College Seminar I
Bryn Mawr College
Fall 2004
Questions, Intuitions, Revisions:
Telling and Re-Telling Stories About Ourselves In the World
Anne Dalke (English House, ext. 5308, adalke@brynmawr.edu)
This course was co-designed by faculty members in English and Biology to
explore the variety of ways in which we are all continually
reaching for new
understandings. Materials to be handled in the class include fairy
tales, the
nineteenth-century satire Flatland, Bertold Brecht's play The
Life of Galileo, Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn and
reflections on topics ranging from linguistics and neurobiology to
the culture
of Bryn Mawr. In addition to long-established elements of
inquiry--acting, enacting,
observing, experimenting, reading, talking and writing--we will
explore visual
culture, the new potentials of the web and other aspects of
developing information
technology. Together, we will apprehend this wide range of
literary, cultural
and scientific stories, intuiting, imagining and revising what they
might mean,
continuously telling and re-telling them in an attempt to "get it less
wrong." Students will be expected to contribute to the
education of their colleagues as well as to people beyond the College
by participating in an on-line forum and putting some of their
writing on the web.
Images in this syllabus were created by |
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. Ill meet you there. |
I. Reading and revising ourselves
The stories we tell ourselves, particularly the silent or
barely audible
ones, "I wrote the story first. It was a true story. But it
seemed too simple.
are very powerful. They become invisible enclosures. Rooms with no air.
One must open the window to see further, the door to possibility
.
How to tell a story without fashioning it along the prefabricated
lines? . .
. .
we are immersed in an old story and cannot see what is happening."
Susan Griffin. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War.
New York: Anchor, 1992. 284, 324.
So then I wrote the counter narrative: a second voice, second
thoughts."
Susan Griffin. Reading at Bryn Mawr. February 2, 1999.
9/2
Tracy Chapman. "Telling Stories."
Patricia Hempl. "Memory and Imagination." I Could Tell You Stories. New York: Norton, 1999. 21-37.
Mary Catherine Bateson. Composing a Life. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. 1-34, 232-241.
Paul Grobstein. This Isn't Just MY Problem, Friend: Some Thoughts on Science Education, Education, American Culture, and What to Do About It. (August 21, 1991.)
Anne Dalke. "Turtles All The Way down: Class As Persistent Critique." Teaching to Learn/Learning to Teach: Meditations on the Classroom. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 115-137.
Andrea Friedman. "Meta/phor" and "Sediment Core."
Draft A, 4-5pp: Compose your own life of learning.
Week Two
9/7
Selected excerpts by Charles Darwin, Soren Kierkegaard, Virginia Woolf
from Nothing Begins with N: New Investigations of Freewriting.
Ed. Pat Belanoff, Peter Elbow and Sheryl I. Fontaine.
Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
In-class writing workshop on Draft A
9/9
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. "Little Briar Rose" and
"Cinderella."
The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. Trans. Margaret
Hunt. Revised James Stern. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 118-122,
64-71.
"Yeh-Shen." Myths, Legends and Folktales of America. Ed. David Leeming and Jack Page. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999.
Anne Sexton. Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.
Draft B, 4-5 pp: Write a fairy tale (maybe re-compose your life of learning as a fairy tale?).
Week Three
9/14
In-class writing workshop on Draft B
9/16
Bruno Bettelheim. "Reflections: The Uses of
Enchantment."The
New Yorker (December 8, 1975): 50-114.
Juana Rodriguez. Guidelines for Revisions.
Paper #1: Using Bettelheim's methodology (or another), analyze your fairy tale.
Week Four
9/21
In-class writing workshop on Paper #1
II. Ordering and Re-ordering the World
"Physical concepts are
free creations
of the human mind,
and are not, however it may seem,
uniquely determined by the external world."
--Albert Einstein, in Albert Einstein and
Leopold Infeld.
The Evolution of Physics. New York:
Simon and Schuster,
1938. 33.
9/23
Bertolt Brecht. Galileo. 1952; rpt. New York: Grove, 1966.
Draft A: drawing on Brecht's play, reflect on why we are both motivated and reluctant to revise the stories we tell about the world. What provokes us to this activity? What prevents us from engaging in it? How does it profit us, and what are its costs?
Week Five
9/28
In-class writing workshop on Draft A
9/30
They Might be Giants. "Particle Man."
Edwin Abbott. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. 1885; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1984.
Richard Monastersky. "Recyling the Universe: New Theory Posits that Time Has No Beginning or End. The Chronicle of Higher Education. June 7, 2002.
Michel Foucault. Preface and Forward. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966; rpt. and trans.New York: Vintage, 1973. ix-xxiv.
Draft B: Drawing on Flatland and Foucault, reconsider and revise your reflections about why we (refuse to?) revise the stories we tell about the world.
Week Six
10/5
In-class writing workshop on Draft B
10/7
Daniel Dennett. Chapters 1-3. "Tell Me Why," "An Idea is Born" and
"Universal Acid." Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the
Meaning of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. 17-84.
