Course Descriptions

Restricted to students in the Freshman Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts. An overview of the liberal arts disciplines.

Offered on the pass/fail basis only.

Restricted to students in the Freshman Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts. Intensive small class lecture or seminar course addressing basic issues in various liberal arts disciplines. Lectures, readings, discussions, examinations. Humanities 305 and Liberal Arts Honors 305 may not both be counted unless the topics vary. Liberal Arts Honors 305 (Topic 1) and 305 (Topic: Reacting to the Past) may not both be counted.

May be counted toward the writing flag requirement.

Designed to accommodate 35 or fewer students. Offered on the letter-grade basis only. Course number may be repeated for credit when the topics vary.

Restricted to students in the Freshman Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts. Intensive small class lecture or seminar course addressing basic issues in various liberal arts disciplines. Lectures, readings, discussions, examinations. Humanities 305 and Liberal Arts Honors 305 may not both be counted unless the topics vary. Liberal Arts Honors 305 (Topic 1) and 305 (Topic: Reacting to the Past) may not both be counted.

May be counted toward the writing flag requirement.

Designed to accommodate 35 or fewer students. Offered on the letter-grade basis only. Course number may be repeated for credit when the topics vary.

Prerequisites

In order to take this class you must be enrolled in the Government Department’s honors program.

Course Description

This course will offer something more, and something less, than a standard survey of American political thought.  It will offer more because its focus is just as much on economic thought as on political thought, or more precisely, its focus is on the interaction of political and economic thought.  It will offer less because it does not cover some of the standard topics of American political thought courses—much Constitutional development, federalism, civil rights, and civil liberties, for example—except where those topics directly impinge on the interaction of the political and economic.

We address such questions as:  Under what circumstances should government regulate the economy?  Should government encourage industry, or agriculture, or both, or neither?  Should taxes be progressive?  Under what circumstances, if any should government redistribute wealth?  Is the unregulated market the best producer of social wealth?  In pursuit of these and other topics we will read some of the writings of John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, the Populists, the Progressives, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, George Gilder, Paul Krugman, and many others.  In other words, this is an old-fashioned history-of-ideas course with a great deal of reading and, I hope, a significant amount of class discussion.

Grading Policy

Two in-class quizzes                            5% each

Class participation                               20%

Two short essays                                 20% each

Final essay                                         30%

Texts

Everyone must read:

John Locke   Second Treatise Of Government (public domain)

Adam Smith   The Wealth of Nations (public domain)

Michael B. Levy (ed.)   Political Thought In America:  An  Anthology, selected readings, second edition (The Dorsey Press, 1988)

George Gilder  Wealth and Poverty   (1981; now out of print, but available through libraries, used-book stores, Amazon.com, etc.)

Paul Krugman   The Conscience of a Liberal (W. W. Norton, 2007)

Selected articles and documents from a reading packet, available at the House of Tutors on the corner of 24th and Pearl Streets

A good case can be made that one of the vital factors in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the communist ideology on which it was based, was the consistent superiority of American technology for the forty-six year duration of the “Cold War”. It is the purpose of this course to examine this proposition. Many of these technologies had their origins during World War II when they were developed on a “crash” basis because of the exigencies of war. The institutions that developed these technologies were then converted to new work of a military nature that turned out to be important during the Cold War. Thus, the course will start with a discussion of the situation as World War II ended in the summer of 1945.

A number of examples of American technological developments will be presented, and the effect that they had on Soviet-American relations will be evaluated. One of the first was the Berlin Airlift, which broke the Soviet blockade of the city in 1949. We astonished the Soviets with our technological capability to supply a city of three million people with aircraft alone. It was the first “peaceful victory” in the Cold War. Next was the use of U-2 aircraft to gather credible information about the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The high-resolution U-2 pictures permitted President Kennedy to persuade a skeptical public that the Soviets were indeed doing just that. The development of the technology for defense against ballistic missiles was another important element. President Reagan’s refusal to trade away the work on missile defense at the Reikjavik summit meeting with President Gorbachev in 1986 was one of the critical turning points in U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War. The meeting persuaded Gorbachev that we were serious, and some believe he lost his nerve at that point. Gorbachev himself has actually said so. The continuing work on cryptology and other information systems were also a decisive element in winning the Cold War. This work was an extension of what was started in World War II and profoundly influenced computer development. Perhaps even more important, the unclassified work on information technology, transistor radios, Xerox machines, FAX machines and VCR technology made it impossible for the Soviets to operate the closed society that the communist philosophy demanded. The lectures will be presented roughly in chronological order of events during the Cold War. There will also be some discussions of how the legacy of the Cold War affects current events.

