CHAT Courses

Spring 2011

Dangerous Ideas: Darwin in America

Prof. Britt Russert (CHAT External Humanities Fellow)
American Studies 2900, Section 001/ English 3900, Section 002, T/Th 3:30-4:50

2009 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Despite the general acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the motor of evolutionary change by scientific experts, current debates about the teaching of evolution in high schools as well as rising popular support for the theory of intelligent design illuminate the enduring controversy that has surrounded evolution ever since the 1859 publication of Darwin’s “dangerous idea.”  In this course, we will return to the nineteenth century in order to explore the controversial—and somewhat peculiar—reception of Darwin in the antebellum and postbellum United States.  Darwin’s groundbreaking theory had a dramatic impact in the U.S., a fragile, war-torn country in the midst of widespread cultural transformation and economic reorganization.  Through readings of short stories, novels, and poetry, as well as scientific and economic texts, we will trace these cultural transformations and consider how Darwin’s radical reinterpretation of nature and the place of  “man” in it shaped the preoccupations and forms of literature, science, and politics during the period.  Topics will include: natural history in the revolutionary era, Darwin and the Civil War; evolution and religious controversies; shifting concepts of nature in American literature and poetry; the rhetoric and aesthetics of nineteenth-century science; race, gender, and sexuality; the emergence of Social Darwinism and eugenics.

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Issues in Modern Literature:  Modernism, Media and Comparative Accoustomology

Prof. Daniel Morse (CHAT Graduate Teaching Fellow)
English 3512, Section 0258/BTMM 3890, Section 001, Th 2:00-3:20pm

What do Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and T. S. Eliot all have in common? If you guessed that they were all radio broadcasters, you’re right! They were, of course, also great twentieth-century writers. So why is their involvement in “wireless” such a secret? This class will stage a critical re-examination of modernism and media, examining film, radio broadcasts, and early phonograph recordings alongside literature, in order to explore the connections between literary innovations and the larger cultural contexts in which they unfolded. We’ll set out to tackle the following questions: How did the development of mass media change the way that cultural producers related to consumers and vice versa? How are modernism’s artistic practices in conversation with technological developments? What can the interventions staged by modernist texts teach us about life in the media-saturated world of the twentieth century?

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Spring 2010

American Perceptions of Muslims in Historical Perspective

Kelly Shannon (CHAT Graduate Teaching Fellow)
History 2910, Special Honors Topics II, TR 11-12:20pm

The Muslim Middle East is an important region for U.S. foreign policy and the projection of U.S. global power.  However, most Americans have never visited the region.  The Muslim world is largely an idea to them, an imagined space onto which they could project their fears and fantasies.  To Americans, the Middle East has been the home of both exotic pleasures and of terrorism and extremism.

In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore how Americans have talked about and imagined Muslims and the Middle East from the Barbary Wars through the present.  We will trace the evolution of American discourse about the Muslim world over time, place it in its historical context, and evaluate the usefulness of current American discussions about the region.  Special emphasis will be placed upon American perceptions of Islamic gender relations and how Muslim women have functioned in the American imagination.

Based largely on class discussions and writing assignments, the course will encourage students to approach American perceptions of Muslims critically and to place primary sources (and the views expressed in them) in their historical context.  It will also encourage them to trace the evolution of American attitudes through time and to examine the ways such attitudes have influenced both American culture and U.S. relations with Muslim countries. 

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Fall 2009

Words of Passage: Interpreting Mexico-US Migration

Hilary Parsons Dick (CHAT Humanities Fellow)
Liberal Arts 3900 (TR 3:30-4:50, Tut 202)

This course will explore the motifs, themes, and ideological frameworks that recur in representations of Mexico-US migration through an examination of scholarship, non-fiction essays, visual art, the news, and movies. These materials are selected to make the experiences of migrants palpable by conveying not only the political economy of migration, but also the affective, psychological, and spiritual aspects of its traumas and exhilarations. As part of this, the course will consider some of the structural factors that shape migration patterns, placing contemporary Mexico-US migration in its historical context. But it will put a particular emphasis on understanding the sociocultural beliefs and practices that inform migration processes. Special attention will be paid throughout to the role that the construction of race and gender plays in the initiation and perpetuation of migration, on the one hand, and the incorporation of migrants into the US society, on the other.

