Fall 2011 Course Section Descriptions

Listed alphabetically by last name of instructor.

Please note: all sections of fall E&D read a set of common works in addition to the individual texts assigned by each instructor.

Common Works
Holy Bible. Genesis, Exodus 1-24 and The Gospel According to Matthew
Euripides. The Bacchae
Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents
Plato. Five Dialogues

Section Descriptions

Kim Cameron-Dominguez
M.A., Cultural Anthropology

Core 106-30  SECTION IS CLOSED
Core 106-08  SECTION IS CLOSED

Identity, Orgins, and Meaning
This semester, we will focus on two overlapping concepts: identity and origins.  We will all bypass the notion that either is natural, pre-determined, or easily visible.  Instead, we will explore identity and origins as part of very complex social relations with historical, philosophical, and cultural meaning. With the aid of our course texts, we will ask how identity is constitutive of encounters as intimate as family and community, or the clash between nations and civilizations.  Origins will be important in its guise as place, but we also will investigate it as a set of narratives that help us to make sense of changing experiences and moments of self-evaluation. Ultimately, this section will be an exploration of “us—at once local and global, products and makers of history, and always involved in processes of formation.
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Becko Copenhaver
 Ph.D., Philosophy

 Core 106-09  SECTION IS CLOSED 

Wisdom & Folly
Consider the following question: why didn’t you go to Engineering (Business, Nursing…) school instead of Lewis & Clark College?  In this section, we explore and develop one of the fundamental tenets of liberal arts education: the claim that successful human life does not require just expertise; it requires wisdom.  At the center of the liberal arts is the conviction that a broad and deep education makes a certain kind of good life possible – one that is embedded in relations that provide life with meaning: relations to the past, the world, and to other persons.  On this view, education is an antidote to the notion that each person creates his own reality, his own truth, his own value.  One must exercise individual and autonomous judgment, but such judgment does not mean simply believing whatever one feels like believing, rejecting all authority—“going it alone.”  Those who propose to exercise liberty in such ways will almost certainly fail to achieve anything valuable in their ignorant lives, and may act so foolishly as to destroy any chance they might have had to flourish, in the only life they will ever have to live. So what follies control us, and how can we be free of them?  What would life look like if we could really become wise, instead of merely developing our expertise?
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Eddie Cushman
Ph.D., Philosophy

Core 106-10   SECTION IS CLOSED 

Somewhere Between the Beasts and the Gods
This course is a collaborative inquiry into some of the deepest questions about the human condition, informed by texts that have profoundly shaped our understanding of what it means to be human. One promising strategy for better understanding our humanity involves systematic exploration of liminal cases—anthropomorphic gods; humans who aspire to divinity, or who have been made in the image of God; creatures, beasts, and monsters who are in respects recognizably human, or who long to embody our humanity; humans and divinities dominated by their darker, bestial sides; and humans who have been transmuted into monstrous forms, where the status of their humanity remains tenuous and troubling. Over the course of the semester, we will explore the significance of such liminal cases. We will investigate the following questions, among many others: What is wisdom? What is virtue? What is knowledge? What is skill? How can these attainments be reconciled with our animal natures? Can we acknowledge the darker reaches of our instinctual side without being destroyed by it? Are certain types of knowledge, including deep forms of self-knowledge, forever closed to us? If so, why? How are the identities of individuals and groups defined by conditions of exile, hardship, or oppression? What is martyrdom? How should we conceive of God? What can we learn from the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth? What are the appropriate roles of reason and faith in an autonomous life? Is curiosity a vice?
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Ralph Drayton
 Ph.D., History of Science

 Core 106-02  SECTION IS CLOSED
 Core 106-11  SECTION IS CLOSED

Being in the World
In addition to the shared works (Euripides’ The Bacchae, dialogues by Plato, portions of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents), we will examine a variety of works of drama, philosophy, and narrative fiction, including Shakespeare’s King Lear, Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Kafka’s The Trial.  Each of these works, emerging out of very different contexts, in its own way grapples with questions at the heart of the human condition:  What are the origins of human suffering?  Can knowledge of the self and the nature of things — if such knowledge is even possible — lead to happiness?  Or is this view fundamentally at odds with the way we experience life, seemingly buffeted by forces beyond our rational control that demand to be acknowledged?  In other words, is there a path to living the “good life”?  If so, what might such a life look like?  Through critical analysis and lively conversation, we can together learn how these authors confronted the problem of “being in the world,” and perhaps begin to seek solutions for ourselves.
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Kristin Fujie
Ph.D., English

