Fall 2022 Honors Seminars

HONS 1810W-77
“Don Quixote: Revelation through Laughter”
TR 11:15 am-12:30 pm
Professor William Franke
Department of French & Italian
AXLE: Humanities & the Creative Arts (HCA)

Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote in two parts (1605, 1615) is often considered canonically to be the first modern novel. What matters is less the action (as in epic and drama) and the adventures in themselves (as in romance); more important is what it all means to the characters in the novel. The subjective experience of the protagonists moves into the foreground, and a new dimension of psychological depth opens up. Furthermore, the writing itself and the interaction between author and reader in constructing the fiction work not only in the background but become overt concerns. This metafictional aspect of the work probes the relation between imagination and reality and their complicated mutual implication. Although a fiction, the figure of Don Quixote has become a paramount historical icon, an emblem of Spain, with his statue dominating the Plaza d’España in central Madrid. No other fictional character, not even Hamlet, has achieved such an apotheosis, becoming more present and real than real historical figures. Even more universally, Don Quixote, however ridiculous, also becomes a Christic figure, a martyr submitting to unlimited self-sacrifice and humiliation for his dream and ideal. Laughter can turn the world upside down and reveal what is ordinarily hidden by objective reality, remaking the universe out of the deepest aspirations of the human heart, revealing (even if pathetically) an inalienable nobility in the human being and perhaps even some spark of divinity. Laughter becomes a privileged means of theological revelation that needs to be taken seriously as literature takes over from religion in modern secular society by assuming an instructional and even salvific function.

Don Quixote will be read in this course as one of the all-time classics of world literature that we commonly call the Great Books. We will question what makes a book such as Don Quixote great and how and why it still has vital meaning and is full of life-transforming insights for us today.

 

HONS 1810W-78
“Creativity and Play”
MW: 2:30-3:45 pm
Professor Mark Wollaeger
Department of English
AXLE: Humanities & the Creative Arts (HCA)

What can a multi-disciplinary approach tell us about the nature of creativity? Different disciplines carve up reality in different ways: are there two kinds of creativity? three? four? Imaginative literature, neuroscience, and psychology will offer different answers and will trace the phenomenon to different sources. We will explore creativity by studying, among other things, English Romantic discourse on imagination and genius, current perspectives from neuroscience, psychology, and sociology, all with an eye to developing a richer understanding of some basic questions: what is creativity? can it be taught or enhanced? how does creativity enter into what engineer James L. Adams calls conceptual blockbusting? can our course make you more creative? Our theoretical inquiry will also be brought to bear on a case study: what can the work of a particular individual, such as the multi-dimensional American artist Laurie Anderson, teach us about creativity?

 

HONS 1820W-23
“Science/Fiction”
TR 9:30-10:45 am
Professor Jay Clayton, Department of English
Professor Robert Scherrer, Department of Physics.
Department of Anthropology
AXLE: Perspectives (P)

This class will explore the relationship between science and science fiction. Drawing on classic works of scientific writing and SF, we will examine the distinctive modes of imagination and style in the two activities, as well as their social and cultural influences. What are the ground rules for introducing original ideas in each field?  How are ideas embedded and developed in a SF story in comparison with their presentation in a scientific article?  What roles do prediction and falsification play in each?  Fiction will range from the origins of the genre in H. G. Wells to the “golden age” of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and Bradbury to new wave fiction, speculative fiction, Afro-futurism, and emerging twenty-first century writers, and will include readings from exemplary works of science writing. No scientific background is required, but scientific concepts will be introduced and discussed.

 

HONS 1830W-63
“The Science of Misinformation: Why We Believe False Information”
TR 1:15-2:30 pm
Professor Lisa Fazio
Department of Psychology and Human Development
AXLE: Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS)

This course will focus on the psychological processes that affect belief in misinformation. We will focus on questions such as, How do people come to believe false information? How can we best correct false beliefs? and What policies/interventions are more or less effective in stopping the spread of misinformation? During the semester, the class will collaboratively design, run, analyze and write-up a psychological study with the goal of submitting the resulting manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal

 

HONS 1840W-40
“The Scenes of Nashville”
TR 1:15-2:30 pm
Professor Claire Sisco King
Department of Communication Studies
AXLE: US History and Culture (US)

In 2012, The New York Times declared Nashville had gone from “Music City” to an “It City” because of its growth and increased visibility in national culture. In the decade since, the city has continued to grow exponentially, leading the United States in tourism numbers even amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This course will examine the rhetorical implications of Nashville’s “It City” status, focusing particularly on its tourism cultures from the music industry to the bachelorette party industry. We will also consider the roles of race and racism in defining the city’s history and the identity of “new” Nashville. Other subjects of discussion will include gentrification, public art, and celebrity culture. The course will involve multiple excursions to engage with art, commerce, and cultures in Nashville.

