College Catalog
Course Descriptions
General Studies (GENS)

GENS 403 Ideal Societies
This course addresses the fundamental question: What political and social system best provides for the common welfare? Various answers (and warnings) are considered through readings from political philosophy, social commentary, and utopian and anti-utopian literature ranging from classical times to the twentieth century with the intention of stimulating reflection on issues and events in contemporary society. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 405 Myth, Values, and Modern Society
Myths from Asian, Native American, African, and Western societies will be read and analyzed. The course will explore myths from three perspectives: types (e.g., origins, trickster myths), themes (hero tales, good vs. evil), and reinterpretations (art and ballet). Theories of myth and folklore will be applied to discover values expressed by myths in traditional and modern societies. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 406 Religion and Politics
An examination of the teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in relation to the nature and excercise of politics in selected countries and cultures and how political states and religious societies produce conflict and consensus. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 407 Science, Literature, and Culture
A reading of contemporary works that engage a philosophical and literary approach to current ethical, moral, and cultural issues raised by science and by presenting science to a lay public, to include such books as Chaos, The Tao of Physics, The Lives of a Cell, and Godel, Escher, Bach. We will discuss such themes as the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge, and how scientific findings affect cultural perceptions as we discuss the increasingly important genre of "pop-science." Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 408 Social Inequalities: Race and Minority Relations
Social Inequality is a critical examination of prejudice and discrimination in the past and present experience of minority groups in the United States. This course confronts the internal contradictions between the ideals of social justice, equality and personal freedom and social realities of injustice, inequality and personal coercion. The focus is to learn from history, analyze the present and seek alternatives for the future. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 411 Vietnam War and The American Imagination
An examination of the American involvement in Vietnam through its symbolic history, the finest novels, personal memoirs, and films on the war. Primary texts - appraised as both aesthetic responses and cultural documents - will include the written works of Grahame Greene, Philip Caputo, Tim O'Brien, Bobbie Ann Mason, and others. Films by directors such as Francis Coppola, Michael Cimino, Oliver Stone, and Stanley Kubrick will also be examined. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 413 Living as a Community: Buddhist and Christian Paradigms
The course will examine communal life as it is conceived and practiced in Buddhism and Christianity. The purpose of this examiniation is to identify crucial components of communal life and to provide potential solutions to the crises that confront the establishment of communities. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 414 Nationalism: "Imagined Communities"
This course will explore the development and extension of nationalism over the past two centuries. Originally a product of the European tradition, in the 21st Century it appears in almost every society worldwide. The course will examine the phenomenon of nationalism both in its political and ideological dimensions and in its cultural manifestations in art, music, and literature. As ideology, nationalism has unified and divided societies since the French Revolution through claims of self-determination, state building, ethnic autonomy, and political secession. The one constant has been the dimension of national identity, as "imagined community." Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 418 International Inequalities
This course focuses upon the broad theme of social inequalities by examining cases of prejudice and discrimination occurring outside of the United States. The roots and nature of prejudice, and the discrimination which typically follows it, will be examined through case studies drawn from Africa, India and the Middle East which explore biases based upon ethnicity, gender, race, and religion. The case studies which will be used to explore social inequalities internationally are the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the massacres of Armenians by Turks which occurred around the turn of the twentieth century, violence against women in Africa as expressed through female circumcision, and popular stereotypes and scholarly representations of India in the West. First semester, annually. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 419 The Distant Mirror
What does our knowledge of the literature and history of the past tell us about the present? This discussion-based senior general education course will begin with Barbara Tuchman's eminent A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century to consider the notion of "the past" or specific actual or reconstructed "pasts" as literary, historical, and scientific mirrors to the present. To test a broader applicability of Tuchman's metaphor, we will proceed to study and compare various parallel fourteenth- and twentieth-century books (such as The Book of Margery Kempe and Thomas Merton's spiritual autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain) to determine to what degree they too mirror each other. We will conclude either by attempting to apply the mirror metaphor more generally, by comparing texts of other eras to their twentieth-century parallels, (such as Homer's Iliad to Derek Walcott's Omeros) to learn to what degree we see the former reflected in the later, or by comparing texts and ideas that uncover aspects of the literary and intellectual evolution taking place from the ancient to modern world, such as a study of the comparative "consciousness" using such books as Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's The Mind's I. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 420 The End of the World
This course examines the many ways that beliefs about death, a final judgment and an end-time event have been put into action in Western and non-Western societies during periods of acute crisis. Students will be exposed to a variety of disciplinary approaches to the study of millenarian movements, and will be expected to reflect critically in class discussions and essays on the values that these movements reflect and their change or continuity across space and time. The course will include an examination of contemporary American millenarian beliefs. Every other Spring. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

GENS 421 Race and Minority Relations: Field Experience.
Race and Minority Relations is a critical examination of prejudice and discrimination in the past and present experience of minority groups in the United States. This course confronts the contradictions between the ideals of social justice, equality and personal freedom and social realities of injustice, inequality and personal coercion. The focus is to learn from history, analyze the present and seek alternatives for the future. This special section of GENS421 will include an experimental component in Chicago that will emphasize the way in which social inequalities manifest themselves in a modern American city. Offered Summer only. Fulfills General Education Area 12 - Senior Colloquium Requirement. See General Education Extended Course Description.

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