Core 106-28  SECTION IS CLOSED

Traversing Boundaries
This course is all about boundaries and their traversal.  To “traverse” means to cross over, but it also means to move back and forth, to cross and recross.  By zigzagging, so to speak, across a boundary, we come to regard it—that is, to pay attention to its contours and functions—only by dis regarding it, passing freely between the territories that the boundary aims to divide.  We will traverse boundaries of all kinds this semester.  For starters, we will cross and recross the lines between psychology, religion, philosophy, and literature.  The readings for this course will not only allow but actively require us to do so, for much like the “monster” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, many of the texts are hybrid creatures that challenge the very frameworks through which we make sense of our worlds and of ourselves.  By urging us across those boundaries that seem the most absolute and indispensable, they compel us to consider both the possibilities and the limitations, the expansiveness and the boundedness, of human knowledge, belief, imagination, and compassion.  What makes us human?  Are we born that way or must we become that way?  Who counts as human?  If our humanity is not a given, then what do we take on in order to become human?  What do we give up?  What does our humanity enable us to remember, believe, and embrace?  What does it require us to forget, discredit, and disavow?
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David Galaty
 Ph.D., History of Science

 Core 106-06  SECTION IS CLOSED
 Core 106-12  SECTION IS CLOSED

Human Understanding; Divine Passion; Eternal Law?
Humans have long yearned to understand two unknowable realms: the underlying structure of the physical universe and the nature of the divine.  We seek to know the laws of God and nature.  How should we live our lives?  What happens when we die? Of what are we made?  What does it mean to be human?  How does the universe work?  What does it mean to understand something?  With the narrator of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, we will study some of the voices from the past that still reverberate today as we ask such questions. We will read about the passion of God: God’s wrath and God’s love. We will inquire into the nature of divine law — from the Ten Commandments to the Law of Gravity. And as we explore, we will discover more about what it might mean for a human being to understand something. ——————————

Susan Glosser
 Ph.D., Chinese History

 Core 106-13  SECTION IS CLOSED 

“Knowledge, Love, and Obligation”
In this iteration of E&D we will read plays, autobiographies, novels, essays, poems, and histories to explore how knowledge, love, and obligation have shaped human perceptions of what we might do, what we want to do, and what we believe we are bound to do. Our readings will range over two millennia — from Oedipus Rex to the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and beyond. I’ve chosen our readings for their artistic, historical, and intellectual depth and their engagement with at least two of our three themes. We will try to understand each of the readings on its own terms and then explore the ways in which the authors’ and characters’ views of the
world compare to one another and to ours. It is my hope that in the course of the semester we will gain a deeper appreciation for the demands and choices that shape our lives. The class is reading and writing intensive and I expect students to make a serious investment of time and to have a deep commitment to intellectual engagement.
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John Holzwarth
 Ph.D., Political Science

Core 106-03   SECTION IS CLOSED
 Core 106-14   SECTION IS CLOSED

Reason and Wildness
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.                                                                                                                         – Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

Philosophers from across the ages have equated human freedom with the cultivation of reason.  Only through the use of our rational faculties, they argue, can we guard ourselves from the manipulations of others and the depravity of our own worst instincts.  On this view, the life of reason is the happiest of lives.  But could this insistence on reason itself be a form of manipulation? Does obedience to reason really makes us happier, or just more predictable and socially manageable, all the while forcing us to live at odds with our true natures?  Could living more wildly make us happier, and if so, how much wildness can the world withstand?

