Honors Seminars - Spring 2007
Honors 181, Section 37 “Forms of History: Literary Study in Pursuit of Law”
Professor Colin Dayan, Department of English M 2:30-5:00 CSC
"If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else, without thinking of the thing it is attached to, then you have a legal mind. --Thomas Reed Powell
What does it mean for literary study to be "in pursuit of the law?" What is at stake for students of literature in the analysis of law? How is it that law continually eludes literary study? Can we read judicial opinions as literature? And if we understand "pursuit"in its medieval sense as "prosecute" or "petition," we might ask, how does literary study become legal study? Finally, how might the tension between "law" and "literature" help us to rethink the ways we periodize literary history, as well as the way we rethink the political and social contexts undergirding literary fiction? Topics include: civil death; proof (motives and evidence for character or personal identity); legal fictions (civil persons and legal slaves); ritual (precedent and performance) and contract (property and possession). The process by which words (such as race, blood, sacrifice, redemption, punishment, and judgment) are specified and by which their precise meaning over time is determined will be crucial to our investigations. Texts include: selected legal cases and sermons; the Bible; Charles Dicken's Bleak House; Melville's "Bartleby," "Billy Budd" and "Benito Cereno"; selected Poe tales; Frederick Douglas's Narrative; Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Henry James's "The Ghostly Rental" and "The Jolly Corner"; Coetzee's Disgrace.
CPLE: Humanities AXLE: Humanities & Creative Arts
Honors 181, Section 38 “Love and Friendship” TR 11:00 - 12:15 CSC
Professor Barbara Hahn, Department of German and Slavic Languages
Love and friendship - the most important relationships human beings create. But how do they differ? Their time structure is not the same: Love might happen in a moment – we fall in love -, friendship needs time. In Western tradition, friendship has political connotations. But, how about love? Could “neighborly love” serve as a political category? In order to explore all the different connotations of love and friendship, we will read theoretical and philosophical texts as well as novels and poems, written among others by Arendt, Barthes, Derrida, Dostoevsky, Fontane, Heine, Montaigne, Plato, Rougemont, Tolstoy, and Schiller.
CPLE: Humanities AXLE: Humanities & Creative Arts
Honors 181, Section 39 “The Boundaries of the Human” TR 2:35-3:50 111 McGill
Professor Michael Bess, Department of History
We human beings are rapidly acquiring an unprecedented capacity to manipulate our own biology, through heroic medicine and genetic alterations. At the same time, we are also developing machines so sophisticated that they may soon begin replicating some behaviors previously considered unique to our species. What is it that makes us human? This question, one of history's slipperiest and most speculative, has now acquired particular urgency, requiring that we seek workable definitions and practical answers. Though the task is in effect an impossible one, we can at least clarify the issues at stake. In this course, we will use movies, literary works, scientific and technical texts, and philosophical essays to explore the following questions: What are the defining features of human personhood? To what extent can those features be modified or extended, before human personhood begins to break down? Can some (or all) of those features find embodiment in an entity other than a human being?
CPLE: Integrated AXLE: Humanities & Creative Arts
Honors 182, Section 08 “Nobel Prize Winners in Science” MWF 11:10- 12:00 CSC
Professors Charles Brau, Department of Physics
Virginia Shepherd, Department of Biochemistry
The Nobel Prize laureates in science were brilliant, imaginative, and driven. Some were lucky, some were focused only on winning the Prize, and others were downright unethical. But it is without dispute that their discoveries have significantly altered the course of human existence. The goal of this course is to use the lives of these Nobel laureates to highlight the great scientific achievements of this century. By studying selected winners, we will examine the science behind the Prize, the impact of the award on the scientist and his/her future work, and the effect of the discovery on society. We will ask such questions as why this work was awarded a Nobel prize over other discoveries and why scientists who may have contributed to the discovery were excluded. Using the information from these studies, we will get a glimpse of science as a human enterprise, and we can address the more general questions of what Alfred Nobel and his Prize did to the progress of science, and why and how some people achieve greatness.
