Languages & Cultures College Courses Fall 2011

Select from the menu of courses using the Online Residential College Request Form.

Fulfills the following requirements:
First-Year Course, Writing Level 1

It is commonly assumed that "love" and "sex" are universal, natural phenomena, intrinsic to our very existence as human beings. However, whatever their biological aspects, love and sexuality are also very much products of society and culture-i.e., multifaceted phenomena with long and complex histories across various cultures, languages and traditions. This course provides an intimate look at a few of the highlights in the global history of love and sex, as manifested in "works" (e.g., philosophy, poetry, novels, paintings, sculpture) from various cultures, times and places. The objective of the seminar is to have students engage critically with cultural product--both foreign and familia--in a way that recognizes the reality of cultural diversity as well as the possibility of a shared human "nature." The narrative frame for our tale of the history of love and sex will be the Silk Road, the 5000-mile series of overland and maritime trade routes that once connected Europe to West, Central, South and East Asia. Themes include: theories of love and sex, cultural taboos on love and sex, conceptions of beauty, body image, misogyny and sexual politics. Topics include: classical Greek perspectives on the male body, Roman and Persian love poetry, fertility goddesses in Indian sculpture, the Kama Sutra, the Buddhist body, sexual manuals in medieval Chinese Daoism, romance in The Tale of Genji, and attitudes towards homosexuality among the samurai of Japan.


RESC 098 13 CRN: 15814
Making Sense of Cultural Difference
Prof. Alice Poust, Spanish
Fulfills the Following Requirements:
First-Year Course, Writing Level 1

This course encourages students to engage the challenges posed by encountering and experiencing a different culture. As part of the Languages & Cultures Residential College, the course features a travel motif to represent the movement through time that is both historical and personal, as well as through a space that is both geographical and intellectual. We begin with the Iberian Peninsula, on the Western Mediterranean, and move to the Americas, to focus on Latin American cultures.

The course places a secondary emphasis on one's personal voyage in becoming a member of a community that extends beyond her/his own culture. Students are expected to seek dialogue with people of other cultural backgrounds on campus, and to explor ways of experiencing other cultural perspectives.

RESC 098 19 CRN: 15903
How We Do Things With Words
Prof. Katherine Faull, Foreign Languages
Fulfills the Following Requirements:
First-Year Course, Writing Level 1

This seminar explores the relationship between language and culture in both English and other cultures. A knowledge of a language is not only a skill and an instrument for communicating thought and information, but language itself is an essential part of our thought processes, perceptions and self-expression. The seminar will explore how language is a complex phenomenon that brings us together with other humans in global societies. For example, to what extent does our language affect the way we live in the world? How does the way we describe our world with language affect the ways we perceive, think, and act? Do speakers of different languages have different perceptions of the world? How do the figures of speech and the types of sentences we use affect the assumptions we have about fundamental concepts of living in a cultural and linguistic community? What makes a promise something we should keep? What makes the words "I do" different from the words "I think"? Can we rely on language to say what we mean? Through this foundation seminar students will investigate and discuss these central issues of language, discourse and culture as we grapple with the question of how we do things with words.