Baltimore exists because of its harbor.  Capitalizing on its position as the westernmost port on the East Coast, and its connections to the South and the Midwest, Baltimore became an economic powerhouse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  But in a post-World War II global economy, its power didn’t last.  Today, Baltimore harbor and its basin, the Inner Harbor, have been transformed—developed into a tourist destination, a place for ball games, restaurants, and conventions.  While some such as Martin O’Malley contend that Baltimore’s harbor has become “a living, vibrant source of pride for Baltimore,” others doubt that the new harbor is good for the city.  Critics see the harbor redevelopment as underlining the divisions between classes in the city.  This debate about Baltimore’s Inner Harbor opens up larger questions about culture, space, politics, and power in the city.  How can cities thrive, or even survive, in a globalized economy?  What sacrifices of culture and political power must cities make?  Do individuals still have a voice in local politics and development?  Taking Baltimore as a case study, we will consider these questions, and others.  We begin by analyzing Marc V. Levine’s critical assessment of “the Baltimore Renaissance.”  Students will write an essay in which they analyze and critique the author’s argument.  In the next segment of the course, students will analyze and evaluate different viewpoints on the question of redevelopment and urban growth in Baltimore.  For their third and largest assignment, students will develop a multi-source argument by entering the contemporary controversy over development, class, and power in the city.  The final essay gives students the opportunity to analyze how the dynamics examined earlier might have consequences for individuals.

060.113.04  Freedom and the Self (MWF 11:00)
Patrick Fessenbecker

In the Western philosophical tradition, humans are often supposed to have a special kind of freedom: freedom of the “will.”  Yet it is not always clear what this means.  For instance, in what sense do we as individual selves have a free will in a world where social and cultural forces deeply affect the kinds of things we believe, desire, and do?  What, after all, is a “self,” and how does a free will inhere in it?  Do we need to have freedom in order for others to hold us responsible for our actions?  In this writing course, we will consider how two major philosophers have dealt with these and related questions.  In the first unit, students will read and critique essays by contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who has argued for a link between freedom and desire—for Frankfurt, to have a “free” will is simply to have the will one wants to have.  In the second unit, we’ll consider the significantly different view of selfhood expressed in Michel Foucault’s widely influential book Discipline and Punish, where cultural forces play a much larger role in producing selves and their wills than in Frankfurt’s model.  Students will read portions of Foucault’s work and will analyze his view using the same techniques developed in the first essay.  In the third and largest unit, we’ll read Elie Wiesel’s Night, as well as secondary material on the Holocaust and additional essays on Frankfurt and Foucault, and consider the questions of the course in relation to these texts: did the individual Germans who participated in the Holocaust act freely, or not?  What view or views does Wiesel’s text take on this question?  In the fourth and final unit, we’ll examine Frankfurt and Foucault directly in relationship with each other, and students will write a philosophical essay of their own on the nature of freedom and selfhood.

060.113.05  What’s Up, Doc: Analyzing Humor (MW 12:00)
Elena Marx

In this writing class, we ask what is funny, and why.  We start the semester by learning to identify comic elements in jokes, physical comedy, parodies, and word play.  In their first essays, students develop a coherent theory of humor through a close analytical reading of Will Ferrell’s The Landlord.  In our second unit, we explore influential theories—such as Freud’s idea about the disruption of taboos—that interpret laughter as a response to incongruity.  Students write an essay testing Henri Bergson’s theory of the humor of the mechanical agains a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  In our third unit, we consider the relationship between comedy and tragedy.  Hobbes saw laughter as “sudden glory” at someone else’s expense.  Following Hobbes as well as Mary Douglass’s reading of jokes as suspensions of social hierarchy, we will further complicate our thinking about comedy by investigating how and why death, pain, and misfortune can make us laugh.  MTV’s Jackass, Popeye, Warner Brothers’ cartoons, and personal injury videos from YouTube will be our case studies.  In our fourth unit, students have an opportunity to write about their own experiences as joke-tellers and comedians, using the analytical and theoretical tools they have developed in the course.  In this assignment, students return to and revise the theories about humor they developed in the first unit.