Text/Readings:

Course packet of articles about the Cold War

Supplemental readings for term paper (guided by the professor)

Requirements:

The course consists of twenty-four lecture sessions supported by video presentations. There will be a mid-term and a required term paper. The students’ grades will be determined by their performance on these assignments.

About the Professor:

Dr. Hans Mark is a member of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, specializing in the study of spacecraft and aircraft design, electromagnetic railguns, and national defense policy. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954. Dr. Mark served as director of the NASA-Ames Research Center (1969-77) and Secretary of the Air Force (1979-81). While working for the U.S. Air Force, he created a space command center in Colorado which is still operational. During this time he was also the director of the National Reconnaissance Office, where he was responsible for managing the U.S. satellite reconnaissance program. In 1981, Mark was appointed deputy administrator of NASA. During his three years in the position, he supervised the first 14 space shuttle flights and beginnings of the United States involvement in the International Space Station program. He served as chancellor of The University of Texas System from 1984 to 1992 and on the faculty of the Cockrell School of Engineering since 1988. After working at the university for several years, Mark was named director of Defense Research and Engineering for the Department of Defense in 1998 and serviced until 2001.  He previously taught at Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University. Dr. Mark returned to teaching and researching at the University of Texas in 2001. He has published more than 180 technical reports and authored or edited eight books. Dr. Mark is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.  He has been awarded five Distinguished Service medals, two from the Department of Defense; two from NASA and one from the US Navy.  Dr. Mark holds six honorary doctorates.   

This upper division honors seminar traces the evolution of race policy in the United States from the development of the color line, through the current policy of equal opportunity, to alternative forecasts about the role of race in America’s future.  Emphasis will be placed on understanding the circumstances that led to particular policies.  Students will be encouraged to read and develop their own interpretations of primary sources such as Supreme Court cases, rather than to rely solely on the interpretations of scholars.  

Texts

Taylor Branch, Parting The Waters: America in the King Years, 1954 – 63, (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1988).

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, any edition

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, any edition.

Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth (New York: Routledge, 1997)

Edward Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

This seminar is designed as a reading course in history, literature, and politics, and as a class in professional writing. Its scope will include not only the literature, history, and politics of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but also the interaction of British and other societies throughout the world. One point of emphasis will be the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth in its Asian and African as well as early American dimensions. Another point will be a focus on historical, literary, and auto-biography (Disreali, Woolf, Lawrence, Orwell, Gandhi, etc.).

In a general way, the seminar upholds the principles of the Modern History Faculty at Oxford-to enhance (1) intellectual curiosity, (2) conceptual clarity; (3) flexibility, that is, the capacity to engage with alternative perspectives and new information; (4) accuracy and attention to detail; (5) critical engagement; (6) capacity for hard work (7) enthusiasm for history, literature, and politics; and (8) historical imagination and understanding, that is the ability to speculate and compare, alongside the possession of appropriate historical knowledge and the capacity to deploy it.

Texts

Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians is required, then a choice of five other books from the list below plus six others to be decided upon in consultation with the instructor:

      Robert Blake, Disraeli

      Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey 

      Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf

      T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

      Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life

      Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope

About the Professor:

His teaching fields are the British Empire and Commonwealth and the comparative history of colonialism, Belgian, French, Dutch, German, and Portuguese; and the history, literature, and politics of nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain.

Professor Louis has recently published Ends of British Imperialism: the Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (2006). He has written or edited more than thirty books including Imperialism at Bay (1977) and The British Empire in the Middle East (1984). His edited publications include The End of the Palestine Mandate (1986), The Transfers of Power in Africa (1988), Suez 1956 (1989), The Iraqi Revolution (1991), and Churchill (1993).

He is the past President of the American Historical Association and the present Director of the AHA's National History Center.  He is Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire, and the former Chairman of the Historical Advisory Committee, U.S. Department of State (resigned on principle, 2008).