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2008-2009

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Philosophy of Interactive Technologies and Media

Joan Jasak (CHAT Graduate Teaching Fellow)
Philosophy 3210

This course is an intermediate introduction to the philosophy of interactive technologies and media, with an emphasis on video game arts and virtual sociality.  The course will examine the aesthetic legitimacy of video games, the social and political implications of virtual technology and interactive arts, and the phenomenology of the virtual experience.  Organizing themes include: the ludology versus narratology debate; the role of “Flow,” also known as Immersion Theory, in video game experience; the discourse surrounding video games; the social location of the gamer and the role of games for different cultural groups; phenomenology of movement in virtual space, identity with a virtual character (and the role of subjectivity therein), and finally, personal identity and social networking sites. Flyer

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Self-Reliance in American Experience: Representations and Social Contexts

Kara Clevinger (CHAT Graduate Teaching Fellow)

It alone can’t motivate Harry Potter to defeat evil. But it can help Arnold Schwarzenegger win the Mr. Olympia title six times. What is it? It’s self-reliance, and those embarking on this upper-level Honors course will explore how Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous philosophy has impacted our outlook, our values, and our television programming. In order to understand the profound influence the concept of self-reliance has had on American ideals, institutions, and individuals (and even on foreign imports like Potter and Schwarzenegger), we will take an interdisciplinary approach that uses a variety of literary, cultural, and sociological texts to raise four critical questions. With Frederick Douglass, Fanny Fern, Horatio Alger, the documentary Pumping Iron, and the television shows House and What Not to Wear, we will ask: How has the ideology of self-reliance shaped notions of American individualism and masculinity? Using Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and Kurt Cobain, we will ponder: What has Emersonian self-reliance meant for the role of the artist? Examining the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Zitkala-Ša, and Gloria Anzaldúa, we will ask: Does the notion of a single “self” limit our understanding of identity? And finally, with Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, and, yes, Harry Potter, we will consider: What other types of values or epistemologies challenge Emersonian self-reliance? (English 2901)

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Words of Passage: Interpreting Mexico-US Migration

Hilary Parsons Dick (CHAT Humanities Fellow)

Using the tools of narrative and discourse analysis, this course will examine the motifs, themes, and ideological frameworks that recur in considerations of Mexico-US migration. In so doing, the course will examine images and ideas about migration found not only in scholarship, but also in non-fiction essays, novels, poetry, visual art, and movies. These materials are designed to make the experiences of migrants palpable to students. As part of this, the course will consider some of the major economic and political factors that shape migration patterns, placing contemporary Mexico-US migration in its historical context. It will also investigate the socio-cultural beliefs and practices that inform migration processes. Finally, it will use art and literature that captures the affective, psychological, and spiritual aspects of migration to convey the traumas and exhilarations that accompany it.

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2007-08

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The Bible in Early Modern England: Revolutions Textual, Religious, and Political

Patty Crouch (CHAT Graduate Teaching Fellow)

Historian Jonathan Rose has argued that "[i]t is perfectly legitimate to ask how literature has shaped history and made revolutions, how it has socially constructed . . . this, that, and the other. But we cannot begin to answer any of these questions until we know how books (not texts) have been created and reproduced, how books have been disseminated and read, how books have been preserved and destroyed." In this hands-on, interdisciplinary course spanning the fields of literature and literacy, religion, history, the visual arts, and translation theory, we will test Rose's argument. We will consider the place of the Bible as a material object (that is, as a physical book circulating in various forms rather than as a singular, autonomous text) in the "making" of the English Reformation and Civil War.
We will focus on the religious, political, and ideological ends that such material forms served, as well as the reader's role in the construction of meaning. Theoretical questions we will consider include: What role, if any, did the technologies of print play in the religious, political, and cultural changes that took place in early modern English society? How does the form in which a book appears affect its meaning and/or the reader's interaction with the words contained within it? How do practices of reading effect historical change (if at all) and, inversely, how does historical change affect reading practices? Throughout the course, we also will consider how what we learn about the literate technologies of the past can help us understand the radical transformations taking place today because of new electronic technologies of the word such as wikis, hypertext, online archives, and multimedia web content.

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Anime and the Globalization of Culture

Andrew McKevitt (CHAT Graduate Teaching Fellow)

This interdisciplinary course will use the global phenomenon of Japanese animation, or anime, to explore the origins and processes of cultural globalization since the 1970s.  The course will begin by examining contemporary globalization from a historical perspective, focusing on its roots in post-World War II international political and economic transformations.  After surveying a variety of theoretical and empirical frameworks for understanding cultural globalization, students will examine the history of anime in Japan by viewing several representative anime texts.  The course will culminate in an exploration of the ways that anime and globalization have transformed local and national cultures in the United States.

