First Year Writing Seminar (FWS)

Jonathan Baldo, English

At the most recent presidential inauguration, 22-year-old Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in American history, wowed the nation with her recitation of “The Hill We Climb.” The event did much to revive the nation’s interest in poetry. Coming as it did in the midst of a pandemic, it demonstrated one of the oldest functions of poetry: in the words of former poet laureate Rita Dove, “Now I think people have begun to yearn for a return to the use of language as a way of lifting us up.” Nowhere is that use more apparent than in the rich tradition of African American Poetry. We will begin by going back in time to listen and respond to early voices, concentrating on two major artistic movements of the twentieth century: the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Later we will study Dove’s lyrical re-creation of the collaboration between Beethoven and the Afro-Polish violin prodigy George Bridgetower, Sonata Mulattica. I hope the course will also encourage students to think of our individual and collective need for poetry, a kind of discourse that teaches us to listen more attentively both to ourselves and to others. According to Dove, “We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there’s a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry. . . . Poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.”

Jean Pedersen, History

This course explores the many different relationships between art and politics with a special focus on some of the most interesting and important art works, musical performances, and arts institutions in the Rochester area.  This year’s course will explore themes of racism, anti-racism, sexism, and anti-sexism by considering a series of art works and musical events that include Olivia Kim’s sculptures of Frederick Douglass, Sarah C. Rutherford’s murals of Susan B. Anthony, and the recent world premiere of a new piece by Eastman composer Mina Esary with the contemporary chamber ensemble fivebyfive.  Students will finish the semester by completing individual independent projects on the connections between art and politics in the life, world, and work of the poet, painter, writer, sculptor, director, composer, conductor, performer, or other creative individual of their choice.

Sue Uselmann, English

What is creativity?  We hear this term almost every day in the context of music and the arts. Creativity is vital to our ability to thrive and survive as human beings.  From the Moonlight sonata and Chinese calligraphy to the development of the polio vaccine, creativity is integral not only to the arts but also to science, medicine, mathematics, and ecology as well as economics, public policy, business, and everyday life. In this section of FWS, we will explore the characteristics of creativity, including how it is defined and measured, and the processes involved in it. Are there any differences between the creativity associated with ‘geniuses’ and the kind of creativity we engage in every day? What is the neuroscience of creativity and how can it help us manage uncertainty?  is it possible to measure whether something is creative? Can computers be creative? What role do social or cultural environments play in fostering creativity?  Because creativity is a broad, interdisciplinary topic, the course will be a collaborative effort in answering the questions you and your classmates are most interested in exploring. You will develop your skills in integrating evidence across disciplines and in clearly communicating your analysis in writing.  At the same time, you will express what you have learned and explore aspects of creativity through the development of creative projects to share with classmates.

Sevinç Türkkan, Comparative Literature and Translation Studies

The Arabian Nights has intrigued the Western imagination since its translations into European languages began in 1704. However, the Nights was long dismissed in the Arab world as vulgar or unworthy of attention. What about the Nights fascinated Europe and why didn’t it enjoy similar prestige in the Middle East? What happened to the marvelous story-teller and icon of liberation, Shahrazad, when she traveled West? We will explore these questions from interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and theoretical perspectives. We will read various translations, short fiction, and novels inspired by the Nights as well as dramatic, visual, aural, and cinematic versions. Critical and theoretical readings from literary studies, history, philosophy, and art history will help us enter into larger debates regarding East-West relations, translation, global circulation, and reception. After we explore the current literature on the subject, we will craft our own responses to how stereotypes form, how cultural representations circulate, and what constitutes ethics, aesthetics, literary influence, and narrative technique.

Robert Rich, English

This course involves critically assessing and writing about recent and anticipated advancements in areas like artificial intelligence and human genetic enhancement, and the debates, social problems, and ethical predicaments which accompany those advancements. How will humankind cope with the rise of synthetic media (like deepfakes) when we already struggle with fake news? What are the pros and cons of allowing algorithms rather than human judges to make bail and sentencing decisions. Does germline genetic engineering of humans constitute a threat to a meaningful existence? Readings range from science-fiction stories like Kate Wilhelm’s “Baby You were Great!” to nonfictional writings like Marvin Minsky’s “Will Robots Inherit the Earth?” Assignments include both informal responses and formal papers, culminating with an argumentative research paper.

Robert Rich, English

This course involves critically assessing and writing about the nature and function of hypothetical realities, which for the sake of a working definition we may define as visions of the world that are fictitious but deliberately plausible and in most respects consistent with reality. Readings range from science-fiction stories like Kate Wilhelm’s “Baby You were Great!” to nonfictional writings like Marvin Minsky’s “Will Robots Inherit the Earth?” to polemical writings on the ethics of allowing children to believe in Santa. We will learn to address a myriad of pertinent questions: How do hypothetical realities help us address our own experience? How effective are they at interrogating contemporary culture? Are there dangers to being too invested in a certain hypothetical reality, as in the case of doomsday theories? Assignments include both informal responses and formal papers, culminating with an argumentative research paper.

