curriculum

Instructor: Jenks

Course Content

Instructors: Merrow, Wheeler, York, Jenks

In the first two quarters of the sophomore year, students inspect the “deep past” out of which arose (and which was seriously challenged by) the project of experimental science examined in the freshman year. We begin in the Fall quarter with the classical foundations of modern Western civilization, examining the limitations attached to Greek and Roman notions of the “public citizen.” In Winter quarter, we explore the development of humanism in the universities and its relationship to knowledge production within the framework of courtly culture.

Core Texts - IV
Homer, Iliad
Plato, Symposium
Euripides, Medea
Virgil, Aeneid
Augustine, Confessions

Core Texts - V
Walter of Chatillon, The Alexandreis: A Twelfth-Century Epic
Dante, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno
Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism

Instructors: Merrow, Wheeler, York, Jenks

Instructor: Michael Flower

Instructor: Michael Flower

Instructors: Kathleen Merrow and Lawrence Wheeler

Course Content
We will study the history and development of the graphic novel in the 20th and 21st centuries by making a case study of several significant graphic novels. Our main focus will be on the relationship between form and content in each text, and the way in which each text raises larger questions about the nature and limits of representation. We will use related materials (handed out in class) in order to situate each text in its intellectual, professional, and historical contexts.

Instructor: Lawrence Wheeler

In this seminar we shall examine the morally complex act of observation ("theatron" is an ancient Greek word which means "place of observation.") By looking at the complex act of observation in different historical settings (ancient Greece, early modern England, nineteenth century Europe), we shall consider the way observation is rich in its attachment to (and representation of) its culture, period, epoch. A seminar paper/presentation will be expected.

Instructor: Lawrence Wheeler

General information

This course may be taken to meet a part of the honors college’s upper-division seminar/colloquium requirement; it is a course in the study of recent autobiography (and autobiographical writings.)

Readings for the course

There will be three main texts (Jacob’s The Statue Within, Levi-Montalcini’s In Praise of Imperfection, and Yukawa’s Tabibito [“The Traveler”]), each by a Nobel laureate in the sciences. The Jacob and Yukawa texts are available at the PSU Bookstore; Levi-Montalcini’s autobiography, along with a core critical text that will guide some of our reading (Ch. 1 of Pascal’s Design and Truth in Autobiography), will be available at Clean Copy.

Summer session only.

Instructor: Kathleen Merrow

Instructor: Katleen Merrow

Course Content