Humanities Course Descriptions
HUM 101A
Prof. Anne Rodrick: Madness, Murder, and Misbehavior: Sensation Fiction in Victorian England
“Sensation fiction” as a genre relied on evoking “sensations” in the reader, who vicariously lived through such tribulations as madness, wrongful incarceration, missing heirs, wills gone astray, and wicked relations galore. As such, the sensation novel was a forerunner of the gothic as well as of the mystery novel. But the sensation novel was also a critique of convention and social expectations, especially in its presentation of women, foreigners, and others who exercised little conventional power. And because most sensation fiction was written by women, critics were often horrified at the combination of bad behavior within the novel and the questionable moral values of the authors themselves. This humanities course will look at several sensation novels, including The Woman In White and Lady Audley's Secret, as well as the reviews and essays written about the phenomenon of the sensation novel, to examine how this apparently frivolous and very popular genre could both undermine traditional social codes and, at the same time, invite extraordinarily harsh criticism.
HUM 101AA
Prof. Charles Kay: Tough Questions/No Easy Answers
Tough questions attract the attention of both philosophers and filmmakers. The nature of moral character and its development is addressed in writings from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche and Camus. But it is also the topic of Groundhog Day, Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, and GATTACA. We will study these authors and these films to inquire about the nature of human character, and the different ways to answer some tough questions. This seminar directly addresses moral character development and questions of altruism, courage, fortitude, honesty, and human relationships.
HUM 101B
Prof. Deno Trakas: Space and Time, Love and Loss: Science Fiction Stories *(Part of a learning community; linked with Physics 104A)
Science fiction is a complex, fascinating, growing genre in part because, at its best, it combines good science and good fiction and looks at the world from two different perspectives at once. Science challenges us to be curious and observant and to make methodical investigations of our universe. Fiction challenges us to be curious and observant and to study the human condition. In this course, which will be linked to Dr. Zides’ Physics 104, we will focus on the literary: we’ll read approximately two dozen short stories by authors such as Ben Bova, Arthur C. Clarke, and Nancy Kress. We’ll also write science fiction short stories of our own. In both reading and writing, we’ll study the boundaries and techniques of the form, and we’ll discuss the issues and values therein. Although we will look at science fiction as a genre and study its boundaries and techniques, Dr. Zides and I will pick stories that are based on accurate science and raise interesting questions about humans as complex physical and spiritual beings who must constantly make decisions based on values. We will address questions of values in all our discussions.
HUM 101BB
Prof. Scott Neely: The World Needs You: The Search for Vocation
What should we do with our lives? This course examines the search for vocation. Delving into accounts of the desire to work, the call to serve, and the needs of the world, we will reflect together on what we most want to do with our lives and what challenges face our world. Stories from world religious traditions (including the lives of Jesus and the historical Buddha), modern autobiography (including An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum), and analyses of local and global challenges (including Spartanburg County’s Community Indicators project) will guide our discussion. This course poses a fundamental question facing undergraduate students—what will they do with their lives? Readings move through mythic frameworks from world religious traditions to modern autobiography to studies of challenges facing our world and our community. This approach requires students to consider a plurality of value systems and the immediacy of societal problems. A major goal of the course is to encourage students to engage their personal interest in fulfilling work with needs around them and to find vocational purpose in thinking itself. In the end, this course posits the undergraduate career as a calling in itself, unavailable to many, critical to our society, and empowered to effect that society not only as preparation for work but as work now.
HUM 101CC
Prof. Jeremy Jones: Speculative World-Building
To understand our future, we must first understand our past. In this class we will examine the patterns of human civilization and make informed speculations about the future. We will create, as a group, an imagined future Spartanburg based on our understanding of typical societal patterns. Each student will write an argument paper, descriptive text for a wiki, one piece of journalistic writing, and a short story.