060.113.06  Carnivorous Planet (MW 12:00)
Eliza Barclay

Never before in the history of the planet have humans consumed more animal protein per capita than they do today, with increasingly worrisome implications.  In recent years, a consensus of public health experts, environmentalists, and economists has concluded that current patterns of meat consumption are unsustainable, and that an overhaul of the global food system is needed.  Yet this concern about our eating habits is nothing new.  Scientists, activists, and writers in a range of disciplines have been calling for changes in the way meat is produced and consumed for well over a century.  In this writing seminar, we will read and analyze fiction, essays, journalism, and online videos that have attempted to sway the public’s meat-eating habits.  We will ask, among other questions, how effective these works are in influencing eating habits, and how we as consumers might reconcile the reality of how our meat is produced with our appetite for it.  In the first unit, we will read an early critique of America’s industrial meat system in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle.  We’ll also watch a contemporary online video tackling the same subject, The Meatrix.  Students will write an essay analyzing one of these texts.  Next, we will evaluate some of the ethical considerations that arise from meat eating through Peter Singer’s animal rights essay “Animal Liberation” and through the writings of Mahatma Gandhi on vegetarianism.  In the third segment of the course, we’ll read a section of Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma on “beyond organic” meat production and Paul Roberts’s take on the food crisis in his book The End of Food.  Analyzing the views of these texts as well as selected secondary sources, students will develop their own arguments about how and why—if at all—people should be persuaded to change their eating habits.  For the fourth and final essay, students will write a short essay of their own design within the context of the course.

060.113.07  Analyzing Debates in International Relations (MW 12:00)
Sunil Vaswani

Will European nations continue along the path toward “ever closer union”?  Or will the European Union project stall or even move towards disintegration, as some skeptics predict?  Will China’s rise be peaceful, or will this rise bring the United States and China into inevitable confrontation?  In this writing seminar, we will consider these questions, among others, as we examine competing approaches to international relations.  We begin with the Realist approach to international relations by reading short excerpts from Hans Morgenthau, the father of contemporary realism.  Students will write an essay analyzing the realist approach to alliance formation.  In the second unit, we turn to the Liberal approach to international relations and read selections of Grasping the Democratic Peace by Bruce Russett, a leading theorist in the liberal international tradition.  Students will write an essay evaluating the “democratic peace theory” debate based on the realist and liberal approaches to international relations.  For the third essay, students will develop a multi-source argument by entering the scholarly debate about the future of world politics.  We will read arguments for and against the viability of the European Union as well as arguments relating to the rise of China and the decline of American dominance.  Students choose one area of controversy and evaluate the arguments, offering their own points of view.  Our fourth and final unit relates to terrorism.  We consider conflicting arguments about the magnitude of the terrorist threat and whether or not the threat can be contained.  Students write a short essay critiquing the text of their choice by drawing on the realist and liberal traditions.

060.113.08  Hitchcock (MW 1:30)
Andrew Sisson

This course aims at developing students’ critical and expository abilities by taking up the challenges of writing about several of Alfred Hitchcock’s major pictures.  “Suspense” was the word Hitchcock most liked to have associated with himself, and we will find that the process of understanding his work often leaves us suspended: between seriousness and play, fascinated absorption and critical distance, high art and mass culture, the elegance of technical and formal control and the excess and contagiousness of desire.  Perhaps no figure in the history of cinema has led such a successful double life as entertainer and intellectual, engaging both theorists and the general public with equal intensity.  In the course of the semester, we will consider—with help from the critical tradition—different ways of thinking about the relation between the intimate pleasures and anxieties aroused by these films, and their investigations of freedom and community, maturity and identity, visibility and the social role of cinema.  We begin with an analysis of a scene from Rear Window, the Hitchcock work which most clearly proposes that film may be a way of reflecting morally on the kinds of excitement it generates.  As our second assignment, we look at The Birds in view of Robin Wood’s contention that the film is ultimately less “about” the experience of suspense than about the difference between meaningful relationships and meaningless violence.  For the third essay, we bring multiple critical perspectives, including interviews with Hitchcock, to bear on Psycho and Notorious, two films about sexuality, vulnerability, and responsibility for one’s identifications.  Finally, students write a shorter essay about either Vertigo or North by Northwest—works sometimes seen as meant to sum up Hitchcock’s oeuvre—on a topic of their choice incorporating themes from the course.

060.113.09  What’s Up, Doc: Analyzing Humor (MW 1:30)
Elena Marx 

Please see the course description listed above for Section 05 at MW 12:00.

