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TBA

Description:
In this core humanities course, students encounter exemplary texts from antiquity to the present and from multiple continents and diverse cultures. How do we make meaning from this expansive record of storytelling, inquiry, and creative expression? How can today's artist-citizens respond as active conversation partners across time and space? Specific content and thematic emphases will vary across course sections, reflecting the diverse specializations and perspectives of Division of Liberal Arts faculty. In all sections, however, students will wrestle both with texts long privileged as 'canonical' and, of equal importance, others that speak from the margins and compel us to think critically about how we assign value and importance to different voices and traditions. All sections also share one significant contemporary text (selected annually). “Critical Dialogues” students will cultivate their skills of research, writing, and verbal expression, and in doing so, situate their artistic and professional practice in specific contexts and as woven into a larger world of ideas. Prerequisite: ENG 1200 or equivalent

Description:
This course will explore how we use monsters as metaphors in literature and film to explore the relationships between the human and non-human, male and female, “normal” and “abnormal”, healthy and sick. We will apply the psychological and literary theories of Freud, Lacan, and others to give perspective on the concept of the monstrous. Prerequisite(s): ENG 1200

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In this course, we’ll consider how we live among poetry. This is not to say that “everything is poetry” or even “poetic,” but that when we live with language, we live with poems. Or at least we can. By the end of the term, someone who has done the work should have improved their understanding of poetry, encountered new poems, thought about the relationship between poetry and contemporary culture, and generated an interesting portfolio of materials.

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From our fixation on the unique odds and ends of one’s “creative process” to the enduring appeal of meta-texts that take on art about making art, the life of the artist is one of infinite curiosity. By taking a critical look at art that falls under this rubric of meta-fiction or art cinema, we will look at 20th and 21st century texts to examine the self-reflexive impulse behind art that explores how “the artist” is enmeshed with our external reality. With art as a mirror to society, this course curates a series of contemporary experimental works that examine the relationship between innovative new representational forms of storytelling and art’s larger sociopolitical meaning. This course is divided into five sections: Finding the Story: Where Art Meets Life; Seeing, Being, and The Limits of Cultural Imagination; Finding the Language: Giving Form to New Shapes; Finding The Self: Coming of Age; A Story Within a Story. Beginning with Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, this first unit considers the ways in which art presents its own “portrait” of reality. What is the relationship between the artist and one's art? How do we find the story? Where does the art begin and where does it end? To disentangle what it means to be an artist in society, we will explore how art produces social and cultural meaning. We will then analyze how art about “the self” shapes larger narratives around categories of identity through different genres and modes of expression from Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” to satire in films such as American Fiction that in turn prompt the question: Is art always critique? What are the limitations of art as a vehicle for social change? Situating these conversations within a historical frame, we will trace how postmodern texts draw on modernism’s investments and aesthetic strategies to explore themes like interiority, selfhood, and temporality. Finally, we will think about how graphic memoir, performance art, and experimental filmmaking challenge the singularity of the narrated self.

Description:
This is a broad survey of psychology. Topics to be addressed include psychology as science, nervous system, growth and development, sensory and perceptual processes, motivation, emotion, learning, social behavior, personality (normal and pathological), statistics, testing, intelligence, aptitudes, and achievement The online version of this course is currently available only during Summer School sessions.

Description:
Drugs that act on the central nervous system (CNS) are the most widely used group of pharmacologic agents. In addition, drugs are one of the most important tools for studying all aspects of CNS physiology from the mechanisms that control movement to the consolidation of memories. The field of neuropharmacology requires understanding of disease mechanisms as well as the effects of drugs and other compounds on neuronal function. This course will focus on the pharmacodynamics (the actions of the drug on the body) and pharmacokinetics (the actions of the body on the drug) of various drugs in the central nervous system and the communication of this subject to a non-science audience.