HUM 101C
Prof. Carol Wilson: Family Fictions
Family... For many, this word evokes feelings of warmth, security, and love. It is a solid foundation upon which people build their lives. For others, family summons feelings of rejection, hurt, and failure, and for them, family becomes a net from which they must escape. In this seminar, we will read twentieth-century novels, plays, and short fiction which take family relationships as a principal concern. Works will include Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and August Wilson’s Fences. As we examine traditional and non-traditional families, our challenge will be to analyze ourselves as well as the characters we encounter. Exploring different conceptions of the family will lead us through a wide range of topics: for example, the relationship of the individual to the family, the expectations held by and for men and women within the family, and the role that a family's own ”fictions” play in a person's life. In all, the focus of our research, discussions, readings, and other assignments will be on our values and ideas as we draw conclusions about the characters in the literature we read.
HUM 101D
Prof. Clayton Whisnant: Utopias and Dystopias
Since Plato, a popular subject among writers and intellectuals in the West has been the human potential for creating novel kinds of communities. Originally, the goal was to conceive of new social and political organizations that would both provide for our basic needs and bring out the best in mankind. In the twentieth century, however, more and more writers have occupied themselves with nightmarish visions of society overrun by technology and tyrannical governments, which take away everything that makes life worth living. This course will compare a number of these utopian and dystopian works—Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, and Zamyatin’s We—in order to think about different understandings of what we human beings require, both physically and spiritually. In the process, students will consider different views of human nature, alternate conceptions of the relationship between society and the individual, and ultimately questions about the value of human life.By reading these different examples of utopian and dystopian literature, students will have an opportunity to explore different notions about what it means to be human, what we require as human beings to thrive and be happy, and finally what the proper relationship between the individual and society is.
HUM 101E
Prof. Karen Goodchild: The Artist and Society
Should an artist be allowed to make and display an image of the Virgin Mary using elephant dung? Or sign a porcelain urinal and call it art? Art can be a powerful mode of communication, and, across time, artists have been afforded special societal status as geniuses who distill universal truths into visual form. Yet artists have also been seen as dangerous outsiders who can encourage transgressions against societal norms through their control of potent cultural symbols. Through a close examination of artistic personalities across time, including Michelangelo Buonarroti, Vincent Van Gogh, Andrew Wyeth, and Steve Keene, the multiple and sometimes paradoxical attitudes towards artists and the art they make will be explored. Selected readings will include Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture by Michael Kammen; Selections from two 16th century biographies of Michelangelo: Ascanio Condivi and Giorgio Vasari; and Selected Letters: Vincent Van Gogh.
HUM 101F
Prof. Sally Hitchmough: Madness and Literature
John Dryden wrote:
Great wits are sure to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
In this course we will consider the interesting relationship between creativity and madness through a variety of texts. Among many others, writers include Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Guy de Maupassant and Henry James. Both the madman and the artist tend to be outside of mainstream society and therefore often offer interesting perspectives on it. We gain insights when we consider the values by which we judge art and are likewise judged by the artist, and our treatment of the mad can challenge all our values.
HUM 101G
Prof. Julie Sexeny: Narratives of Survival
Apocalypse, genocide, sexual abuse: under what circumstances might we lose a sense of self that we take for granted? What is identity without the stories we employ to constitute and understand it? And what happens to the self when human experience falls outside the capacity to narrate it? In other words, what happens when our stories fail? In this course, we will explore narratives of survival and how they put in relief the interconnectedness of self and story. We will interrogate the role of human agency, hope, and trust in the face of powerlessness, loss, and despair. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and films by De Sica, Coppola, and Lumet are just some of the texts we will consider. This course will interrogate what it means to be human—to have ethics and values—when one is confronted with profound loss. We will consider how humanity signifies for survivors of trauma who have lost all that had once defined their sense of self and community. An exploration of individual and collective identity, narrative, and representation will be central to this discussion.