 

HONS 1850W-31
“Science, Politics, and Economic Growth”
MW 1:15 – 2:30 pm
Professor Richard Haglund
Department of Physics
AXLE: Math and Natural Sciences (MNS)

In the century from 1879 to 1970, five major innovations (internal combustion engine, modern telecommunications, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, urban water and sewer networks, electric power grid) transformed American life by driving economic growth at roughly the same rate all across the population. In sharp contrast, five revolutionary technologies from the 1970s (integrated circuits, smartphones, satellite systems, lasers, biotechnology) based on previous scientific advances have yielded negative economic growth for all but the wealthiest ten per cent of Americans. There is nothing inherent in these technologies that explains this fact; instead, it evolved from the complex interactions between the science and technology communities, American political institutions and business. From this perspective we survey the linkages between scientific research, science and technology policy, and market economics in the United States, China and Germany to see how a range of outcomes from innovation can be shaped, usually by the choices of non-scientists for non-scientific reasons. Finally, we ask how different policy choices might produce a broader and more equitable distribution of the wealth derived from innovation and whether a more diverse, sophisticated work force might influence our national research agenda and the future trajectory of innovation.

 

HONS 1860W-27
“Representations of Women in Film, Images of the Nation”
TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm
Professor Andres Zamora
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
AXLE: International Cultures (INT)

One of the most outstanding features of the Spanish national cinema in the last quarter of the 20th century, basically from Francisco Franco’s death to the beginning of the new millennium, was the overwhelming abundance and importance of women’s stories, or, more precisely, stories about women written, directed, and told compulsively by men (Pedro Almodóvar, Alejandro Amenábar, Fernando Trueba, Carlos Saura, Víctor Erice, et al). This course is an exploration of the cinematographic obsession with the feminine subject, object, gender, genre, and sex. Some of the main characters in these myriad cinematic stories about women are the mother, the housewife, the girl, the lover, the angel, the monster, the hooker, the daughter, the researcher, the witch, the killer, the sister, and the porn-star. Among the intentions, functions, or consequences of all these images of the feminine, the course pays special attention to their role in the depiction of, discussions on, and proposals for national identity throughout the last years of the dictatorship, the transition to democracy, and the consolidation of the new political system in Spain. In fact, the course might work as a case study on the topic of the importance of film in national identity building, placing a special emphasis on the use of women’s images towards that end.

 

HONS 1860W-28
“Justice and Art”
TR 9:30 – 10:45 am
Professor Christina Karageorgou Bastea
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
AXLE: International Cultures (INT)

The purpose of this seminar is to explore where justice and art meet, and how one human activity shapes the other. At first, we will go to two different directions, that of ethics and that of aesthetics in order to define the principal concepts that sustain the binary of fairness and beauty. After establishing such foundation we will explore how art may act as an incentive for justice, an act of resistance in the face of injustice, a reason for the search of justice. We will study plays, paintings and sculptures, mythology, fairytales, musical pieces, graffiti, poetry, in order to establish the link that bridges the morally normative to the aesthetically apt in different societies and eras. An array of thinkers (from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt, from Plato to Franz Fanon, from Martin Luther King to Iris Marion Young), and a number of artists such as poets, playwrights, and novelists, sculptors, musicians, painters, filmmakers, graffiti creators, dancers, will offer us perspectives on how art takes issue with concrete circumstances of injustice in favor of fairness and equality.

 

HONS 1860W-29
“Passion, Fashion and Murder in the City of Lights”
TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm
Professor Robert Barsky
Department of French & Italian
AXLE: International Cultures (INT)

Paris in the Long Nineteenth Century overflowed with fictional characters created by the likes of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Émile Zola and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. These characters are so deeply ensconced into the imaginations of readers that they seem to have made the leap from fiction to reality, so that we can still imagine them showing off their fashions and their passions in contemporary Paris. In this course, we’ll read (in translation) about some of these extraordinary characters, and we’ll think about that sometimes-tenuous distinction between fiction and reality in ways that will shed light on both realms.