CSP2030 Black American Music
(Formerly CVA2030 African American Music in the U.S.)
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course surveys music created by and about African Americans from the 19th century to the present, including spirituals, gospel, ragtime, blues, jazz, classical, R&B, rock and roll, soul, funk, disco, and rap. The course will emphasize: (1) African origins, and the historical and sociocultural contexts in which African American musical styles developed; (2) nontechnical musical analysis of the works studied; (3) the reciprocal relationships between African American music and other American music; and (4) the ways in which music participates in and shapes our national perceptions of and debates over race. No musical background required.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2031 Top Performers: Business in American Drama
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsEver since Willy Loman walked on stage with his sample cases in Arthur Miller's 1949 masterpiece Death of a Salesman, it has been thought axiomatic that American playwrights have painted a bleak portrait of sales professionals in particular and businesspeople generally. But a close look at American dramatic treatments of business shows something more complicated. Over the past century American playwrights have located in the world of business and the world of drama a shared preoccupation with the sometimes tricky distinctions between word and act, authenticity and performance, the _real_ and the symbolic. This course will look at a selection of American plays from the early twentieth century to the present, focusing on those plays' treatment of business and economic life. In addition to close scrutiny of dramatic texts and theatrical performances, we will also explore the role of performance in business. In other words, we'll look at both business in American drama and drama in American business. Your performance will be assessed through two papers, a mid-term and a final exam.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Fall

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

CHN2200 Chinese I
4 General CreditsAn introduction to practical and functional knowledge of modern Mandarin Chinese. Emphasis on developing proficiency in fundamental language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, using basic expressions and sentence patterns. Computer programs for pronunciation, listening comprehension, grammar and writing Chinese characters will be used extensively.

Prerequisites: None

CHN4610 Chinese II
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsA continuation of the fall semester, an introduction to practical and functional knowledge of modern Mandarin Chinese. Emphasis on developing proficiency in fundamental language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, using basic expressions and sentence patterns. Computer programs for pronunciation, listening comprehension, grammar and writing Chinese characters will be used extensively.

Prerequisites: CHN1210 or CHN2200

FLM4671 Comic Form in Film
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsThis course explores the history and theory of comic form as it applies to movies from the silent film era to the present. Beginning with silent comedies and progressing to more recent films, we will consider such topics as comedy's roots in ancient ritual; recurring comic character types and genre conventions; irony, satire, anarchy, and surrealism as comic principles; and dark comedy. Course readings will introduce students to narrative theories, aesthetic and philosophical questions, and analytical models that address the purposes and strategies of comic form.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4620 Constructing and Performing the Self
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsIn Constructing and Performing the Self students will examine and attempt to answer the most fundamental of questions: Who am I? A question this significant cannot be adequately answered by any one approach, thus the course brings together two very different approaches to guide the investigation. Psychological studies of identity marshal the tools and methods of science to develop and test theories that describe and explain the self. Theater studies bring interpretative and aesthetic perspectives to represent and reveal identity. In this course, these two approaches will be purposely inter-mingled: the questions asked and the answers derived will be informed equally by psychology and theater. Students will see, on a daily basis, how each field informs, supports, and speaks to the other. While there are some class sessions and assignments explicitly grounded in only one field to build students' fluency, the major activities of the semester will require both.

Given how personally applicable both psychology and theater are, students' own sense of identity will be the central text in this course. Like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, students are both the main character in their own life stories and also the narrator of them. This course aims for true interdisciplinary integration, and students will be called upon to use and apply the theoretical work as they build and create an original solo performance about a key moment in their lives. Our hope is that by semester's end students will have taken a concrete step forward in understanding and articulating their sense of self and feel comfortable and confident in their ability to perform for a live, public audience.

Students are asked to alternate between four roles in this course: scholar, writer, actor, and critic.
- Scholars consume information in analytical ways and produce new knowledge that is deeply grounded in their foundational knowledge.
- Writers produce new works, both analytical and creative, that take a novel position and support it.
- Actors give life to both old and new characters, conveying their shifting objectives over time to impact an audience.
- Critics evaluate texts (in our case, performances) with a constructive, thoughtful, and respectful approach that brings new insights.
Some days students will only adopt one role, other students will be asked to oscillate between the
them.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4640 Contagious Cultures: Narrative, Film, Society
(Formerly Literature and Film of Contagion)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Wherever you live in the world, it is almost certain that your life has been affected if not profoundly transformed over the past two years. The experience of living through such a vast contagion prompted me to think not about illness (I think we're exhausted by that), but about the spreadability and transmission of all sorts of infectious content. In this course, we will look very little at narratives of actual physical contagions. Instead, we will study contagion-as-metaphor for the expansion of a wide range of ideas and movements that propagate, spread, go viral, catch on, etcetera. Through narrative and film, discussion and debate, we will consider such overt topics as humor, laughter, and fear, but also beliefs, environmental contagion, cheating, social media, scapegoating and cancel culture, hair and fashion styles, protest, hope, and happiness, among other possibilities. Why and how do we aspire to some concepts going "viral," while striving to contain others? How is the speed and profusion of transmission of things other than disease both a positive and a negative aspect of our contemporary world?

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4605 Contemporary World Literature: The Writing of the Unreal
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsStudents who have taken VA2036 are not permitted to take LIT4605This course examines contemporary world literature through the specific prism of _the unreal_. Writers from Latin America, the Caribbean, East Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East will be examined in their rich experiments with surrealism, anti-realism, and hyper-realism. Moreover, this course will explore the enigmatic conceptual territories of the dream, the nightmare, the fantasy, the illusion, the hallucination, the mirage, the vision, and the simulation as breakaway zones of the global literary imagination. To achieve this task, we will evaluate authors as diverse as Franz Kafka, Ghada Samman, Haruki Murakami, Clarice Lispector, Jose Saramago, Naguib Mahfouz, Kobo Abe, Juan Rulfo, Vi Khi Nao, and Reinaldo Arenas, interrogating their different approaches to the creation of phantasmatic, strange, and unknown spaces.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

CSP 2006: Critical Philosophy of Race

4 advanced liberal arts credit

This course will survey the history of philosophy and race and critical philosophies of race. The first half of the course will begin with a study of the use of Aristotle's Politics as it was taken up by 15th and 16th century theologians in the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the context of the colonization of the Americas. We will then look at early modern philosophy and the shift away from theologically based hierarchies to "scientific" analyses of race as they were developed alongside the Enlightenment political values of individual freedom and republicanism as promised in social contract theory. The first half of the course will end with a case study of the international abolitionist movement. The second half of the course will look specifically at the philosophies of race within the United States as a settler colonial nation. We will look at the social construction of "whiteness" as it coalesced around specific labor and property relations, the prison industrial complex, and contemporary decolonial and abolitionist political philosophy.

Prerequisite: WRT1001 and FCI1000

LTA2039 Curiosity in Literature
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsCuriosity contains within it a contradiction; it is our drive to know battling against our fear of the unknown, and it has played a major role in literature for a very long time. In this course, we will read texts that span several continents and centuries as we study curiosity and ask ourselves myriad questions. Why did the definition of curiosity change from negative to positive in the 14th century? Is curiosity hubristic tinkering or social responsibility? How is curiosity valued? Is the valuation of curiosity dependent on what is being sought? Is curiosity linked to gender? Who is rewarded for possessing it? Who is punished? If curiosity killed the cat, why? We will study Greek Myths and Fairy Tales as well as the following authors: John Milton, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Sigmund Freud, Agatha Christie, Anne Sexton, and Patricia Highsmith. We will also view Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring

Prerequisites: RHT and AHS