Awards/Honors

Selected by the 50,000 students at UT as Professor of the Year, 2009

Kluge Chair for the Library of Congress in 2010

Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011

Instructor:  Adams, M            Areas:  II / D

Unique #:  35490            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  English Honors

Cross-lists:  LAH 350            Computer Instruction:  n/a

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

The subject of each class meeting may be determined from the assigned reading for the day (see course schedule). The instructor retains the right to vary this syllabus.

Description: The intellectual and cultural foundation of what we call the Western Mind has its origin within the ideas and literary and artistic forms established centuries ago by Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. This course will explore those ideas and those literary forms as they continue to manifest themselves both singularly and as a complex union responsible for creating the psychological and aesthetic tension in important modern writers. Singularly we find the mental atmosphere established by the Judeo-Christian notions of monotheism, linear time, a sacred text of laws, Judgment Day, Hell and Heaven, Original Sin, a god of history, Satan, salvation, etc., found in literary forms like psalms, folk tales, etiological stories, prophetic poetry, lamentations, extended narratives, character sketches, gospels, and epistles. And we find the mental atmosphere of Greek notions of intellectual freedom, skepticism, Stoicism, democracy, philosophical inquiry, destiny, glory, honor, hospitality, fate, the heroic, etc., found in literary forms like tragedy, odes, the Sapphic, the elegy, the epic, philosophic tracts, and satire. But perhaps most important, we see prevalently in the modern mind a blending of these two mental atmospheres that have created some of our finest stories, plays, and poems as they encapsulate what some have called the sadness of sophistication tempered by the mercy of the imagination—“Need is not quite belief.”

            This exploration will take us back and forth from biblical and Greek and Roman literary texts to contemporary versions or rethinkings. Aeschylus’ Orestia; Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra; the gospel of Mark and Pars Lagerkvist’s Barabbas; the biblical Lamentations and Anne Sexton’s The Jesus Papers; Ecclesiastes and Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts; the biblical Job and Archibald MacLeish’s poetic drama J.B., the Garden of Eden story and Paul Valéry’s Sketch of the Serpent, and so on. In essence, this comparative look at ancient and modern literary devices, and the ideas they literally contain, is a study of the creative mind’s response to the mystery of being alive.

Readings selected from the following list: Large selections from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Sophocles’ Antigone; Aeschylus’ Orestia; Euripides’ Medea; Horace and Juvenal’s satires; the odes of Pindar, Horace, Catullus, W. H. Auden, Laurence Binyon, Alan Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Creely, Bernadette Mayer; Sappho’s poetic fragments and the modern Sapphic by Anne Carson, John Frederick Nims, Ezra Pound; elegies of Mimnermus, Propertius, Tyrtaeus, Ovid, Catullus, Jerico Brown, Robert Lowel, A. E. Housman, W. H. Auden, Paul Celan, Rainer Maria Rilke; the Old Testament (the historical books—Genesis, Exodus, etc.—Psalms; the Prophets; Wisdom literature—Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, etc.; selections from the Apocrapha, especially Enoch; the New Testament—the Gospels, Paul’s Letters, Acts, Revelation; Petronius’ Satyricon; selections from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca; brief selections from the pre-Socratic philosophers; the Persian Avesta; Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts; Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son; short stories by Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, James Joyce, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Anton Chekov, William Faulkner, and others; Hesiod’s Works and Days ; Archibald MacLeish’s poetic drama J.B.; Par Lagerkvist’s Barabbas; Anne Sexton’s “The Jesus Papers.”

Grading Policy: Attendance is required. Unexcused absence results in a deduction of three points off the final grade—for each unexcused absence. Class discussion is highly valued. In many ways, this is the heart of the class, for it’s by this means that we share insights into the art of a fine story and insights into the human condition—especially our own. These discussions will be open, frank, and respectful. The discussion grade accounts for 10% of the final grade. This is based not on the number of times you contribute but on the quality of your insights and your willingness to share your thoughts. A careful reading of each story for each class is highly valued. To this end, pop quizzes will constitute 15% of your final grade. You must come to class fully prepared each class meeting. The quizzes will be over the readings due for that day. If you miss a quiz due to an excused absence, you must come by my office within one week from the missed class and take an oral quiz. If you’ve missed class with an excused absence for more than one day, you must, upon your return, arrange a time to make up any missed quizzes. These quizzes will result in a grade of pass or fail. If you score from 70-100, you will receive a pass in the grade book, which cannot be averaged into your final pop-quiz grade. If you score lower than a 70, that grade will be recorded in the grade book and averaged into your final pop-quiz grade. This protects the integrity and goal of the pop quizzes—to determine how prepared you were for class NOT knowing whether you would be given a quiz.

