Current Feit Seminar Courses - Spring 2011
New York Stories
IDC 4050H KM13H – registration code 0971
M/W 11:10-12:25
Professor Shelly Eversley, English
Professor Vera Haller, Journalism and the Writing Professions
New York: what is it about the city that attracts and inspires so many? There are millions and millions of stories. In this seminar, we will analyze some of the poems, essays, fiction, and journalistic writings that attempt to define the identity of the city. When does a person become a New Yorker? What makes New York unique? In class discussions, in posts to a class blog and in focused excursions around the city, we will discover our own “New York Stories.” We will add to the city’s seemingly endless tales in formal writing assignments and in final multimedia projects.
Utopias and Dystopias: Searching for the Perfect World
IDC 4050H KM24H – registration code 0972
T/TH 11:10-12:25
Professor Frank Cioffi, English
Professor David Hoffman, Public Affairs
Like an “archeology of the future,” this class will explore artifacts of alternate worlds—perfect worlds and nightmares of perfection gone awry. We will examine utopian and dystopian works, such as Plato’s Republic, Gilman’s Herland, Zamyatin’s We, Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. We will also study actual attempts to create utopian societies, especially on the small scale, from early Shaker, Fourierist, and Owenite communities, to the Israeli kibbutz and the Biosphere II experiment. Through such studies of literature and practice, this course will explore issues in governance, economics, human rights, and sustainability, and examine even more fundamental questions about human nature and happiness, as we experiment in world building and possibly the creation of our own narratives, dystopian and utopian.
Decolonization and Postcolonialism
IDC 4050H XZ24H – registration code 0973
T/TH 4:10-5:25
Professor Glenn Peterson, Anthropology
Professor Kevin Frank, English
Colonialism did not begin with Columbus’s voyages to the Americas. The rise and fall of empires is as old as recorded history. Likewise, decolonization is an old process that often leads newly created nation-states to fragment in the wake of the long-term aftershocks of the collapse of empires. So post-colonialism is neither something short-term nor limited to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Decolonization and post-colonialism are facts of sociopolitical existence and the study of them can tell us a good deal about what lies ahead of us, as well as how things unfolded in past.
