Sustainability Course Repository

If the 18th and 19th Centuries produced some optimism about humanity and its prospects, the 20th and 21st centuries, with theirunprecedented wars, ecological devastation, and global anxieties, led to grave doubts about the Westerncultural heritage. Reading some of this period's most trenchant thinkers, we will examine some of its most vexing questions. For example: What remains ofreligionandthe belief and trust in God? Is thehumanistic heritage all it is cracked up to be? Does capitalism enhance...

Read more about HONR-2030 : Crises in Contemporary Thought

This seminar examines the nature of moral responsibility and the practice of moral reasoning.Classic and contemporary authors willguidea philosophicalexamination of foundational ethical questions, such as: Are there moralprinciples thathold true in all times and places? Does the existence of moral responsibilitydepend on a religiousfoundation?Do human beings have a nature, function, or set of capacities that provide a framework for moral responsibility? Is it best to understand moral responsibil...

Read more about HONR-2040 : Ethics and Moral Philosophy

Beginning with the events surrounding the French Revolution, and concluding with the first World War, artistic and cultural production in the long nineteenth century began to engage and thematize social and political issues of rupture and revival. This course will investigate how visual and literary artists used their various media to intervene in some of the tumultuous questions of their day: the limits of reason, the effects of industrialization, the landscapes of urban expansion, the rise of ...

Read more about HONR-2120 : Revolutions and Revivals

Starting roughly with the aftermath of WWI and culminating with the post-9/11 moment, this course examines the literary and artistic responses to technological modernity, historical trauma, and the rise of global capital. We will consider how artists and writers engage crucial forces that structure our world today through a variety of techniques, practices and media. Students will encounter: aestheticfragmentation and Dadaist absurdity; the stream-of-consciousness novel and the Surrealist montag...

Read more about HONR-2130 : Representation and Culture

The second Literary Innovations seminar tells the story of innovations in literature from the revolutions of the late 18th century to the present. Just as the rise and diminishment of empires (French, British, German, American, Russian, Chinese, etc.) and World Wars I and II produced a variety of social and cultural ruptures during this period, literature also experienced seismic shifts in the revaluing and repurposing of genres, the rise of the novel as a dominant form, the rapid increase and p...

Read more about HONR-2140 : Literary Innovations 2

From the beginnings of recorded history, people have carefully wrought language, in both oral and written forms, for a variety of social purposes. Some, like the bards of Celtic Ireland, or the shamans of various indigenous peoples, or the poet laureates of our more contemporary times, served as official spokespersons for their peoples and sought to memorialize the stories, beliefs, and customs of their times. For others, like Du Fu and the Confucian poets of T'ang Dynasty China, or John Donne a...

Read more about HONR-2150 : Writers in the Public Sphere

Significant shifts in political and economic systems invite resistance in various forms, and yet many who dare to speak truth to power or express subversive points of view are silenced and/or persecuted. This course will examine various literatures that were considered subversive, dangerous, or in violation of dominant doctrines of a particular time and place. We will explore the contexts that influenced writers to engage in literary acts of resistance, and we will considerwhy and how writers su...

Read more about HONR-2160 : Literatures of Resistance

This seminar develops the essential skills of effective argumentative writing on policy or other significant social issues within the social sphere. It provides a study of the rhetoric of public debate that emphasizes writing for diverse audiences, marshaling evidence for strong persuasion, constructing logical arguments, and appealing to an audience's sympathies and reason. Consideration also will be given to the genres of public discourse and the development of a flexible prose style that can ...

Read more about HONR-2180 : Rhetoric for Public Debate

This course will explore significant and selected developments in European culture and society from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution. The approach will be one that seeks to discern the interconnections and tensions between the social, cultural, economic, scientific, technological, and political spheres that marked the transformation of Europe from the fifteenth century through the seventeenth century.

Read more about HONR-2210 : Early Modern Culture

The first part of this course will compare the revolutions in England, France and the Atlantic World in the 17th and 18th centuries order to critique theories of revolution that have long dominated the discourse about these events. With this theoretical underpinning this course will then examine case studies of revolutionary responses to industrialization, political underrepresentation and colonialism in the 19th century. This course concludes with an examination of the extent to which the Russi...

Read more about HONR-2220 : History of Revolutions