Throughout the semester, we will consider these and related questions through a series of works that explore the ongoing tension between order and transgression.  We will begin with Socrates, who spent much of his life subjecting others to rigorous (and often unwelcome) scrutiny in the belief that there was no better way to help them be happy.  From here, we will consider a range of responses, some in defense of the instincts, some recognizing the dangers of over-indulging, and some that suggest, tragically, that the conflict cannot be resolved.
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Curtis Johnson
 Ph.D., Political Science

 Core 106-05  SECTION IS CLOSED
 Core 106-15  SECTION IS CLOSED

Wisdom and Folly
In this section, we explore and develop one of the fundamental tenets of liberal arts education: the claim that successful human life does not require  just  expertise; it requires wisdom. According to Immanuel Kant, in “What Is Enlightenment?” we can never escape from effective enslavement by others who would use and manipulate us unless and until we learn to exercise individual and autonomous judgment. But such judgment  does not mean simply believing whatever one feels like believing, rejecting all authority, and “going it alone.” Those who propose to exercise liberty in such ways will almost certainly fail to achieve anything valuable in their ignorant lives (no matter how prodigious their technical expertise in some area), and may act so foolishly as actually to destroy any chance they might have had to flourish, in the only life they will ever have to live. So what follies control us, and how can we be free of them? And what would life look like if we could really become wise, instead of merely developing our expertise?
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Loretta Johnson
 Ph.D., English

Core 106-04  SECTION IS CLOSED
Core 106-16  SECTION IS CLOSED 

Ourland
Who owns the land? What is humanity’s role in inhabiting it? How has the land been perceived throughout history and what will its identity be in the future? In OURLAND we practice deep exploration of the E&D Common Works by learning about ideas and cultures that shaped these texts and in turn are shaped by them. OURLAND explores a world of ideas about gods, earth, flora, and fauna. We enter portals to other perspectives on who or what made the earth, what our role on it is, and what ways cultures have defined it. For example, in addition to analyzing “Creation” in Genesis, we read about “The Big Bang” and the Maya Popol Vuh. Similarly the Hebrew Exodus leads us to the African Diaspora in Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography of a Slave. OURLAND seeks to broaden the definition of “OUR” and “ownership” by including readings from the Yi Ching, the Koran, Locke, Darwin, Thoreau, Emerson, and Todd Downing’s The Mexican Earth. We will discuss and perhaps reconstruct dichotomies, e.g.  mind/body, reason/emotion, male/female, human/nonhuman, and yours/mine. Foremost, however, we concentrate on sharpening our own skills of analysis, critical study, and communication so that we are better able to develop our own ideas and do our own good work.
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Todd Lochner
 Ph.D., Political Science

 Core 106-17  SECTION IS CLOSED 

Conceptions of Justice: God, the State, the Deviance
This section examines the concept of justice and its relationship to human affairs.  Questions to be addressed include:  Does justice flow from divine providence?  The state?  Reason?  What is the relationship between society and justice?  How do we balance the desire for justice with other values such as love or compassion—or are the latter an intrinsic element of the former?  Is justice as a concept fixed, or does it change depending on time and culture?  In order to explore these questions, we will examine readings from the fields of literature, philosophy, and religion.   ——————————

Michael Mirabile
 Ph.D., Comparative Literature

 Core 106-01  SECTION IS CLOSED
 Core 106-18  SECTION IS CLOSED 

Crimes and Punishments
In this section we will examine key texts in the Western tradition, placing special emphasis on questions of law and criminality; on normative values and transgressive forces in society.  Throughout the semester we will consider the ethical, social, and legal implications of specific acts.  Through assigned readings, class discussion, and papers, we will develop close reading, writing, and critical thinking skills.  As we consider crimes and punishments as well as historical and fictional trials (in the writings of Plato, Sophocles, Franz Kafka, and other authors), we will inquire into the means by which we define justice.  How do we respond to the outcomes of these trials?  Do definitions of justice have a universal foundation?  Or do they change significantly over time?  The course materials will also address why and how we read.  Again, does the act of reading, interpreting a given text, make objective or subjective claims?  How do we evaluate truth claims?  This point of focus will draw on traditions of Biblical interpretation, debates over the meanings of works of literature, and various relatively new modes of reading, including those associated with Romanticism (e.g., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), psychoanalysis (e.g., Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents), and modernism (e.g., Kafka’s The Trial).  
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Susanna Morrill
 Ph.D., History of Religions

