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Courses
Students, please go to WebCT/Blackboard Vista for more
detailed course materials.
Spring 2009 Courses:
HUM 2900-002 The Machine in the
Garden [syllabus]
In his 1964 book
The Machine in the Garden, author Leo Marx unraveled the
tension of the American myth of a pastoral landscape and the
reality of the nearly constant presence of the machine in
American life. This seminar course takes Marx’s idea of the
machine in the garden and explores it through an
interdisciplinary lens. Concerned primarily with architectural,
landscape, and spatial issues but also considering history,
literature, and art, we will explore how the machine and
industrialization writ large has shaped our landscape and how we
perceive it. Architecture and the built environment becomes a
compelling window onto the intellectual trope of the machine in
the garden, which has gained even greater currency with the
current green movement.
ACS 1001-23 and 28 Modernity and its
Discontents
Theme: Man and the Machine [syllabus]
In this second half of the Augustine and Culture Seminar, we
will focus on readings from the 1600s to the present to explore
the theme, "Man and the Machine." This course asks whether
technology has benefited or harmed humanity. We will read
such classics as Frankenstein and Brave New World
in addition to works by John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau.
We will also watch such films as The Matrix.
Fall 2008 Courses:
AAH 2005-x17 & HUM 2900-x17 Modern
Architecture [syllabus]
The struggle to come to grips with
modernity—those forces, technological and otherwise, that have
profoundly shaped the world from the eighteenth century to
today—is an crucial theme in history, literature, philosophy,
and theology. But nowhere else is this struggle more visible or
tangible than in architecture. While the “battle of the styles”
dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with
architects recycling classical and Gothic forms, underfoot were
new ways of thinking about aesthetics and architecture that
responded to vast social, economic, and technological changes.
These foundations gave way to a stunning architectural
vocabulary in the twentieth century that imagined and visualized
a world transformed.
In this course, we examine modern
architecture primarily in Europe and the United States with the
understanding that architecture is another way to examine larger
questions and approaches to human life. We will look at
buildings and projects that both responded to modern conditions
and shaped them from the late nineteenth century to today.
ACS 1000-F02 Traditions in Conversation
Theme: Nature/Human Nature [syllabus]
Most of the time in our lives we are
immersed in our own personal triumphs, tragedies, and concerns,
often placing ourselves at the center of our world. This course
will ask you to step away from this close perspective to
consider a wider of array of how and why humans act. What are
our motivations and desires, and what principles guide our
actions? How do we define the relationship to ourselves and to
others? We will also discover in these texts just how deeply
humanity’s relationship to nature runs. We will explore how
these writers use nature to reflect, interpret, and understand
our human condition. We will consider how nature is another
creation, and in what ways might we find ourselves in it.
In this
first part of the two-semester Augustine and Culture Seminar
(ACS), we will focus on the theme “Nature/Human Nature” in a
series of significant texts from the ancient era to the
seventeenth century—from Plato, to St. Augustine, to
Shakespeare—to sharpen our ways of reading, thinking, and
writing.
Spring 2008 Courses:
HUM 2900 American Sacred Space [syllabus]
What is sacred space? In this
seminar course, we will go beyond the traditional definition of
a sacred space as a church or temple to consider how sacred
space is a pervading component of the American landscape, from
churches to parks to cities. We will begin with the
theories of sacred space and then explore how Americans have
constructed sacred space in a variety of ways.
ACS 1001-34 and 58 Modernity and its
Discontents [syllabus]
In this second half of the Augustine and Culture Seminar, we
will focus on readings from the 1600s to the present to explore
the theme, "Man and the Machine." This course asks whether
technology has benefited or harmed humanity. We will read
such classics as Frankenstein and Brave New World
in addition to works by John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau.
We will also watch such films as The Matrix and
Metropolis.
Fall 2007 Courses:
HUM 3600
American Architecture Since
1865
This survey of American architecture from
the Civil War to the present seeks to understand the
development of American architecture. More importantly, we
will wrestle with questions about modernity; the continuation of
tradition in the midst of technological and social change; and
the shaping of an American identity.
ACS 1000 Traditions in Conversation
In this first semester of the Augustine
and Culture Seminar, my students from Simpson and Fedigan Halls
will delve into the theme of "Love and Friendship" across such
readings as Shakespeare's The Tempest, St. Augustine's
The Confessions, and Plato's Symposium.
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