and oral
histories, to write an account of ways in which the Vietnam War has come down into your own generation and your decade;
your goal here will be to deal with some legacies of the Vietnam War in our own time. The class format will be a
combination of lectures, discussions, and writing and editing sessions conducted with student partners. One of the main
ways in which we will use writing in this course is through "writing to learn," which means finding out more about the
subject in the process of writing about it. Readings include: O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Mason, In Country;
stories by Vietnamese and American writers found in the collection, The Other Side of Heaven; oral history and memoir
writing such as Santoli's, Everything We Had; and Wolff's, In Pharaoh's Army; and films including Apocalypse Now, Full
Metal Jacket, and Platoon.
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S103 West African Society in Novels (Clark, G.)(9374) 2:30p - 3:45p TR SB 138
Novels written by African authors are one of the best ways to see African cultural values, family loyalties and social
conflicts from the inside out. These six famous books will give you two contrasting approaches to each of three West
African countries with close historical links to the United States through the slave trade. By comparing the viewpoints
these authors present through various characters, you will understand better how perspectives change from villages and
cities, from rich and poor, from women and men, and from British and French colonial times to independence. Many books
also include portraits of white residents and their ideas about Africa. You will discuss how each author might have
developed the opinions he or she shows, and figure out your own points of view on important policy questions. We will
also watch videos about the same counties.
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S103 Literature of the 60's (Ziegler, C.)(0218) 11:15a - 12:05p MWF ME CRB
Bob Dylan accurately characterized the 60's when he wrote "The Times They Are a Changin," and those who were making
the changes were students. Questioning the authority of parents, teachers, clergy, police, and government officials
was standard practice as young adults experimented with drugs, redefined standards of sexual relationships, questioned
university academic policies, supported racial equality, and protested the government's involvement in Vietnam. In this
course we will explore the changing times of the 60's through works of literature, including On the Road, Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Fire Next Time, The Bell Jar, Goodbye Columbus, The Things They
Carried, Dispatches, and Everything We Had!
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S103 Literature and Power in Early Modern Europe (Scalabrini, M.)(0213)
11:15a - 12:30p TR RE 2120B
This course will focus on the culture of the Italian Renaissance courts and the modern European national states. We
will examine the complex relationship between literary creation and political powering an age which witnessed the
origin of modern Absolutism in European history. How is poetry to preserve its inner freedom as well as its open access
to truth in the context of absolute political power? The dilemmas of caution and resoluteness, simulation and
dissimulation, heroism and conformity will be considered as some of the central forces shaping early modern Italian and
European literature.
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S103 When the Dragon Meets the West (Luo, J.)(0215) 1:25P - 2:40P TR WI 111
This course focuses on the encounter of indigenous Chinese religions, including Confucianism and Taoism, with the
foreign religions from the West: Buddhism and Christianity. Indian Buddhism began to penetrate China in the early
centuries of the first millennium and Christianity arrived with the Jesuits in the 16th century. Both brought with
them ideologies that were antithetical to the Chinese worldview. Both stirred up political controversies and religious
debates, before they gradually became accommodated into Chinese religions. The conflicts reveal the essential and
indispensable elements of Chinese religions, as well as the fundamental differences between the religions of China and
the west. As the confrontation eventually led to mutual accommodations, it also provides us with important examples of
religious discourses and integration.
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S103 Folklore in Video & Film (Johnson, J.)(0212) 11:15a - 12:30p TR KH 312
Since the beginning of the discipline of Folklore in the mid Nineteenth Century, many new ways have evolved to spread
and reinforce folk belief and other kinds of folklore, A new term, Popular Culture, has also evolved to describe these
new forms. The difference between folklore and popular culture is sometimes very difficult to determine, but one such
difference seems to be that folklore forms exist in unstandardized multiple variation, while forms of popular culture
exhibit multiple variation that is standardized. While topics that interest folklore scholars appear on film and video,
the presentation of such topics are standardized (changeless) in that they are "frozen" onto film. This course will
deal with a number of issues of folk belief and world view reinforced, debated, propagated, and spread by film and video,
and it will explore whether folklore is really altered by standardization. Many ideas from the past are indeed spread
by the cinema, television, and VCR players in modern America. The course will also explore ways of critically viewing
and examining folklore on tape and film.
Two varieties of video/film will be examined. Documentaries are perhaps the most common medium by which folk belief is
communicated on film. But dramas are also employed by the true believer. Samuel Coleridge suggested in an essay in the
late eighteenth century that readers are asked to "suspend their disbelief" when reading fiction. It is interesting that
neither the documentary nor the drama in this respect ask its viewer to suspend disbelief. Both forms are more related
to legends that fictional folktales, because even the dramas are enacted as "true stories."
Videos that will be shown in the class include such topics as Atlantis, the Ark of the Covenant, Bigfoot, the Shroud of
Turin, the Bermuda Triangle, Ghosts, UFOs, Alien Abductions, the search for the Holy Grail, stigmata, Alien Autopsy,
Loch Ness (and other lake monsters), Near Death Experiences, and the X Files phenomenon. If the Truth is out there,
perhaps you can find it in this class.
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