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Nietzsche and Foucault: Crossing Boundaries

H390: Honors Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies
Saul Tobias (CHAT Humanities Fellow)

Are boundaries (for example, between the rational and the irrational, the normal and the abnormal, the moral and the immoral) necessary structures which order our experience of the world? Or are boundaries obstacles to political change, intellectual discovery, and artistic expression? Does the boundary between the humanities and social sciences (think Anderson and Gladfelter) reflect a natural division of knowledge, or is this a divide we should try to overcome in our efforts to understand the world and, hopefully, change it?  

In this course, we will examine the relation between boundaries as necessary intellectual structures and boundaries as mechanisms of social and political control. Our starting point will be the provocative ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984), two thinkers whose work ranged across philosophy, literature, history, religion, and the social sciences. Topics to be discussed include the relation between knowledge and power; morality and social control; and the connection between thought, creativity and political resistance.  

This class will take the form of an intensive, interdisciplinary seminar where both humanistic and social-scientific perspectives will be welcomed. The course will include careful study of selections from Nietzsche and Foucault’s most challenging books and essays (including On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, Discipline and Punish, and History of Sexuality); active and intensive discussion; and the use, wherever possible, of relevant film, literature, art, scientific writing, and contemporary journalism. 

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2006-07

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The American Athlete: The Politics of Identity and Difference

Joan Grassbaugh Forry (CHAT Graduate Teaching Fellow)

This interdisciplinary course examines the historical, philosophical, and socio-political dimensions of the cultural institution of American sport. This course addresses issues of identity and difference, paying particular attention to race, class, gender, and sexuality as they operate in sport. Through a critical evaluation of values and ethics in American sport, this course also addresses sport’s relationship to social change in American culture. The purpose of this course is to enable students to critically consider the ways in which organized sport affects life in the United States. This course is an upper-level humanities course and will be taught through the Department of Philosophy, and cross-listed with Sociology and American Studies.

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A History of Readers and Reading

Katherine Malone (CHAT Graduate Teaching Fellow)

Why do we read books?  What do books do to us?  What do we do to books?  How does a book’s meaning change with the reader’s location in history and society?  What is “high literature” and why does it usually exclude popular reading?  Are internet texts still books?  Why are some books, and sometimes reading itself, banned?  Intended to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of book history, this course will focus on reading as an activity with personal, political, and ideological consequences.  As we explore the different ways of studying readers and reading, we will focus particularly on their relation to religion, gender, social class, and technology.  To what extent do these shape our reading practices?  Or do our reading practices shape, sustain, and even undermine these institutions? 

We will investigate the power (and danger) attributed to literacy in a variety of cultures and eras by reading texts such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader 1837-1914, Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, a current New York Times bestseller (TBA), and essays by Jonathan Franzen and others.  Since the history of a book depends not only on how we read it, but also on how it has been read, students will conduct library research to learn how books were received by real readers in different places and times.  This is a seminar-style course and will require intensive reading and active discussion.  Students will present their work and take turns leading class discussion.  In addition to the research-based final paper, students will write weekly response papers and several short essays.

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2005-06

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American Sacred Space: Contentions and Constructions

Matt Hunter (Graduate Teaching Fellow)

Americans have great imagination for the material world. We imagine our destiny in terms of places we haven’t been, and construct the memories of places we have been. We build monuments to our heroes, our achievements and our tragedies. We worship. Far from being stagnant symbols of various monolithic faiths, sacred spaces are places of dynamic tension, conflict and divergent interpretation for Americans and others. This dynamism makes American sacred space a fascinating topic for academic study. Conflicting histories, aesthetic sensibilities, loyalties and values all manifest themselves spatially. Frequently, spaces are designated “sacred” and more commonly they are simply treated with the sort of decorum that is reserved for the things we explicitly call “sacred.” Sometimes sacred space is only revealed when Americans sense that “desecration” has occurred. Sacred spaces may be, but are not always, overtly “religious.” Landscapes and cityscapes, parks, sports stadiums, mural sites, museums, concerts, court-rooms, eating establishments, areas of a home, political centers and many other kinds of places and spaces can be sacred for particular groups of Americans. Americans are a people driven to sacralize spaces and places through a variety of strategies and for a variety of reasons. In constructing sacred spaces or sacralizing “ordinary” spaces Americans may be telling others who they are, were, or think they should be. Acts of desecrating and sacralizing in the material world BOTH reveal the power and significance of spaces and places in the American imagination.