If you miss a quiz due to an unexcused absence, you will not be given a chance to make it up. A zero will be recorded in the grade book.

Requirements and Assignments: You will write five analytical essays (4-8 pages). These will be averaged together and constitute 75% of your final grade. You will be given the opportunity to revise the first essay for a grade by improving the presentation and addressing errors in grammar and punctuation. You will not be allowed to add content to your analysis unless approved by me. Those who need help with your writing will meet with me regularly during the semester. I encourage regular visits for every student in order to discuss both the content of the course and ways to improve your writing. As indicated above, quizzes will make up 15% of your final grade, class discussion 10%.

Final grades will be determined on the basis of the following rubric. Please note: to ensure fairness, all numbers are absolute, and will not be rounded up or down at any stage. Thus a B will be inclusive of all scores of 80.000 through 89.999.

A = 90 – above; B = 80-89; C = 70-79; D = 60-69.

Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities, 471-6259.

Provisional Schedule (subject to change upon notice by the instructor)

To be determined

Instructor’s name:  Michael Adams, Calhoun 316. Office hours MW 4:30-6

This seminar will explore the ways in which crime was prosecuted in Europe and America from ancient times to the present. The first part of the course will be devoted to studying the ways in which secular and ecclesiastical courts defined crimes, the types of people they prosecuted, the procedures they used in the trials, and the punishments they administered. Particular attention will be given to the medieval ordeals, the adoption of inquisitorial criminal procedure, the use of torture, and capital punishment. The second part of the course will be devoted to the study of prosecutions for a variety of specific crimes, including heresy, witchcraft, treason, infanticide, incest, murder, and theft. The third part of the course will be devoted to reading some of the more celebrated trials in Western history, including those of Jesus, Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn, Galileo, Louis XVI of France, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Manson.

Instructor:  Houser, H            Areas:  I / H

Unique #:  35465            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  English Honors

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  n/a

Prerequisites: Six semester hours of upper-division coursework in English.

Description: This course covers the truncated career of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), one of the most obsessed-over and lauded authors of his generation. We will read some of Wallace's essays and short stories, and all of Infinite Jest. The following questions will motivate the course: 1. What is Wallace's place in US literary history? What is his project for a new fiction? 2. What are his polemics about 20th-century US culture and media forms? Can particular novels and reading practices intervene in these domains? 3. How can the novel and the individual navigate the onslaught of information in the 20th/21st centuries?

We will avail ourselves of the Harry Ransom Center's rich Wallace archive which includes his manuscripts, letters, and personal library. The course culminates in a final project of the student's own design. Students are encouraged to use HRC resources in developing their project questions but are not required to do so.

Texts: Infinite Jest. Possible selections from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, and Girl with Curious Hair, and The Pale King. Short critical readings and prose comparisons.

Requirements & Grading: 20% participation, 10% discussion leading, 15% 5-page close textual analysis, 5% prospectus, 15% bibliographic essay, 35% 12-15 page essay.

“Drama Queens” will examine the relationship between the performed nature of gender, cross- dressing, and expressions of powerful femininity in a broad survey of Western theatrical literature. Students will explore some of the most dynamic women and gender-bending characters ever written for the stage, while contextualizing Classical and Renaissance works in the tradition of portraying women with cross-dressing actors in all-male productions. We will explore how this tradition may have influenced assumptions about the qualities of women and femininity portrayed on stage throughout history—and how modern and contemporary plays featuring powerful women and cross-dressing men respond to these assumptions.