Eric Scherbenske, Religion and Classics

From Hildegard of Bingen’s Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum and Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus has inspired countless musical works since his life and death in the first century. All these works take a somewhat traditional image of Jesus for granted. But what about other images of Jesus? Could he have been, as some suggest, a violent rebel? Can we trust stories about him, if they were told and written by his devoted followers? Are there other, perhaps more authentic, stories about him? Or has our image of Jesus been too distorted from the beginning? In this FWS 121 section we will explore these questions by discovering the earliest stories about Jesus and how to read them—some found in the Bible, some unearthed only recently from the sands of Egypt. We will also explore select musical works that continue a process seen already in antiquity—to understand, reinterpret, and keep Jesus alive by telling and retelling stories about him. This course will combine writing assignments, discussion, and oral presentations, culminating with student research on the historical Jesus or a later musical incarnation. Studying these stories, however, serves the larger goal of developing the critical thinking and writing skills necessary to present your ideas in clear, straightforward, and compelling prose.

Glenn Mackin, Political Science

In the contemporary political world, most of us would say that all persons deserve some basic level of respect. Once someone is included in the category of “personhood,” s/he is granted moral, political, and legal protections. Many critics argue, however, that the category of personhood has been and continues to be problematic. Historically and in the contemporary world, the argument goes, “personhood” is typically defined in different ways, and many persons are excluded from the moral, political, and legal protections that supposedly attach to all. This course will draw upon political philosophy, literature, and the writings of political activists in order to examine the ways in which conceptions of the person are created and contested. Readings will include canonical political philosophers (such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau), as well as more recent theorists and activists and such as Frederick Douglass and Charles Mills.

Daniel Nelson, English

“I would prefer not to.” Thus the title character of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” refuses, for no apparent reason, to do as he’s told, sending his boss into a fit of wonder and self-doubt. Melville’s story is one instance of the phenomenon that is this class’s object of study: acts of rebellion or non-conformity that do not seem to have any point. We will study stories, books, films, and songs which feature rebellious characters who, unlike dissenting or revolutionary political leaders and thinkers, decline to propose an alternative to, or a solution to, the societies they reject or criticize. What do such characters ask of us, then? Why do they win our attention and even our loyalty, despite their lack of a positive message? What does this tell us about American society’s (or any society’s) values, both religious and secular, and especially about the tension between those values and the young people on whom they are foisted? We will talk and write about such questions as well as consider some scholars’ answers to them, in order to learn how to research and write in an organized, professional, scholarly manner—engaging other viewpoints, defending claims, citing relevant research, and much more.

Jonathan Baldo, English

Whenever the United States has experienced a political conflict or social upheaval, Shakespeare’s plays have more often than not played a significant role in either the articulation of the conflict or its resolution. The plays themselves have been appropriated by both sides of the political spectrum. For many on the right, Shakespeare was an admirer of and advocate for a fixed and stable social order and a strong, centralized monarchy. By the left, he has been viewed as a progressive and even radical social and political thinker who challenged the rigid categories of his own day pertaining to race, class, and gender, anticipating many later social and political upheavals. Taking our cue from a brand new book by James Shapiro entitled Shakespeare in a Divided America, in this course we will read three plays–Macbeth, Othello, and The Tempest–both in the context of their own day and of later key moments in American history when a particular play was deeply implicated. Individual plays were at the center of class warfare in the nineteenth century, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, responses to immigration, and debates about interracial marriage. We will reach back into our past in order to help us confront our present. Options for papers will run the gamut (a musical term, by the way) from research papers (e.g., the acting careers of Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth and his brother) to creative exercises in which you might conceive a contemporary production of one of our plays that contends with a pressing and divisive social issue of our time.

Jonathan Baldo, English

At the time Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, one of his last plays, explorations into remote regions of the globe were helping to expand Europeans’ intellectual as well as geographical horizons.  The Tempest evokes the sense of strangeness and wonder in Europeans who realized that the world was much larger than they had believed.  The play represents an exploration of the margins of the world as it was known in the Renaissance.  It has since been adapted and rewritten countless times to reflect the interests, anxieties, and concerns of later periods as they explore the fringes or margins of their own worlds. After studying the original play, we will read or watch and discuss a number of these adaptations:  a revision of the play by Martinican author Aimé Cesaire; the legendary sci-fi adaptation Forbidden Planet; a performance of the play in prison, Shakespeare Behind Bars; and poetic responses to the play by Sylvia Plath and others.  Over the course of the semester, students will be encouraged to exercise their own sense of wonder and to imagine an original setting for a 21^st-century adaptation of the play.