What to expect: In this course we will examine religious, national and other-traditional* sacred spaces. Students will especially consider the sacred spaces in their own locality of Philadelphia. We will look at different disciplinary approaches to the concept of sacred space including geography, sociology and art history. We will also ask: what is meant by “sacred,” “space” and what makes a sacred space particularly “American” besides its location on American soil? We will also inquire into how the sacred is produced, recognized and maintained or and how its power is accepted or resisted in the spaces that Americans recognize or designate as “sacred?” This course will demand analytical reading skills, application of sacred space theory to new spaces, development of interviewing skills, writing and close observation on fieldtrips/site visits. While it will be impossible to “cover” even most of the possible forms of sacred space this semester, I hope this will be a beginning for you and that you will take advantage of opportunities within the course to look at sacred spaces that especially interest you.

*An awkward term. All Sacred Space belongs to a “tradition” of some kind. We could also argue that national sacred space is “religious.” Categories are a schema whose usefulness we may judge later.

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Problems in Aesthetics: Pragmatist Aesthetics & Asian Religions

Scott Stroud (Graduate Teaching Fellow)
Philosophy 233; Asian Studies 303

Aesthetics and religion have often been separated in scholarly examination. The American pragmatist tradition, however, has frequently linked the two areas and drawn upon the aesthetic elements in religious experience as well as the religious quality of moving aesthetic activities. This course will explore this disciplinary nexus between aesthetics and religion by using the guiding paradigm of pragmatist aesthetics as explored by traditional and contemporary pragmatists. Of particular interest will be pragmatism’s affinities with and relation to Asian religious traditions such as Hinduism, Zen/Ch’an Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. The course begins with some background on the study of aesthetics, as well as on some major themes in Asian religious/philosophical traditions.

We start our discussion of pragmatist aesthetics and its connection with Asian religions with John Dewey’s Art as Experience, as it serves as the first extended pragmatist discussion of art. After confronting Dewey’s thought on its own terms, we will examine two recent appropriations of Dewey’s thought in aesthetics and how they see pragmatism connecting to some significant themes in Asian religious traditions. First, we will read Crispin Sartwell’s The Art of Living, and see how he builds a theory of art from Dewey as well as from multicultural sources. The course will conclude with the students completing the dialectal circle by asking the simple but important question—what can pragmatist aesthetics learn from their own experience of religion and/or popular art? To truly be a pragmatist theory, pragmatist aesthetics must be open to insights from the data of art and experience. To assist in this experiential aspect to this course, we will watch the critically acclaimed film, The Thin Red Line, and discuss what it can tell us about general issues of theory and how our concrete experience (of art) can be improved.

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Imagining Open Spaces

Jonathan Skinner, Humanities Fellow

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the history, ecology, sociology, politics and aesthetics of green open space in North American cities, focusing on the case study of Philadelphia’s own Fairmount Park. The history of Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s firm, and its involvement in the development of urban parks throughout North America, as well as the contested legacy of these parks, forms a core part of this course. We will consider class and race, in relation to Olmsted’s hygienic agenda, his “Southern” landscape aesthetics (along with Jens Jensen’s “nativist” landscape movement and some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s influential ideas) and the catalytic role Olmsted’s parks would play in the mid twentieth-century civil rights movement, as documented by Austin Allen in the film “Claiming Open Spaces.” We will also look at the poetry of open spaces—the “Sunday in the Park” section of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson; the on-foot, projective geographies of Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems; Ian Hamilton Finlay’s polemical poetry garden, Little Sparta —and at the interventions of contemporary artists and composers: Robert Smithson’s land art, Cecilia Vicuña’s “precarios” or ephemeral street installations; Hildegard Westerkamp’s soundscape compositions; Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “maintenance art.” Concepts from ecology (recent thinking about microclimates, island biogeography and the issue of “invasive species”) and sociology will help ground our discussion in bioregional contexts, as we survey some of the discourse around urban landscaping: including Jane Jacobs’s writings on urbanism, Michel De Certeau’s theory of walking, the example of Peter Latz’s post-industrial Landschaftspark, utopian proposals for the footprint of the World Trade Center in NYC, and Henri Lefebvre’s thinking on space. The seminar involves discussion, lectures, field trips, a screening and a guest speaker or two, and demands active participation: students will be asked to pursue a project, involving onsite investigation, that essays a creative and/or critical intervention in spaces at once social and natural.