Spring 2010 Course Descriptions

Expository Writing courses introduce students to the principles of academic argument and guide their practice as they learn to embody those principles in their writing. Each individual Expos seminar focuses on the strategies and techniques of college writing; all courses in Expository Writing help fulfill the university writing requirement.

Designed for juniors and seniors with experience in using analysis to make clear and persuasive arguments, but open to any students who have taken Expository Writing (060.113/114), this course focuses on the advanced skills of argument. Students learn how to draw inferences from the evidence, use sources in a variety of ways to develop their thinking, and structure complex arguments.

This course teaches students the concepts and strategies of academic argument. Students learn to analyze and evaluate sources, to develop their thinking with evidence, and to use analysis to write clear and persuasive arguments. Expos seminars are organized around four major essay assignments, each of which guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes in-class discussion and workshops. Students also learn how to document sources and how to navigate the university library.

In addition to its central focus on the strategies of argument, each seminar offers its own intellectually stimulating topic or theme. Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections may be of most interest to you.

Individual course descriptions follow.

060.114.01 Power, Development, and the City (MWF 10:00)
Blake Ethridge

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.

060.114.02 The Use and Misuse of Archaeology (MWF 10:00)
Adam Maskevich

For most people, archaeology is the study of the dead past, the study of dry bones and the ruins of empires. However, from the very beginning of literate urban society in Mesopotamia, ruling regimes have used, and often misused, the past in order to affect the contemporary political discourse. In the first lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, the oldest literary composition in history, the hero boasts of his deeds as king and, speaking to future generations, invites them to come and see the city he has built. He is tying his greatness through the ages to the physical manifestations of his reign; Gilgamesh is explicitly speaking not only to his contemporaries but to us as well. In the modern Middle East, the emergent nation-states of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Israel have all used archaeology to legitimize their existence and create a common national identity. By looking at both ancient and modern examples, this class will examine how various regimes through time have used the study of archaeology as a tool of politics and ideology. We will begin by examining the way modern western culture has viewed the Mesopotamian past, particularly in the construction of its own cultural identity, in an article by an Iraqi-born archaeologist. For the second essay, we will look at two of the most famous pieces of Mesopotamian art, one from the earliest city-states and one from the world’s first empire. Students will read modern interpretations of their iconography and texts and test them against their own understandings of these ancient, and explicitly political, works of art. Part of this discussion will include a visit to the Near Eastern Gallery at the Walters Art Museum. In the third essay we will explore how archaeology has been employed by modern Middle Eastern states to foster and legitimize a sense of place and national identity. Students will develop an argument based on both primary and secondary sources for this essay. Finally, for the last essay, students will write an interpretation of an object of their choice that uses the past to inform the discourse of the present.

060.114.03 Rich Culture, Poor Culture (MWF 10:00)
Robert D. Day

The financial crises of the past year have reintroduced into mainstream political discussion a problem which never really went away: poverty. In this course, we will read a variety of philosophical, literary, and journalistic texts that all ask, How does money (or the want of it) influence one’s access to social relationships, the arts, and ones’s own culture? For the first essay, students will interpret Oscar Wilde’s subversive and surprising essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” We will examine Wilde’s argument for economic collectivity as the best guarantor of individual artistic expression. For the second essay, we will read George Orwell’s Depression-Era novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, with selections from Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; students will both analyze the novel in light of Marx’s theories about the “power of money” in social relationships and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a Marxist interpretation of the starving-poet protagonists’s story. For the third and longest essay, we will read Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2002 account of working minimum-wage jobs, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America; sources include reviews of Ehrenreich’s book and a selection of economic statistics from the Economic Policy Institute’s State of Working America, 2008/2009. Students will evaluate Ehrenreich’s ethnographic claims in the context of the critical disputes surrounding the book. For the final assignment, students will visit the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and analyze an artwork of their own selection. Drawing on the readings of the course, students will consider how class and money are pertinent, if at all, to understanding works of art.

060.114.04 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 sections of Michel Foucault’s widely influential book Discipline and Punish; we’ll analyze Foucault’s theory of the self and the powerful role cultural forces play in producing it and in determining its subsequent actions. In the second unit, we’ll consider the significantly different view offered by contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who has argued persuasively for a link between freedom and desire—in his view, to have a free will is simply to have the will one wants to have. Students will read several short essays by Frankfurt and develop a sophisticated critique of 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.

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.