HUM 101H
Prof. Mark Byrnes: Ban It: Censorship, Literature, and Film
Throughout the semester, we will explore the idea of censorship, reading literature and viewing films that either have been banned or which have been the subject of censorship attempts. In addition to discussing the targets of censorship themselves, we will also examine the goals of those seeking to censor—What are their motivations? What are the sources of the desire to ban? What social/historical/political circumstances create the conditions for censorship? When if ever is censorship a valid response? Possible readings include Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men; George Orwell, Animal Farm or 1984; Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun; Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five; J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated.
HUM 101J
Prof. Dennis Dooley: Chili Cheese 'N Grits: New South/Old South
The South has held onto its regional identity and culture longer than any other section of the United States. In addition, in this century, it has produced a remarkable body of literature which both celebrates and criticizes the Southern way of life. The tensions within that literature are reflective of the conflict between the values of the progressive, industrialized New South and the values of the traditional, agrarian Old South. But great literature not only addresses itself to the particular, but moves from the particular to the universal. It is about man: what he is; what he should be; what he must be. This seminar will examine the South as seen through the eyes of her writers in the hope that this regional examination will reveal something more universal: a vision of the Good Life. Beginning with I’ll Take My Stand, the Nashville Agrarians critique of the New South, we will move to such works as short stories by William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey’s novel Deliverance.
HUM 101K
Prof. Kim Rostan: Travel, Writing, and Ethics
Mobility is a fundamental dimension of our contemporary lives. We regularly make choices to travel—for study, vacations, commerce, mission trips, or for adventure. Travel can be extremely rewarding personally: think of the phrases we use daily to describe travel as “broadening our horizons” or “understanding other cultures.” Other types of travel, however, may differ radically as is the case for refugees and political exiles. On our journey as a class, we will explore the ethical implications of human travel from tourism to exile, starting with a couple key questions: Why do we travel? How does our travel affect others? What about the global movement of goods, animals and plants? How is geographical location and movement connected to our identity? Our course will consider travel in drama, fiction, art, film, poetry and essays from different periods of history—from the earliest Spanish explorers and Jesuit missionaries to more contemporary travel-blog writers and refugees after the Rwandan Genocide. Readings will include major literary names from all over the world: Bartholome Las Casas, Matsuo Basho, Charles Darwin, Ariel Dorfman, Elizabeth Bishop, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce Chatwin, Jan Morris, William Least-Heat Moon, Bill Bryson, Pico Iyer and Amitava Kumar.
HUM 101M
Prof. John Ware: Values and Environment
In Values and Environment, we will look at a variety of texts in which the environment is represented in ways that encourage consideration or critique of cultural values, implicit or explicit. The course opens by addressing concepts such as impact and value in scientific assessments of human effects on the environment and attempts to articulate the environment’s value (ecological, economic, utilitarian, and spiritual) to human society. After considering the obligations implied by the environment’s value, we’ll consider the critiques embedded in representations of environmental degradation and catastrophe. Readings will be drawn from writers as various as Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stegner, and Rush Limbaugh.
HUM 101N
Prof. Natalie Grinnell: Literary Images of the Child
This course will explore the images of childhood presented in literature written both for and about children. We will explore the ways in which childhood is envisioned as both innocent and corrupt, as well as the child’s assimilation (or resistance) of his or her cultural norms. Readings will include novels by Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit, Robert Cormier and Joan Aiken, as well as a selection of short stories, fairy tales and picture books. The course will explore the ways in which adults define and judge the values of their culture through their portrayals of those who adapt to or resist those values, specifically, children. Major themes will include the establishment and perpetuation of gender roles, respect for authority, and the search for autonomy.
