Honors Program Advanced Electives
Fall, 2009

Freshmen are not permitted to enroll in Advanced Electives
without permission from the Honors Director

ART 359Advanced Elective Special Topic: Eternal Images: Art and Magic in Ancient Egypt
Professor Monroe
Using a study of Ancient Egyptian art as our impetus, students will learn that images from the ancient world have a special significance and hold within them the key to understanding the cultural beliefs of people from long ago. Students will read and consider stories and myths from Egypt, then apply these to the images in order to more fully interpret them. Egyptian symbolism will be taught as well so that students will have the ability to “read” and understand the general meaning of works, even of sculpture and painting that they might be seeing for the first time. It will be emphasized that art was more than mere communication to the Ancient Egyptians, being a vital ingredient everything from religious rituals to political propaganda.

CIN 359 Advanced Elective Special Topic: The History of Music in Film
Professor Moratto
This course focuses on the development of the use of music in film from its earliest antecedents to its widespread use in film and various media today. Initially Hollywood embraced the commercial rewards of making movies featuring teen musical idols. Rock music was then adopted by a new generation of baby boomers which labeled the music as being “ours” as opposed to older generations. Young serious filmmakers in the late 60’s incorporated rock musical compositions intro their films, making music an integral part of the filmmaking process itself.

CMA 359 Advanced Elective Special Topic: The First Amendment in the 21st Century
Professor Levin
This course will examine cutting edge issues involving the First Amendment — freedom of speech, press, religion, and the right to assemble in today’s world, where many argue the First Amendment is frequently under attack. Questions such as the following will be explored: Does freedom of speech mean we have the right to burn our flag, to burn the cross as an expression of racial bigotry and hatred, to espouse the violent overthrow of the government? When may speech be limited? Does a newspaper editor have the right to refer to a reader as an “idiot”? Does the clause referring to the right to assemble prohibit the police from investigating a suspect’s membership in various organizations? Students will analyze and debate the shifting and ever-evolving nature of First Amendment law.

ENG 359 001 Advanced Elective Special Topic: Faulkner and Southern Tradition
Professor Lutz
The work of William Faulkner is characterized by an intense engagement with the Western philosophical tradition. His exploration of social conflicts arising from problems relating to class, race, and gender, as well as problems of epistemology relating to language, run parallel with, and sometimes directly engage, specific philosophical schools of thought such as existentialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, Platonism, transcendentalism, and feminism. At the same time, many of these schools of thought have had a corresponding interest in the work of William Faulkner. Through an examination of excerpts from philosophical sources and critical essays, this course will examine Faulkner’s major works and some of his minor ones. We will explore the complex ways in which Faulkner’s great literary achievements parallel existing philosophical traditions and comment upon them, sometimes adopting their assumptions and sometimes rejecting them, but always testing their propositions by the depicting the tragic or comic lives of characters who consciously or unconsciously embody them. Some of the major issues addressed in the course will include: the legacy of slavery and the effects of racial discrimination on the South in the late nineteenth- early twentieth century, Faulkner’s representations of labor and economic exploitation, language and its relationship to the development of human consciousness, Faulkner’s engagement with materialist and idealist schools of thought, Faulkner’s representation of women and corresponding critique of patriarchal institutions, the representation of nature in Faulkner’s work and the attitudes toward industrial development that correspond to them, and Faulkner’s representations of human sexuality and emotional/psychological development.

ENG 359 002 Advanced Elective Special Topic: In Cold Blood: Understanding Horror in Art and Culture
Professor Fahy
Why do we enjoy being scared? What attracts us to the disturbing and horrifying? How can we be frightened by something that we know is false? Or, as Stephen King puts it in his nonfiction study Danse Macabre, “why are people willing to pay good money to be made extremely uncomfortable?” These types of philosophical questions have been raised since gothic fiction laid the foundation for the horror genre in eighteenth-century England. Many scholars consider Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) the starting point of horror. Along with the works of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and others, these writers established the conventions that continue to shape horror fiction, film, and television. This course will investigate the philosophical themes and underpinnings of this genre. In addition to studying several novels and films, we will also read a range of criticism that explores the impressive scope and versatility of the horror genre: philosophy, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism, queer theory, film studies, and literary and cultural studies. Some of the texts include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Patrick Süskind’s Perfume.

PHI 359 Advanced Elective Special Topic: Philosophy on Film
Professor Magee
This course approaches perennial questions of philosophy through a careful study of four exciting and thought-provoking films: The Matrix (1999), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Fight Club (1999), and Network (1977). These films raise and, in some cases, propose answers to most of the major questions of Western philosophy. We will read short selections by major philosophers in conjunction with each film. Through The Matrix we will examine questions of metaphysics and epistemology (“what is real?—“what can we know?”), and will read selections from Plato and Descartes. Crimes and Misdemeanors raises questions about ethics and the meaning of life. In conjunction with it we will read selections from Sartre and Schopenhauer. Fight Club and Network both present a radical and revolutionary critique of modern society, arguing that we are leading alienated lives of despair in the service of an increasingly dehumanizing and unsustainable system. In conjunction with these films we will read selections from Hegel and Nietzsche. Much of our class discussion will be devoted to how these films convey their ideas—through dialogue, photography, editing, lighting, scenic design, etc. Therefore this is really just as much a course on film as on philosophy.