Can man and nature coexist? A look at the world around us suggests not. Global temperatures are rising, biodiversity is shrinking, and man is extending his reach further and further into the wild. While many environmentalists suggest that humankind’s destruction of the earth is a new phenomenon, historical evidence suggests otherwise: man has been shaping his environs for millennia. In this writing seminar, we will explore the concept of “nature” as a product of humankind, through literature, film, and scientific essays. We will begin with readings from nineteenth-century American writers, such as Thoreau and Emerson, whose ideas about nature still shape our attitudes today. In our first essay, we will analyze the concept of nature presented by one of these writers. We will turn next to Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s futuristic anime “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” to explore the concept of nature as both a function of time and ideology. For the second essay, students will evaluate Miyazaki’s film against a critical argument. In the third segment of the course, we will extend our thinking about concepts of nature by examining the role governments play in protecting wilderness areas through the creation of national parks. What understanding of nature informs the idea of a “national park”? Readings will include works by John Muir, President Theodore Roosevelt, documents of the National Park Service, and arguments by conservationists. Finally, for the fourth unit, students will write a short essay analyzing how concepts of nature frame the debate about a contemporary environmental issue of their choice such as local conservation practices, genetic modification of foods, and the loss of the world’s rainforests.

When we think about political violence we tend to focus on specific examples of war, genocide, terrorism, assassination, or revolution. But the deeper causes, meanings, and justifications of political violence are also worthy of attention. In this course we explore how major political and literary thinkers have tackled the following questions: What is political violence? Are we all implicated in political violence, or is it something we can blame solely on the actions of states and leaders? And when, if ever, can political violence be justified? In the first segment, Defining Political Violence, we read essays by Abraham Lincoln and William James, and you write a short piece that responds to their views on the nature of political violence. In Unit Two, Violence and the State, we read Machiavelli’s account of state violence, and, as a practical example, we consider the use of torture by the US government. You write an essay on the torture issue that engages with the views of a prominent thinker. In Unit Three, Violence and the People, we focus on themes of conspiracy, assassination, mob-rule, and the power of political speech. We read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and you write a longer essay that offers an interpretation of the play in light of the thinkers we’ve already read. In the final unit, Non-Violence and Civil Disobedience, we read short pieces by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and you write an essay that reflects on course themes in relation to an example of your choice. The overriding aim is to develop your academic writing skills as you engage with these fundamental themes and classic texts.

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.

060.114.10 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.

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.

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.

060.114.13 “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. In the second unit, we then turn to the relationship between freedom and personhood in the works of David Hume. Students will analyze and evaluate two related arguments: Hume’s claim that persons are fictional entities, in the Treatise of Human Nature, and his solution to the problem of free will, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Students will critique these arguments and trace the consequences of that critique for Hume’s accounts of personhood and freedom in the Treatise and Enquiry. 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 and Hume.

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.

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 Othello, focusing on the presentation of Othello’s courtship of Desdemona through stories of his travels, in order to develop an understanding of the figure of the traveler in literature. Next we will examine Edward Said’s influential critique of Orientalism, and test his theories against travel writers including Charles Darwin. 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.

“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.

James Baldwin urged teachers to teach every child that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it . . . and that it belongs to him [or her].” In just a few words, Baldwin both emphasizes the importance of education and foreshadows the responsibility that comes with it. This course looks at class="normal"race and education in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century US to ask a pair of questions: What is the US’s responsibility to educate its citizenry, and what is an educated citizen’s responsibility to society? We begin by looking at the connections John Dewey drew between education and democracy. With this foundation, our first essay, an analysis, responds to contemporary public educators (and education critics) Deborah Meier and Jonathan Kozol, both of whom protest the exclusion of low-income students from public education’s promise of democratic participation and intellectual liberation. We turn in our second essay unit to trace the influence of Dewey’s pedagogy and pragmatism in the post-Civil Rights era, investigating issues of integration and equity fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education. Our third and largest essay unit builds on this exploration of secondary schooling by examining undergraduate education: Do colleges bear a responsibility to democracy? Does the institution have a role in shaping students as citizens? In short, what is the purpose of the university, and what is the point of undergraduate education? Drawing on the work of Stanley Fish, Adrienne Rich, and others, students formulate their own answers to these questions. Finally, we end the course as a college education ends: with commencement. For the last essay, each student analyzes, in light of the semester’s insights, a commencement speech of his or her choice.

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 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. Students will write an essay interpreting this text. Next, we will evaluate some of the ethical considerations that arise from meat eating through Peter Singer’s animal rights book Animal Liberation and through Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In the third segment of the course, we’ll read an essay by Wendell Berry on agrarianism 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.

060.114.19 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.

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.

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.