Texts/Films:

 Aeschylus, The Oresteia

Sophocles, Antigone

Aristophanes, Lysistrata

Shakespeare, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra (selections) 

Ben Jonson, Epicœne

Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler

August Strindberg, Miss Julie

Doug Wright, I Am My Own Wife

David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

Caryl Churchill, Top Girls

Neil Labute, The Shape of Things

David Harrower, Blackbird

What do I mean by the Face of Justice? In our democracy, justice concerns certaininalienable rights: liberty, due process, equality. And it concerns freedom fromgovernmental intrusion on the right to speak, to assemble, to be secure in our homes, topractice or not practice any religion we choose. Certainly justice includes some notion offairness. These fundamental values are expressed in the Declaration of Independence andthe Bill of Rights. The Face of Justice reflects the individuals whose rights are beingprotected (and those whose rights are being overlooked) by our operating system ofjustice at given time. But these rights have little meaning without a political structure that enforces them. OurConstitution establishes a unique form of government, characterized by a separation ofpowers and an independent.judiciary. The Face of Justice also reflects the individualswho are allowed to fully participate (and those who are excluded) in the civic andpolitical society that enforces our individual rights.Women are not the only individuals whose rights have been overlooked even under ourConstitution, even under our Bill of Rights. Women are not the only actors who havebeen formally excluded from voting, running for office, holding and managing theirproperty, serving on juries, obtaining the education they seek, entering the professionsthey desire, and receiving equal pay for the work they perform. By focusing on the ways that women have been excluded from political, educational and professional opportunities, and their struggles to redefine their rights and their roles, we learn that justice is never fully attained and is never fully secure. It is my hope that by observing some of the faces once excluded from the tent of justice, we can learn to recognize those who are still excluded. It is my hope that by studying the persistence and doggedness of those who were once excluded, that we may find the courage to further extend thepromises of justice and to shore up the institutions that enforce it. This is a small class and it will only work if you do the readings and participate in the discussions. Attendence is required.

Description: Despite the many calamities it caused and experienced in the twentieth century, the German state has persisted into our present as a leader in European politics, economy and society and an important international actor. To understand why this would be the case, this course treats the history of Germany in the “long” twentieth century, that is, from the intermediate background of WWI and the establishment of a unified German Empire (1871) to the present. Class time will alternate between lecture and discussion of primary source readings. Topics to be covered include: German economy, geography, and demography; national unification; German colonialism; Wilhelmine society and culture; the social and political status of German Jewry; the background, causes, and experience of WWI; the failed Communist Revolution of 1919; the emergence and decline of the Weimar state; the economic crisis of the interwar years; Weimar culture; National Socialism and the Third Reich; the experience and effects of WWII; the Holocaust; the constitution of East and West German states, societies, and cultures; the “economic miracle”; the Cold War in Germany; 1968 and its social effects; the revolutions of 1989; reunification; the experience of non-Germans in Germany since 1945; and Germany in the European Union. Where possible we will consider these themes in global context. Throughout, emphasis will fall on the reading and interpretation of primary sources in English translation, including text, film, photographs, and music.

Possible readings (selections – please consult the instructor for the final reading list before purchasing any items):

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday; Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel; Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back; Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known; Kaes et al., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (selections); Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf; Peter Fritzsche,Germans into Nazis; Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed; J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace; Filip Müller,Eyewitness Auschwitz; Jana Hensel, After the Wall.

Probable grading scheme:

Map quiz=5%; Midterm 25%; Final exam 25%; Short paper 30%; other quizzes 15%.

This course seeks to explore how exceptional men and women have significantly influenced the lives of millions of people, in their own and later generataions, for the benefit of mankind. We shall study the character, behavior, and development of these figures to assess whether there are unifying or repetitive patterns among them. Further, why di these figures rise above others of their time to merit study and attention in later centuries? Most important, however, is to ask ourselves: What can we learn from these heroic figures that we, as private individuals and as public citizens, can absorb or emulate in order to lead richer, fuller lives and contribute positively to our own and future generations? The calss will focus on a different historical figure each week. The seminar will be led by a professor with experience in teaching English and world literature in serveral universities, and in serving in government as a U.S. Congressman and U.S. Senator from Texas, and as a U.S. Ambassador and Special Representative of the U.S. Secretary of State to several different countries.

Course Materials

Texts of readings will be provided electronically by instructor via blackboard. However, students are urged, whenever possible, to buy hard-copy, used books by and about these figures, so that they can explore these works without being restricted to the limited number of pages which can be legally copied electronically. Amazon.com has many used books by and about these heroic figures, available at nominal cost.