Paper #2: Draw on Dennett's ideas to (once again) revise your reflections about why we (refuse to?) revise the stories we tell about the world.
10/12-14 FALL BREAK
Week Seven
10/19
In-class writing workshop on Paper #2
III. Apprehending and Absorbing the Storyteller
"The Brain--is wider than
the Sky--
The Brain is deeper than the sea--
The Brain is just the weight
of God--
Emily Dickinson. 1896; rpt. The Complete Poems.
For--put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease--and You--beside--
For--hold them--Blue
to Blue--
The one the other will absorb--
As Sponges--Buckets--do
For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound"
Ed. Thomas Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.
10/21
Michael Polanyi. The Tacit Dimension. New York: Anchor,
1967. 3-25.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. "Introduction: Who are We?" "The Cognitive Unconscious" and "The Embodied Mind." Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. 3-44.
Lisa Belkin. "The Odds of That: Coincidence in an Age of Conspiracy." The New York Times Magazine. (August 11, 2002). 32f.
Draft A: Collect data on tacit understanding.
Week Eight
10/28
Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. Thought and Language. Trans.
Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1962.
1-7, 119-153.
Steven Pinker. "An Instinct to Acquire an Art" and "Chatterboxes." The Language Instinct. New York: HarperPerennial,1995. 15-54.
Draft B: Interpret the observations you have made.
Week Nine
11/2
In-class writing workshop on Draft B
11/4
Oliver Sacks. "The Last Hippie" and "A Surgeon's
Life."An Anthropologist on Mars. New York:
Vintage, 1995. 42-107.
Week Ten
11/9
In-class writing workshop on Paper #4
IV. Revising Culture's Story
All that you touch
All that you Change
The only lasting truth
God
Earthseed: The Books of the Living
You Change.
Changes you.
Is Change.
Is Change.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
11/11
Leslie Marmon Silko. "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian
Perspective." Critical Fictions, ed.
Philomena Mariani.
Seattle: Bay Press, 1991. 83-93.
Clifford Geertz. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic, 1973. 195-240.
Draft A: Tell the story of some aspect of culture with which you are familiar.
Week Eleven
11/16
In-class writing workshop on Draft A
11/18
Ray McDermott and Hervé Vareene. "Culture as
Disability." Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26, 3
(1995): 324-348.
Hervé Varenne. Extra Burdens in the Search for New Openings: On the Inevitability of Cultural Disabilities. (November 17, 2003.)
Harriet McBryde Johnson. "Unspeakable Conversations, Or How I Spent One Day as a Token Cripple at Princeton University." New York Times Magazine. (February 16, 2003). 50-79.
Harriet McBryde Johnson. "The Disability Gulag." New York Times Magazine. (November 23, 2003). 59-64.
Amy Harmon. "Neurodiversity Forever: The Disability Movement Turns to Brains." New York Times. (May 9, 2004). 1, 7.
Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical. (March 18, 2002).
Draft B: Describe the disabling aspects of your ("hometown") culture.
Week Twelve
11/23
In-class writing workshop on Draft B
11/25 THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY
Week Thirteen
11/30
Jonathan Lethem. Motherless Brooklyn. New York:
Vintage, 1999.
12/2
Lethem, continued
Paper #4 (not to write, but for class discussion): What is abling, what dis-abling, about the world Lethem portrays? What different forms of abling and dis-abling might Lionel contend with in your hometown? Drawing both on the novel and your earlier account of your culture, explore how we might go beyond abling and dis-abling.
V. Re-vising and re-visioning Bryn Mawr
If resistance is always the sign of a counter-story,
ambivalence
Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race,
and Gender.
is perhaps the state of holding on to more than one story at a time."
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 2
Week Fourteen
12/7
Helen Horowitz. "A Certain Style of Quaker Lady Dress" and
"Behold They Are Women!" Alma Mater: Design and Experience in
the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the
1930s. New York: Knopf, 1984. 105-133.
The Women of Summer: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921-1938 (videorecording). Dir. Suzanne Bauman. New York: Filmakers Library, 1985. (55 mins.)
Rita Rubinstein Heller. "An 'Unnatural' Institution." "The Women of Summer: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921-1938." Dss. Rutgers University, 1986. 1-36.
Selections from Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin. (October 1921-May 1935).
Draft A: Write the story of Bryn Mawr, as you now understand it.
12/9Anne Dalke, Paul Grobstein and Elizabeth McCormack. Theorizing Interdisciplinarity: Metaphor and Metonymy, Synecdoche and Surprise. (June 2003.)
Paper #5, to conclude: how might we revise the Bryn Mawr Story? This might take the form of a fairy tale, or a montage, or a poem; it could be collaboratively written.
ALL WRITTEN WORK DUE BY 12:30, Friday, December 17, 2004
Course Requirements:
Weekly web postings
Weekly paper drafts
Bi-weekly individual writing conferences
Final Portfolio
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