060.113.10  Liberty and Individuality in American Political Imagination (MW 1:30)
Luke Plotica

What do the ideals of liberty and individuality mean in the American political imagination?  Liberty and individuality were animating principles of the American Revolution, and are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights.  However, in American political thought, the principles of liberty and individuality have also been turned to the criticism of American society and politics, including the institution of chattel slavery, a burgeoning culture of conformity, and the strictures of political patriotism.  We will consider the principles that guided the founding of the United States as principles of criticism directed toward the country whose formation they inspired.  For the first essay, we will analyze polemical calls for liberty and individuality offered by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson as preludes to revolution.  Next, we will consider John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government as one of the roots of the American ideal of a commonwealth of free individuals, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a critical assessment of American liberty and individuality.  Students will compose an essay that offers a critical analysis of Locke or de Tocqueville.  The major writing assignment of the course will be a critical evaluation of the American realization of the ideals of liberty and individuality in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and George Kateb.  Finally students choose a depiction of liberty and individuality in American political rhetoric—from a selection of speeches by Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama—and analyze it in an essay of their own design.

060.113.11  Heroes and Villains (MW 1:30)
Doug Tye

A year before the international trauma of 9/11, philosopher Alenka Zupancic wrote that the revulsion one feels at an act of “diabolical evil” springs from its “uncanny resemblance to the pure ethical act.”  In other words, the differences between heroism and villainy are not so unsettling as their ultimate (if only superficial) similarity.  In the wake left by pioneering and iconoclastic hero-villains such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Satan, a branch of Western literature has delved into this tension and produced a wide-ranging cast of antiheroes and unwilling villains, superfluous men and unwitting evildoers (sometimes all at once).  In this writing course we’ll explore a few of these characters, and ask what makes them good, or evil, or something in between—and why it matters.  In our first essay unit, we’ll begin by examining doppelgänger tales by Poe and Conrad that demolish the boundary between “good guy” and “bad guy,” and between innocence and guilt; we’ll ponder conflicting or contradictory impulses, and the effect of what Poe, anticipating the Freudian unconscious, calls the “Imp of the Perverse” that haunts us all.  In our second unit, we’ll read stories by Kafka and Sartre in which characters are condemned and imprisoned, and students will analyze the role of perception and state intervention in branding individuals with labels, whether positive or negative.  Our third, largest essay will revolve around the lovable and despicable narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and his struggle with his own banality.  Students will develop an argument about heroism (or wickedness) in its most basic sense—as the will to do something other than what’s easy, “normal,” or acceptable.  The course will close with an investigation of the uses of heroes and villains in our cultural imagination.  We’ll read Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, and students will evaluate the function of the superhero in contemporary society.

060.113.12  The Ethics of Work (TTH 9:00)
Kara Wedekind

Recent economic events, such as the crisis in the banking industry and the increasing number of corporations seeking government bailout money, have raised questions about business practices and ethical standards.  Lawmakers and taxpayers are reevaluating a company’s responsibilities to its employees, to its customers, and to the country.  This concern about ethical practices is not a new phenomenon.  As Max Weber notes, a language of ethics has been attached to capitalism since its inception.  However, while Weber describes the ways in which work is valued for its benefit both to the individual and to society, current events suggest that individual benefit can conflict with social benefit.  How do we negotiate such conflicts?  In this writing course, we will consider how the language of ethics can affect our understanding of work.  We will begin by examining the ethical theories of work presented by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations and by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  Students will write a short essay analyzing the views of either Smith or Weber.  In the second unit, we will read Saul Bellow’s short story “Something to Remember Me By” and will analyze it in relation to Karl Marx’s theory of labor.  For our third and largest essay, students will offer their interpretations of Bohumil Hrabel’s novella Too Loud a Solitude in the context of secondary sources and the ethical theories of work we’ve already considered.  For Essay 4, students will consider how the ethics of work are represented in a text of their own choosing; potential sources range from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography to movies such as Wall Street and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.