 Core 106-19  SECTION IS CLOSED

The Nature of Humans and the Divine
The premise for this section is that the way a person or community understands a divine or ultimate reality profoundly shapes how that person or community sees and acts in the world. To comprehend an individual or cultural worldview, we need to explore this understanding. In this section we will focus on three clusters of worldviews/communities that have in some way contributed to modern U.S. culture: ancient Greek culture, the Reformed Protestant tradition, and Enlightenment/Natural Rights viewpoints. We will examine some important authors in these traditions and ask the questions: How do these authors understand the divine? How do these views affect their understanding of human nature? How do these views affect their understanding of the ideal community? Justice? Truth? This will not be an exhaustive history of ideas, rather we will sample some well-known, complicated literary works from a variety of genres written by people both inside and outside of the dominant elites of their cultures and eras. I hope that this will shed some historical light on the varieties of religious, political, and social discourses in modern U.S. culture. But, just as importantly, along the way, we will build our critical reading and thinking skills. We will also spend a substantial amount of time working on our writing skills.
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Kate Muth
Ph.D., English and American Literature

Core 106-33 SECTION IS CLOSED
Core 106-35  SECTION IS CLOSED

Law and Democracy
The word “democracy”—from the Greek demos, meaning “the common” or “the people,” and kratos, meaning “rule, sway, or authority” (OED)—carries within it an uneasy collision of ideas. On one hand, “rule by the common people” implies freedom from divine or monarchal law. On the other hand, “authority or rule” in itself implies some locus of power, some voice of the law. How might we reconcile the egalitarian ideals of democratic societies with the moral/ethical demands of law? Through readings from literature, philosophy, and political theory, we will examine the vexed intersections of law and populous, authority and dissent, social convention and individual rights, asking how ancient and modern thinkers have conceived the boundaries and imperatives of community. Why, for example, do calls for democracy or egalitarianism so frequently include injunctions to disobedience? What is the function of the divine in secular life? And how is divine law challenged or upheld in various social arrangements? How do kinship relations come to figure broader social roles and responsibilities? And how might we expand the realm of responsibility beyond the human? We will read selections from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Karl Marx, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, and Toni Morrison.
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Maureen Reed
Ph.D., American Studies

 Core 106-29  SECTION IS CLOSED
 Core 106-20  SECTION IS CLOSED

The Ties that Bind
What pulls humans together, and how do individuals gain their identities through their relationships to others?  We will read to better understand the self, not as an isolated concept, but as one formed in dialogue with others.  In Part One, we will look at historical texts, such as Genesis and Exodus, Euripedes’s The Bacchae, Plato’s dialogues, and The Gospel According to Matthew, in order to see the differing ways in which the Western tradition has defined relationships between individuals and communities.  In Part Two, we will ask these questions of more recent texts, such as Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical narrative about escaping slavery, Sigmund Freud’s psychological treatise Civilization and Its Discontents, Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Carson McCullers’s philosophical novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s multicultural memoir The Woman Warrior.  Understanding these texts means asking questions about historical context, authors’ motives, textual genre, religious traditions, and gender and ethnic identities.  But one of our most important questions, in the words of a Katha Pollitt essay we will study together, will concern “Why We Read.”  What can we learn about ourselves and our communities by reading, discussing, and writing about how others have analyzed or imagined these relationships?  Finally, do the ties that bind us together restrict us, or in fact empower us to be ourselves?
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Marianna Ritchey
Ph.D., Musicology

Core 106-27 SECTION IS CLOSED

Traversing Boundaries
This course is all about boundaries and their traversal.  To “traverse” means to cross over, but it also means to move back and forth, to cross and recross.  By zigzagging, so to speak, across a boundary, we come to regard it—that is, to pay attention to its contours and functions—only by dis regarding it, passing freely between the territories that the boundary aims to divide.  We will traverse boundaries of all kinds this semester.  For starters, we will cross and recross the lines between psychology, religion, philosophy, art, music, and literature.  The readings for this course will not only allow but actively require us to do so, for much like the “monster” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, many of the texts are hybrid creatures that challenge the very frameworks through which we make sense of our worlds and of ourselves.  By urging us across those boundaries that seem the most absolute and indispensable, they compel us to consider both the possibilities and the limitations, the expansiveness and the boundedness, of human knowledge, belief, imagination, and compassion.  What makes us human?  Are we born that way or must we become that way?  Who counts as human?  If our humanity is not a given, then what do we take on in order to become human?  What do we give up?  What does our humanity enable us to remember, believe, and embrace?  What does it require us to forget, discredit, and disavow?
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Chris Roberts
 Ph.D., Religious Studies