Course Procedures

Assignments – Students will be expected to participate in reasoned, informed discussion, and to help one another to think clearly, reason soundly, and speak persuasively in presenting positions with force, but with minds open to tolerate differences of opinion.

Attendance is essential in a seminar; any class missed will require the student to write a longer essay.

Make-up Assignments and Examinations – Any missed written assignment receives a full letter-grade penalty on the make-up essay.

Academic Integrity is expected of everyone. All work submitted must be a student’s own. Plagiarism would mean failure.

Course Topics

Winston Churchill - Selected readings from Churchill: Great Lives Observed ed. by Martin Gilbert

Abraham Lincoln - Selected readings from Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings ed. by Don Fehrenbacher

Hidegarde of Bingen - Selected readings

Mohandes Gandhi - Selected readings from his autobiography

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, scholar, philosopher, physician - Selected readings from Reverence for Life and Out of My Life and Thought by Albert Schweitzer

Shakespeare - Othello

Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Selected readings and speeches

Eleanor Roosevelt - Selected readings and speeches

Dr. Martin Luther King - Selected readings and speeches

Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (TX) - Selected speeches

Nelson Mandela - Selected speeches and writings

Paul Rusesabagina (protected citizens in Rwandan genocide) - Movie Hotel Rwanda and autobiography, A Ordinary Man

Grading Policy

Final assessments in this course will be based on the student’s knowledge of great historical heroic figures, student’s facility in producing a point of view, and an ability to synthesize course material with student’s own value system. Grades will be based on:

• quality of thought and expression in class discussion – 35%
• short essays demonstrating soundly reasoned expression – 35%
• final oral exam – 30%

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A            Areas:  V / G

Unique #:  35545            Flags:  Global cultures, Writing

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  English Honors

Cross-lists:  LAH 350            Computer Instruction:  n/a

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Focusing on contemporary fiction inspired by actual historical events, this course will explore literature’s value as a forum for cultural memory and public history, with particular emphasis on how it articulates affective histories. A key point of departure for the course will be the use of fiction to explore the absent archive of slavery, in works such as Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and Saidiya Hartman’s combination of memoir, field work, archival research, and speculative imagination in Lose Your Mother. The course will also draw significantly on the role of fiction in the historical archive of queer sexuality, through texts such as Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, which imagines the queer life of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Indochinese cook, and Alison Bechdel’s graphic narrative, Fun Home.  It will consider the literature of the Holocaust and 9/11 through Sebald’s Austerlitz and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, as well as how histories of colonialism and the Americas are represented through a specific focus on the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean in Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We will consider how this literature’s historical concerns are also global ones that touch on a range of geopolitical regions beyond the U.S., including Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

The course will also take up the history of historical fiction, turning back to Sir Walter Scott and/or Nathaniel Hawthorne to consider the intersections of history and fiction in the formation of the novel as a genre. This historical perspective will inform our discussion of the contemporary relation between fiction and creative non-fiction, including anxieties about memoir’s claims to truth and its usurpation of the novel.

With its focus on how literature produces counterhistories, the course will encourage students in the honors program to explore the role of contemporary writers as public intellectuals. We will, for example, look closely at how the novels we read are situated within popular media, and students will practice writing reviews. Students will also be encouraged to develop critical tools for writing about contemporary fiction, including historical and archival research, so that those who want to write theses in this area can develop a critical relation to the fiction and popular criticism that interests them. In addition to reading the novels themselves, we will likely do some secondary reading in the areas of archive theory, affect theory, history of the novel, and narrative theory.

Texts (tentative): Toni Morrison, Beloved; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother; W.G. Sebald, Auschwitz; Monique Truong, The Book of Salt; Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Requirements & Grading: 35%, 1 long research paper (10-15 pages, including proposal, draft, revision, and peer review); 35%, 3-4 short assignments (a review of a contemporary novel, a historical research assignment, an archive assignment, a report on a public on-campus event); 30%, 3-5 short responses to readings and class participation.