HUM 101P
Prof. John Miles: Running and Writing
In this course we will explore the intersections between running and writing on a variety of levels. While reading and viewing works that include running, we will discuss poverty, spirituality, health care, politics, and personal achievement. Among other texts, we will examine Richard Sheehan’s Running and Being, the film Marathon Man, and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. The texts in this course often depict running and writing as ways humans contemplate complex issues. Through the reading and writing assignments students will face a variety of philosophies on life, running and writing through the texts in this course
HUM 101Q
Prof. John Lane: Into the Wild
This freshman humanities section will explore wildness through fiction, nonfiction, and a few films. We will begin by examining Into the Wild (1996) by Jon Krakauer, a bestselling non-fiction book about Christopher McCandless and his ill-fated attempt to escape civilization. We will also view Sean Penn's 2007 film adaptation of Into the Wild and explore ways that the McCandless story had to change in order to be shaped into a popular film. After establishing our baseline (What is wild and raw? What is tame, cooked, civilized?) we will continue to look at "wildness" as defined through Tom Wolfe's classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the more contemporary fiction and nonfiction of Rick Bass, the vivid stories of Sharon Doubiago, and the films Grizzly Man, The Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and Pale Male.
HUM 101R
Prof. Kim Rostan: Travel, Writing, and Ethics
Mobility is a fundamental dimension of our contemporary lives. We regularly make choices to travel—for study, vacations, commerce, mission trips, or for adventure. Travel can be extremely rewarding personally: think of the phrases we use daily to describe travel as “broadening our horizons” or “understanding other cultures.” Other types of travel, however, may differ radically as is the case for refugees and political exiles. On our journey as a class, we will explore the ethical implications of human travel from tourism to exile, starting with a couple key questions: Why do we travel? How does our travel affect others? What about the global movement of goods, animals and plants? How is geographical location and movement connected to our identity? Our course will consider travel in drama, fiction, art, film, poetry and essays from different periods of history—from the earliest Spanish explorers and Jesuit missionaries to more contemporary travel-blog writers and refugees after the Rwandan Genocide. Readings will include major literary names from all over the world: Bartholome Las Casas, Matsuo Basho, Charles Darwin, Ariel Dorfman, Elizabeth Bishop, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce Chatwin, Jan Morris, William Least-Heat Moon, Bill Bryson, Pico Iyer and Amitava Kumar.
HUM 101S
Prof. Julie Sexeny: Narratives of Survival
Apocalypse, genocide, sexual abuse: under what circumstances might we lose a sense of self that we take for granted? What is identity without the stories we employ to constitute and understand it? And what happens to the self when human experience falls outside the capacity to narrate it? In other words, what happens when our stories fail? In this course, we will explore narratives of survival and how they put in relief the interconnectedness of self and story. We will interrogate the role of human agency, hope, and trust in the face of powerlessness, loss, and despair. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and films by De Sica, Coppola, and Lumet are just some of the texts we will consider. This course will interrogate what it means to be human—to have ethics and values—when one is confronted with profound loss. We will consider how humanity signifies for survivors of trauma who have lost all that had once defined their sense of self and community. An exploration of individual and collective identity, narrative, and representation will be central to this discussion.
HUM 101T
Prof. Tim Schmitz: The College Experience
Students in this discussion-based course are all embarking on the college experience. It is a 4-year period often romanticized in television and film (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to “Jared’s Room” on Saturday Night Live to The Real Cancún). This course will use material from American popular culture to explore views of college life. Based primarily on novels and films, it will explore notions (and stereotypes) of campus institutions and characters. Through such examination, students will look at how (either typically or stereotypically) life at college is “supposed” to be. From there, the class will discuss how its students expect their own college experiences to be. Through such inquiry, the course will turn naturally to an engagement of the following questions: Is Wofford College identifiable in what the class reads and sees? Do you see yourself or your peers in such representations? Are some representations of college life more realistic than others? How can a serious analysis of such material help to prepare you for the challenges that you will face during the course of your college careers? Through it all, a number of sub-themes will appear: “town versus gown;” traditionalism versus change in the American South; the college experience and “coming of age;” the tumult of the ‘60s; the value/vacuity of college life; the effort to make real college experiences mimic the fictional; change over time. Sample texts include Philippe Labro, The Foreign Student, and Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline.