Core 106-31 SECTION IS CLOSED
Core 106-07 SECTION IS CLOSED

Family, Religion and the Rhetoric of Crisis
As students entering an institution of higher learning, for many of you this is the first time that the family is no longer the primary acculturating force experienced on a daily basis. Since this is likely to broaden your horizons, many have come to view this transition as a crisis. That is, for many Americans, first-year college students are at the epicenter of an ongoing, intergenerational culture war, the battlegrounds of which include topics like the status of religious traditions and the legitimate roles played by families and institutions in the reproduction of society. This perceived fragility of “tradition” in the face of a corrosive “modernity” feeds fears that the “traditional family” might succumb to antagonistic cultural, economic and demographic factors. Given that notions of family, religion, tradition and modernity are highly contested and consequential terms, this course will approach the E&D common texts with the goal of discovering some of the historical forces that have shaped the changing nature and function of human families. We will examine the many ways that scribes, artists and critics have narrated, dramatized, symbolized and theorized the family as a complex constellation of tensions between multiple generations. Moreover, we will complicate culturally limited and psychologically simplistic notions of the family by focusing on social interactions like exchange, gift and sacrifice that function within it. From this perspective, why do so many cultural artifacts depict family relationships in terms of exchange, gift and sacrifice, and what does this tell us about the shift from childhood to adulthood, from a state of dependence to one of autonomy, or the transition from one generation to the next? Theoretical readings will include works from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and literary readings will include Sophocles, Kafka and O’Connor.
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Thomas Schestag
Ph.D., Comparative Literature

 Core 106-32    SECTION IS CLOSED
 Core 106-34    SECTION IS CLOSED 

Life-Friendship-Death
This section is about two key notions that condense the essence of the human condition: language and death. Since Greek and Roman antiquity, these notions have been considered either in contrast to one another or as one and the same. They are what distinguish human beings from all other living beings, since human beings are determined both by language and their ability to reflect upon their own mortality. But in between language and death there lies the notion of friendship, which is no less important for questioning the human condition. Designated by the Greek term philia – a term still vivid in the words philosophy (being friends with wisdom) and philology (being friends with language) –, friendship, and its opposite enmity, dominates not only all ethical and political relations among human beings, but also the relation of each human to him- or herself. It is only because I am or becoming friends with myself that I can be or become friends with others. But what exactly is a friend? How are friends and foes different from one other? Can I befriend my enemies? How would that peculiar friendship change the opposition between enmity and friendship? And what is the relationship between friendship, language, and death? Through close readings and intense discussion of key political, philosophical, religious, and literary texts in the Western tradition, we will explore such questions and think about some of their far reaching implications for a deeper understanding of what is to be human.
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Stepan Simek
 Ph.D., Theatre

 Core 106-21    SECTION IS CLOSED 

Creation Myths
Humanity exists, but an individual, a society, a culture, and a civilization “creates itself.” The texts that we are reading are, to a larger or lesser degree, self-conscious attempts to create oneself, one’s society, civilization, and culture by means of myths, stories, self-examinations, etc.
The section is divided into four distinct parts. Part One, “Where the @#!* Do We Come From” explores two “stories” of the origin of a society and the individual. Part two, “Me and the Higher Power (whatever “power” it may be)” looks at several possible ways in which the newly “invented” individual accommodates him or herself in an equally newly “invented” society. Part three, “What the @#!* Do We Know” examines several texts that try to position the individual and the society in relationship with the unknown and unknowable God, and at the same time tries to reconcile possibility of knowledge with the existence of the unknowable. And finally, Part Four “The Monster Within and Without” looks at the “monsters” that may or may not turn against us as we strive to know more about ourselves, about the world that surrounds us, and as we try to learn about the unknowable, and to create new myths of our existence.
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Heather Smith
Ph.D., Political Science