This course will study a selection of key issues in the history of European expansion overseas, beginning with the mercantilist empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, continuing through the era of 'free trade imperialism, and culminating in the so-called 'new imperialism' of the late nineteenth century. The themes to be considered include: the 'world system' of the period, the nature of mercantilism, revisionist views of the chartered companies, the controversy over the acquisition of India in the eighteenth century, the loss of the mainland colonies, the debate over the slave trade and abolition, the rise of free trade, the long-running argument about informal empire, and the nature of 'new' imperialism. 

The ultimate aim of the course is to assist students to understand the evolution of the modern world order as seen through from the perspectives of the major powers of the day, principally Britain, but also other European countries and the United States. The course complements Course 350L offered in the Spring semester (2005), but can be studied independently.

Grading Policy

85% written (3,000 word long essay + three 500 word reports); 15% seminar contribution

Texts

Detailed reading will be provided at the beginning of the semester. Relevant studies containing full references to recent scholarship include: the OXFORD HISTORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE (Vols.1 and 2, 1998, and 3 and 5, 1999), and P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, BRITISH IMPERIALISM, 1688-2000 (2001).

The events of the Holocaust changed Western culture in fundamental ways. Not only was a great part of Jewish culture in Europe destroyed, the circumstances of the Nazi genocide as a modern, highly rationalized, efficient form of mass murder which took place in the heart of civilized Europe changed the conception of the progress of modernity and the Enlightenment in fundamental ways. This course explores the historical, political, psychological, theological, and cultural fall-out, as well as literary and cinematic responses in Europe and the U.S. to these events as they first became known, and as one moved further away from it in time and came to understand its pronounced and often problematic after effects. Central to our inquiry is the realization that the events of the Holocaust have left indelible traces in European and U.S. culture and culture production, of which a closer look (first, decade by decade, then moving on to a number of themes and questions), reveals profound insights into current day culture, politics, and society.

This course explores the nature and consequences of money in American politics and why, at this point in history, we find ourselves embroiled in the most significant debate over campaign finance reform in over thirty years. The debate goes to the heart of the U.S. Constitution, pitting the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly against the perceived fairness and efficacy of a republican government awash, some claim, in increasingly unaccountable money.

Campaign finance issues lie at the crossroads of a bewildering number of analytical perspectives.  We (must) examine the work of historians, social scientists, legal scholars, and interested parties on all sides of the debate in an effort not only to assess current policy debates but also to understand how we got here.  During the course we confront and seek answers to a host of questions, including, but by no means limited to:

     - How will corporations respond to the Supreme Court’s recent decision permitting unlimited    political advertising? 

     - Why did most 2008 presidential candidates abandon the system of public financing for presidential elections?

     -Why does the public believe that corporations play such a large role in funding federal election campaigns?

     -Why does the Supreme Court allow public perceptions to determine the constitutionality of campaign finance laws?

     -Why do U.S. Senators refuse to report their campaign finance activity electronically to the Federal Election Commission?

     -How and why is the Internet treated differently than other means of political communication by campaign finance laws?

     -What are the consequences of unlimited individual contributions to state election candidates in Texas?

Texts

Corrado, Anthony, et al. The New Campaign Finance Sourcebook. 2004. Washington D.C.: Brooking Institution; 

Corrado, Anthony and David Magleby Financing the 2008 Election. 2010. Washington D.C.: Brooking Institution; 

McChesney, Fred. Money For Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion.  1997. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 

Urofsky, Melvin., Money & Free Speech: Campaign Finance Reform and the Courts. 2005. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

La Raja, Raymond.  Small Change: Money, Political Parties and Campaign Finance Reform. 2008. University of Michigan Press

This course examines the development of a “politically correct” racial etiquette in the United States over the past century. These conventions arose for the purpose of facilitating cross-racial communication and minimizing offensive words and behaviors that might disrupt relationships between black and white Americans in social, political, and academic venues. We should recognize that this is a limited definition of political correctness, in that it is limited to the sphere of race relations. Politically correct standards have also been used to “minimize social and institutional offense” (Wikipedia) that might be perceived by people with respect to occupation, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or age. (The University of Texas has published its own regulations regarding freedom of expression and verbal “defamation” and “harassment” that fall within this category.)  We should also be aware that “political correctness” has frequently been used as an epithet over the past two decades. One opponent describes political correctness as “a communal tyranny that erupted in the 1980s,” and many other hostile commentators have equated political correctness with illegitimate censorship. These ideological conflicts belong to the larger “culture war” of which racial issues constitute only one dimension.