HUM 101U
Prof. Amy Sweitzer: Torture
The course will examine torture and the values which are threatened or upheld by the use of torture in a modern political context. Readings will include selections from Alfred McCoy’s A Question of Torture and Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, as well as from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. The course will pose three questions: First, what practical, personal, or ideological goals are achieved by torture? Second, what values (if any) are considered important enough to justify torture? Finally, what values are threatened by the practice of torture? (In answering this question, we will consider the effects on both the victims and the practitioners of torture.)
HUM 101V
Prof. Kari Warren: Images of America
What does it mean to be American? What is the American definition of success? Of happiness? Of beauty? In short, what defines us as Americans? And who sets those definitions? As Americans, we are constantly bombarded with pictures urging us to think a certain way about ourselves and the world around us. In this course we will examine images of America in literature, on the big and small screens, in music, in art, and in other forms of media that have become influential parts of our daily lives. In doing so, we will discuss the picture of America espoused by these forms of media and the ways this picture has changed over the course of the last century. By examining these value systems as well as the definitions of ourselves influenced by friends and family, we can reach a deeper understanding of how both internal and external forces shape our ideas of what it means to be an American. Texts may include both canonical works by Dorothy Allison, Lee Smith, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg as well as local writers John Lane and Deno Trakas; various texts from movies and television; musical texts and texts from the visual arts; and the texts of our own lives and experiences.
HUM 101W
Prof. Alan Chalmers: Listening to Prisoners: Literary and Ethical Dimensions of Incarceration
The course will include fictional and non-fictional representations of the experience of imprisonment as stimulants to ethical and critical thought, discussion, and writing. Readings will focus on prisoners of conscience and the unjustly sentenced, among others. Such figures embody or highlight more pervasive tensions between individual and state claims to authority. One aim of the course will be to explore the larger cultural and ethical implications of such distinctly individual experiences.
HUM 101X
Prof. Michael Curtis: What's Bad About Lying
We will read and discuss a full-length study of Lying as a moral or immoral act, as examined in Sissela Bok's Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. We will also read several essays by George Orwell, a reflexive moralist, including his essays on the exigencies of military life in Burma, the assumptions that govern education in English private schools, “Politics and the English Language,” and revisionist thoughts about Gandhi. Additional essays by a number of authors will be mined from VICE & VIRTUE IN EVERYDAY LIFE, edited by Christina and Fred Sommers. Students will write four short papers on ethics-related subjects, such as bullying, peer-group pressure, and the notion of "principled" lying, and can expect close attention, in their writing, to grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity of expression, and quality of moral reasoning.
HUM 101Y
Prof. Jim Neighbors: Paranoid States: Paranoia in American Literature and Culture
It’s not too much of a stretch to see the Puritans, the Cold War, and what many call “postmodernism” as examples of paranoia run amok – of “psychosis characterized by delusions of persecution or grandeur” and/or “a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward irrational suspiciousness of others” (Webster’s). The same holds true when you understand paranoia philosophically as well – as a problem of knowledge. That is, when Americans ask basic questions of what makes an American – what distinguishes an American or American culture from other people or cultures – the answers often suggest paranoid thinking. We’ll explore the psychological and philosophical notions of paranoia in American literature and culture by reading and watching exemplary texts and movies, which may include The Captivity Narrative of Mary Rowlandson, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Assata Shakur’s Assata, and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Rebel Without a Cause, The Searchers, and The Conversation.
HUM 101Z
Prof. Steve Michelman: The Greeks
This class familiarizes students with the history and culture of the ancient Greeks. Guided by H.D. F. Kitto’s classic study The Greeks, we will examine the ancient Greek alphabet, Greek geography, Greek military history, religion (mythology), literature, science, and philosophy. Readings include excerpts from Homer, Plato’s Symposium, and Aristophanes’ satirical play The Clouds. Documentary films and guest lecturers will also be featured. Students will learn to see ancient Greek culture as comprising a set of discrete values to which our culture remains indebted. These include an appreciation of physical and mental contests, courage, self-control, the valorization of youth and beauty, excellence in craft and art, and the quest to achieve objective understanding of the world.