Core 106-23   SECTION IS CLOSED 

Love, Passion, and Social Conventions
Lao Tzu wrote “to love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage.” And yet the pursuit of love can be a thorny, treacherous endeavor. Societal pressures and rejection can subvert our most valiant attempts for achieving “happily ever after.” In this section we will examine the historical and cultural treatment of love and social relationships. We will begin with a reading of Genesis as a foundation for understanding the social construction of relationships in the Western tradition and examine the role of love in ancient Greek philosophy in Plato’s Symposium. In the second half of the section will read a series of works that describe relationships that challenge the social conventions of their respective eras including Emily Dickinson’s poetry in Open Me Carefully, Mary Shelley’s novella Matilda, and Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. The course will focus on understanding how we relate to each other, how we love and whether there are common social conventions across time and space that dictate the proper way to live and love. ——————————

Joel Sweek
Ph.D., Religious Studies

Core 106-22  SECTION IS CLOSED

Exuberance or Renunciation
“Be fruitful and multiply,” directs the creator of Genesis 1, but Adam’s master in Genesis 2 doubly encumbers his creature with servitude, and Plato’s notorious teacher recommends seeking the soul’s emancipation from its enslaving body. The question presses whether to embrace or renounce the world as the obligatory ground of flourishing, a question often neglected, nevertheless embedded in foundational texts. As a point of departure for this section of Exploration and Discovery, we inquire of each text whether — and why — it recommends exuberance or renunciation, celebration or denial, asking fundamental questions deeply implicit in this continuing argument between embrace and rejection. What then is love (erôs)? Can one love mankind, or only people? Whence the opposing drives to associate or detach? What difference does difference make in a world that relentlessly “others” each of us? The readings include Genesis, Exodus, and Amos (from the Hebrew Bible); Sappho’s lyric fragments; Euripides’ Bacchae; Plato’s Socratic dialogues; Virgil’s Aeneid; Paul’s Letter to the Galatians; the Gospel According to Matthew; the Quran; and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
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Pauls Toutonghi
Ph.D., English

Core 106-24  SECTION IS CLOSED

The Time and The Place
What is a liberal arts education? The liberal arts tradition invites us to reflect critically on our own lives. This is what Paul Ricoeur termed: “Self-understanding by means of the long detour of interpretation.” 

In his 2005 commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace put it a slightly different way, saying that this was what he hoped the graduates would get from a liberal arts education—the ability to “…be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.”

In our section of Exploration & Discovery, we will examine works—in religion, in literature, in philosophy—that are situated between worlds. We will pay particular attention to the ways these works express and navigate encounters between the close and distant, the familiar and the foreign, the new and the old. We will read texts that are separated by time and space—but also by intellectual tradition, by cultural difference, and by political antagonism.
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Ben Westervelt
Ph.D., European History

Core 106-25  SECTION IS CLOSED

Narratives of Human Being
An idiosyncratic collection of classic texts, this section of “Exploration and Discovery” will explore some efforts to characterize what it means to be human.   We will look at some of the formative (and often competing) pressures that narrators have identified, such as reason, emotion, passion and duty, free will and grace, fate, autonomy, and destiny.  The first section, “Identity and Experience,” tracks these themes as they develop and are adapted in “tradition trajectories” from the Hebrew Bible through Dante’s Divine Comedy.  The texts in the second section, “Identity and Experiment,” will illuminate how these traditions fare when our authors, from Descartes to Freud, find a new and dominant place for reason, subordinating or replacing both the authority of antiquity and religion.  We will end with some reflections about the humanities, the liberal arts, science and your education.
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Kristi Williams
Ph.D., English

Core 106-26   SECTION IS CLOSED 

Creating a Self
The general focus of this section of Exploration & Discovery will be on the universal attempt to create a “self”  in the context of the “metanarratives,” or master narratives, reflected in the texts we will read.   Metanarrative has been defined in a variety of ways, most simply perhaps, as “a set of beliefs applied universally that is unquestioned by the individual and/or group holding those beliefs”. Our exploration of these narratives will lead us to considerations of the One and the Other and of the power of “authority” and of the individual in the construction of a given “reality.”
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