060.113.13  “Persons” in Ethical Theory and Practice (TTH 9:00)
Matthew Holtzman

Few of us would deny that persons possess rights and responsibilities.  But what is a “person”?  There is widespread disagreement among philosophers, legal scholars, and other thinkers about how we should understand the concept of personhood, and how we might, therefore, distinguish persons from non-persons, or determine the conditions under which the “same person” persists through time.  Are all humans persons?  Can any non-humans be categorized as persons?  How we think about persons has direct consequences for how we specify the rights and responsibilities we possess as persons and, for this reason, leads to very different responses to ethical issues such as euthanasia, abortion, “living wills,” and even organ transplantation.  In this writing course, we will examine how conceptions of personhood shape both moral theory and practice.  For the first essay, students will analyze John Locke’s pathbreaking account of personhood from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  We then turn to the works of Immanuel Kant and David Hume, both of whom articulate influential and intuitive accounts of personhood.  However, Kant and Hume fundamentally disagree about whether persons are free and about the relationship between freedom and responsibility, and in the second essay students will analyze and evaluate their arguments.  In the third segment of the course, we will examine a contemporary issue in medical ethics that cannot be resolved without appealing to an account of personhood.  Cases may include “savior siblings” and “living wills.”  Drawing on texts from the first half of the course and relevant secondary literature, students will develop an argument on the issue they’ve chosen, based on an account of what it means to be a person.  In the final essay, students will articulate their own account of personhood and respond to anticipated objections from Locke, Hume, and/or Kant.

060.113.14  Education and the American Dream (TTH 10:30)
Sarah Manekin

In the United States, schools have long been considered the primary vehicle for achieving the American Dream.  Yet the American Dream is itself a shifting cultural construct, reflecting pervasive ideals as well as specific social and political conditions.  One way to understand the American Dream is by exploring the goals and aspirations Americans have had for their schools.  In different periods and for different reasons, Americans have turned to schools to ensure national cohesion, promote a common set of values, create economic opportunity, facilitate democracy, cultivate a skilled leadership class, and further individual mobility.  This multiplicity of goals—and the vast financial resources required—has made education the site of vigorous debates throughout U.S. history and a potent source for studying the “American Dream.”  This writing seminar critically analyzes the relationship between education and the American Dream from the nation’s founding to the present day. The first unit examines theories of education at the dawn of the new republic and explores how Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and Horace Mann understood the relationship between schools and the dream of a self-governing nation of citizens.  The second unit focuses on the dream of opportunity and inclusion through an analysis of the writings of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.  In the third and largest unit, students will explore the issue of affirmative action in higher education through a close study of the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).  The fourth and final essay asks students to examine one of the contemporary debates surrounding the relationship between schools and the American Dream.

060.113.15  Travelers’ Tales (TTH 10:30)
Maggie Vinter

Headless men, cities of gold, talking animals and giant turtles: travelers’ tales have a reputation for being improbable, if not outright fraudulent.  But this reputation may say as much about the expectations of listeners as it does about the reliability of travelers.  This course will consider how travelers and their stories are portrayed in literature along with the wider cultural implications of their portrayals.  How do travelers mediate between the places they visit and the places they return to?  What do they tell us and what do they leave out?  What can attitudes towards travelers and their stories tell us about a society?  What social, political, or moral implications do travelers’ tales have beyond their telling?  We’ll start by analyzing some genuine travel narratives, by writers including Charles Darwin, to develop an understanding of the genre.  Next, we will examine Othello, focusing on the presentation of Othello’s courtship of Desdemona through stories of his travels.  For the third and largest assignment, we’ll read a portion of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels together with criticism interpreting it as political satire.  Students will formulate an argument about the meaning of Gulliver’s final voyage given the context in which Swift was writing as well as different critical responses to the story.  In the final unit, students will write a short essay that reflects on the themes of the course in relation to a filmed travel narrative of their choice.

60.113.16  Democracy as a Way of Life (TTH 10:30)
William Dixon

“Democracy” today is virtually synonymous with legitimacy, justice, and freedom.  But what does democracy really mean?  What kinds of authority do democracies claim, and where does this authority come from?  How do ordinary people, or “the people,” create, sustain, and transform democratic authority?  What kinds of obligations, protections, and privileges do democracies in turn create for citizens—in moments of crisis and in everyday life?  Are there limits to democracy’s power over our individual lives, and if so, how are these limits set and renegotiated over time by “local” politics?  How should democrats relate to outsiders and enemies?  How is democracy lived?  This course will consider these and other controversies over the very meaning of democracy and citizenship.  We will begin with Sheldon Wolin’s provocative argument that democracy in the United States is declining into an “inverted totalitarianism.”  Students will respond to Wolin in their first essay.  In their second essay, students will consider James Madison’s classic formulation of liberal pluralism in the Federalist Papers and, with the help of Wolin’s critique, assess whether it is operative in the United States today.  For the third and major assignment of the course, students’ essays will evaluate Rousseau’s social contract theory in the context of other thinkers and writers on the problem of political belonging, particularly as it relates to questions of race, sex, sexuality, and gender.  In their fourth and final essay, students will rethink the question of contemporary democracy in the United States using a topic of their choice, such as terrorism, torture, global warming, or same-sex marriage.