The course therefore focuses on public comments and exchanges between black and white Americans bearing on race relations, as well as the various, and often pejorative, images of African Americans that have appeared in print and other media over the past century. To what degree have black people in the United States been able to represent themselves, as opposed to being represented, for better or for worse, by members of the white majority? A fundamental claim of the course is that the racial politics of representing African Americans changed in a fundamental way following the publication of “The Negro family: The case for national action” (The Moynihan Report) in 1965. The firestorm of controversy provoked by this traumatic event created a new universe of racial discourse that created in turn the new racial politics of “political correctness” that continues to be the dominant conceptual framework within which race matters are discussed to this day.

Instructor:  Barchas, J            Areas:  III / F

Unique #:  35505            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  English Honors

Cross-lists:  LAH 350            Computer Instruction:  n/a

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: This book-history course tracks the evolution of the modern paperback through author case studies. This survey will start with the so-called “yellowbacks” sold in Victorian railway stations in the 1870s and proceed through to today’s paperbacks as they compete with e-books. We shall linger on the marketing hotspots and explosions of cheap books in 1890s, 1940s, and 1960s. Book covers, the canvas upon which the bulk of book marketing occurs, will be a strong bibliographical focus. The class will make extensive use of the Wolff collection of Victorian binding styles in the HRC (one of the top such collections in the world).

The class will be organized around a central case study, namely the marketing of Jane Austen’s novels from 1833 to now, but will ask every student to pick another major author initially published before 1850, whose work was subsequently reissued in paperback form across the entire historical span of this course. This will allow us to identify which marketing techniques are specific to an author and which are generic to the evolution of the modern book. In the fall of 2012, this class will intersect and take advantage of the TILTS lecture series on “The Fate of he Book.”

Required Readings:

--Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813) and two further 19th-c novels (determined by student interest)

--Phil Baines, Penguin by Design: a Cover Story 1935-2005 (Alen Lane, 2007)

--Nicholson Baker, Size of Thoughts (1997)

--Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, 2012)

And selections from:

--John Carter and Nicolas Barker, ABC for Book Collectors.  8th edn (Delaware, 2004).

--Gerard Genette, Paratexts: The Thresholds of Interpretation (1987); English translation by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge, 1997).

--The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1998).

--Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972); corrected rpt. 1974, paperback rpt. Oak Knoll, 1995.

--G. Thomas Tanselle, Book Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (Bibliographical Society of the U of Virginia, forthcoming 2011)

Requirements & Grading: Participation, 15%; 3 essays and an annotated bibliography (2 short essays of 3-4 pp each, and one longer essay of 6-8 pp), 60%; In-class conference-style presentations, 25%.

This course examines the sources and consequences of U.S. foreign

policy. Discussion and readings focus on historical and contemporary

cases, organized by presidency.  The course aims to help students

think systematically and critically about how U.S. foreign policy is

made and its effects, at home as well as abroad.

Texts

Fredrik Logevall and Campbell Craig, America's Cold War (Harvard 2009)

Leslie Gelb, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Brookings 1979)

Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, (Norton 1979)

Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine (Simon and Schuster 2006)

This is an intensive course in writing with a special emphasis on craft.  Students will write profiles, narratives, and essays, some fairly short and others of moderate length.  Instruction and class discussions will concentrate on the fundamental components of nonfiction including beginnings, organization, character development, narrative flow, and conclusions.  The instructor makes extensive comments on all papers.  Readings are devoted to writers working and publishing now or in the very recent past.  Although the writing assignments are demanding, there will be no midterm or final examination. 

The instructor is an experienced editor and a widely published author. The assigned reading is almost all work by contemporary writers.  All this work is legally available for free on the web or on reserve in the PCL. 

Supervised Research. Individual instruction. Prerequisite: A
University grade point average of at least 3.50 and consent of the
liberal arts honors program adviser. Only one LAH 358Q may be applied towards college honors. Course may be repeated.

Class meets Thursdays from 3:00 -4:00 in GEBAUER 1.206  Commons Room.

Class meets Thursdays from 3:00 -4:00 in GEBAUER 1.206  Commons Room.