CPLE: Science and Society AXLE: Perspectives
Honors 182, Section 12 “Cultural History of Disease” TR 9:35-10:50 CSC
Professor Arleen Tuchman, Department of History
Disease is more than a pathological phenomenon. How diseases are understood and defined by physician and patient alike also reflect and shape cultural values. We will explore this claim by studying diseases in the past. Some possibilities include bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, syphilis in the 16th and 17th centuries, cholera and tuberculosis in the 19th century, and cancer, diabetes, and AIDS in the 20th century. We will also examine disease classifications that once enjoyed favor but are no longer recognized as such; some examples are chlorosis, neurasthenia, and hysteria. Studying the cultural history of disease serves two purposes: it deepens our understanding of the past while shedding light on the present. In the end I hope we will all better understand how cultural assumptions – in the past and today – shape the experience and outcome of disease as much as the knowledge produced in the laboratory. We will begin the semester reading Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. Readings for the rest of the semester will consist of primary sources from the past, and historical monographs on the history of disease.
CPLE: Science and Society AXLE: Perspectives
Honors 182, Section 17 “Environmental Philosophy” TR 1:10-2:25 CSC
Professor David Wood, Department of Philosophy
Man's place in Nature has been discussed since the beginning of human history. We are ourselves natural beings: we eat, drink and breathe to stay alive, and we are also mortal, vulnerable and sexual beings. But, as well as our human nature within, there is Nature outside. Nature sustains us (natural resources) and threatens us (natural disasters). The explosive growth of technology has lead to a sharpening of these tensions. Pollution, world hunger, global warming, nuclear waste and other hazards threaten to turn the earth from a paradise into a hell - the "late great planet earth". Major ethical and broader philosophical problems are raised by this crisis: sustainable development, species preservation, global justice, animal rights, biodiversity and so on. We think of Nature as 'out there', but the shape of this 'out there' is determined by our images and theories of Nature, shaped throughout history by religion, art, myth and philosophical reflection. Contemporary radical movements - including land ethic, ecofeminism, and deep ecology - have sought to reshape these images. This course will provide a basis for critical reflection on these vital questions. I hope to be able to use art, literature, poetry and film (such as Al Gores's An Inconvenient Truth) in addition to core philosophical teachings.
CPLE: Science and Society AXLE: Perspectives
Honors183, Section 32 “Ethics of Human Experimentation” MW 2:30-3:45 CSC
Professor Adriane Seiffert, Department of Psychology
Human volunteers are the backbone of much scientific investigation, including topics ranging from the medical efficacy of gene therapy to the psychological processes involved in decision-making. Most of us take this for granted, but the ethical questions surrounding experimentation on humans are profound. What does "informed consent" mean? How much information is required to accurately decide if the benefits outweigh the risks? Who decides what research is allowed? What is the appropriate balance of individual risk against societal benefit? How do we extend these dilemmas to unusual cases, such as children, prisoners or the mentally challenged? Do these issues apply to self-experimentation? Who is responsible when things go wrong and how do we, as a society, build a structure of regulations to support individuals’ rights while still producing the best research to help humanity? In this seminar, we consider the variety of domains in which human experimentation has become standard and the implications of its expanding domain. We will focus on research in Psychology and some of the unique issues that pertain to this research, such as the use of deception. Students are encouraged to learn about the science and ethics of human experimentation generally, drawing on cases and philosophies of their choosing to express their opinions and summarize issues in their writing.
CPLE: Social Science AXLE: Social and Behavioral Science
Honors 186, Section 02 “Empire, Race, and Visual Culture” MW 1:10-2:25 CSC
Professor Catherine A. Molineux, Department of History
What function do images of racial and ethnic others have in societies that are actively pursuing empires? How do people who are subordinated by those empires respond to these portrayals of them? Pictures have immense power to communicate ideas, shape belief, and construct identities. This course explores maps, prints, paintings, ceramics, and other forms of imagery generated by the first British Empire in the New World to consider the relationship between empire, race, and visual culture. Today, race has become one of the central “categories of difference” in Western culture. But modern concepts of racial difference have not always existed, despite the fact that they are often presented as “natural” and seem inevitable today. The creation of an idea of race is one of the central developments of the early modern period, and its meaning was negotiated by many thousands of British writers and artists who discussed, in paint or print, the implications of racial others for their understandings of themselves. The goals of this course include: to think critically about the role of race representation in the process of imperialism; to research and write in depth on a topic of the student’s interest, developed in consultation with me; and to further develop the student’s synthetic, analytic and evaluative skills in both written and spoken form.
CPLE: Social Science AXLE: International Cultures