060.113.17  Lost in America: Vernacular Music and Forms of Departure (TTH 12:00)
Ben Parris

This writing course explores themes of departure, itineracy, and travel in popular American vernacular music of the early to mid-twentieth century.  The goal of the class is to enable students to write effective academic essays that are sharp in argumentation, clear in analysis, and tight in structure.  We will use readings of lyrical content, critical analysis, and historical context, as well as subjective listening experience to shape the content of the essays.  First, students will examine the lyrics and blues musical form popularized by Robert Johnson, with particular analytical attention to the complicated status of women and sexual desire in Johnson’s work.  The second assignment will examine figurations of itineracy, rambling, and the "outlaw," as developed in the country music of Johnny Cash.  Students will evaluate the status and significance of these themes in Cash’s music by situating their own analysis in relation to an established critical perspective.  For the longest essay of the course, students will then examine John Coltrane's departure from the formal constraints of jazz, in the contexts of the socio-political agendas of black nationalism, eastern transcendental spirituality, and consciousness expansion.  Finally, in their fourth essay, students will reflect upon a related musician or musical group of their choice, whose work draws directly from or has directly influenced one of the three artists examined in the course.  Possible topics include the Carter Family, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Led Zeppelin.

060.113.18  Canceled

060.113.19  Education and the American Dream (TTH 12:00)
Sarah Manekin

Please see the course description listed above for Section 14 at TTH 10:30.

060.113.20  “Nature” in the Nineteenth Century (TTH 1:30)
Nick Bujak

What is Nature, and how do different conceptions of it lead to different ideas about the possibility of its representation?  Is art, especially literature, capable of capturing the essence of Nature?  And, if so, how should Nature be represented in art?  Thoreau, for example, answers this question by drawing nature and art together, as if they were essentially similar at their core, when he says that “poetry is a natural fruit.  As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem.”  Other nineteenth-century writers offer different ideas about the relation between art and nature, and, in this course, we will examine how different writers differently understand that relation.  Some of the questions we will think and write about include: What is it about literature that is particularly suited, or not suited, to represent Nature?; and how does a theory of Nature or art lead to a theory of how one should live one’s life?  Authors will include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Thoreau, Emerson, and others.  We’ll read their imaginative work (poetry, essays, and letters) alongside their theories about nature and literature.  We’ll begin with the close analysis of a Romantic lyric, a primary source.  In our second and third essay units, we’ll turn to the essays and journal entries of American Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau.  We’ll continue to pursue and build upon the questions posed in the first section of the course, but you will be challenged in a new way by interrogating contemporary critical responses to these authors’ work as you develop your own points of view.  We’ll conclude by considering the relevance of these nineteenth-century conceptions of Nature for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by looking at contemporary representations of Romantic ideas of nature.  One possible twentieth-century example is Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild (alongside director Sean Penn’s 2007 movie adaptation), which features a main character who is led to his death by taking seriously Romantic ideals of nature and life.

060.113.21  Elements of Enlightenment  (TTH 1:30)
Nils F. Schott

Carl Friedrich Bahrdt—theologian, popular philosopher, inn-keeper—echoes the Declaration of Independence when he argues that, “if it is the foundation of happiness, enlightenment must be the goal of all men.”  This course will explore the historical and intellectual phenomenon known as the “Enlightenment” which, with its emphasis on a rational organization of life, revolutionized the way we see the world.  We begin by asking the very question that was the subject of intense public debate among major intellectual figures in Germany: “What is Enlightenment?”  Students will analyze how Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant answer that question—and why they do so.  The second part of the course examines a particularly sharp controversy about the relation of religion and Enlightenment.  For the second essay, students will consider what is at stake in this controversy over reason and religion by analyzing key arguments by David Hume, Johann Georg Hamann, and Andreas Riem.  In the third part of the course, we will encounter the practical consequences of Enlightenment thinking as it played out in the public debate over two controversial issues: civil marriage and the separation of church and state.  Students will develop an argument about one or the other of these debates and its implications for us today.  Sources will include the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Bill of Rights, and short texts by such writers and thinkers as Bahrdt, Madison, and Kant.  The fourth and final essay will return to the question of “What is Enlightenment?”  Students will write a short essay examining how Enlightenment thinking and values are contested today in a public issue of their own choosing.