|
IDST-010 Ignatius Seminar
Fall only
Faculty:
Carse, Alisa
Connor-Linton, Jeffrey
DeGioia, John
Deneen, Patrick
Leonard, Amy
Morris, Marcia
Murphy, G. Ronald
Paranjape, Makarand
Tutino, John
Wickham-Crowley, Kelley
Wickham-Crowley, Timothy
Woolard, Jennifer
Drawing on the educational insights of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, these courses seek to cultivate the Ignatian ideal of cura personalis: care for each person's individuality and care for his or her integral wholeness. Like other Renaissance educators, Jesuits sought to educate the whole person--mind, body and spirit--a tradition alive at Georgetown College today. The Ignatius Seminars focus not only on conveying information and intellectual content, but also on building a home for wisdom and enriching all dimensions of our students' lives.
Designed for the intellectually curious student interested in an integrative and personal approach to learning, the small class setting of these first-year seminars enables students to get to know their professors and each other well. In this atmosphere, the faculty can recognize the strengths and educational needs of each student, creating a teaching and mentoring environment. Each professor's expression of his or her particular scholarly pursuit provides students with a tangible example of the interplay of mind and spirit, of disciplined work and intellectual excitement, of academic rigor and creative play.
The Ignatius Seminars initiate opportunities early in your time at Georgetown to cultivate basic skills that faculty identify as important: reading a text with thought and insight, speaking clearly and persuasively in an academic discussion, and writing a structured and sustained argument. This is a chance to experience Georgetown College and university learning at its best.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
Course syllabi
The following syllabi may help you learn more about this course (login required):
Fall '10:
Leonard A
(file download)
Additional syllabi may be available in prior academic years.
Sections:
IDST-010-01 Ignatius Seminar: Indexicality: Reading Between the Lines
Fall only
Language is not only the medium through which we communicate, but the material with which we construct representations of our world. Most obviously, we can make claims about our world (It is flat/round/neither), but the ways in which we use language also index aspects of our identity and the roles we are playing at a given moment. Our language use also indexes the identities and roles we perceive in and project on our interlocutors. Our language use doesn’t just reflect these roles and identities passively; we construct and negotiate our social realities dynamically through our language choices. I may talk to my daughter like a father, but she may respond as an independent adult, not my child. A boss talks differently to an employee than to his/her spouse (I hope). Even my choice of ‘his/her’ says something about the identity I seek to project.
Our ways with words have social consequences. Social class dialects help to maintain social class stratification across generations; gender roles are negotiated through patterns of language use; ethnic identities and boundaries are marked and contended through language choices. One’s language use not only communicates volumes about the speaker (or writer), but about his or her perceptions of and assumptions about the world. Is your glass half empty or half full? In a political argument, who are ‘we’ and who are ‘they’? Did John kill the cat or was the cat hit by a car?
In this course, after an introduction to the functional relation between language use and indexical meaning, we will study language use in several domains, using a quantitative ‘multi-feature/multi-dimensional’ method of discourse analysis. We’ll investigate how authors mark their own ethnicity and gender, how knowledge is represented to different users (e.g., lay people, students and professionals), and how language use varies in different electronic media (email, texting, Facebook walls, etc.). In each case, students will work in groups to design the study, motivate a relevant sample, and collect and analyze the data. For the final project, each student will construct an alternative version of an existing text (of his or her own choosing), indexing a different set of identities, roles, contexts, and purposes.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-02 Ignatius Seminar: Shifting Selves:?Changelings and Doubles
Fall only
“Know thyself!” The ancient Greeks paired this injunction together with “Nothing to excess!” and believed that they had captured the essence of the life well lived. We have been pursuing the quest for self-knowledge ever since, but from time to time a nagging unease has checked our efforts: What if we turn out to have no whole, unified self? What if we are divided into multiple selves? Worse yet, what if others can usurp our self? What, in other words, if the self is ultimately shifting and unstable?
What if, indeed? Is a shifting self good or bad; is personal mutability enriching or destructive? This seminar will center on fictive texts and films that probe these unsettling questions. Doubles, impostors, werewolves, vampires – all have captured the imagination of some of the finest minds in the western creative tradition. We will begin with the Greeks, who offer us diverse visions of human transformation; stop briefly in the medieval period to investigate vampires and demoniacs; and then focus on the nineteenth century’s particularly dense concentration of shifting selves, ranging from Gogol’s “Nose” and Dostoevsky’s “Double” to Wilde’s “Portrait of Dorian Gray” and Stoker’s “Dracula.” We will close with the twentieth century, where we will turn increasingly to films such as “The Return of Martin Guerre,” “Zelig,” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” but also to texts like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”
Through our exploration of the implications of “Know thyself!” we will find ourselves at the very heart of the humanistic tradition, the place where we have expressed our brightest hopes and darkest fears.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-03 Ignatius Seminar: Navigating the Moral Terrain
Fall only
Living morally requires artful, and sometimes arduous, navigation of a “messy” and complex range of challenges. There are few tidy rules and algorithms to serve as guides; those we have are often too vague or general to yield clear moral direction in the face of real-life conflicts, pressures and aspirations. In this course, we will explore the art of moral navigation. Our exploration will be organized around four basic questions: What personal strengths and capacities support us in making wise moral judgments? How are the strengths and capacities called on by moral agency diminished, obstructed, or challenged? How are they developed, supported and sustained? What is the relationship between “moral wisdom” and personal thriving?
We will examine these questions through the critical study of a range of topics: moral relativism and moral “isolationism;” personal autonomy and the challenge of moral authenticity; moral responsibility and the specter of “moral luck”; sources of moral resilience and “repair” – especially empathy, trust, forgiveness, and hope; the ethics of love and sexuality; and the nature and value of self-respect. In addressing these themes, we’ll study and reflect together on great philosophical writings, bringing them into conversation with real-life and fictional dramas (e.g. in film, fiction, and poetry).
Our working assumption will be one rooted in Aristotle’s ethical theory, namely, that there is an essential connection between living a moral life (and thus being a “good moral navigator”) and thriving as a human being. Just how we should understand this connection is, of course, a Big Question. It is a question we will grapple with together, sharing our quandaries, insights, and discoveries.
The classroom is, I believe, a privileged space – one that can be made safe for the exploration of “dangerous” issues, and in which we can engage peacefully together in thinking morally about complex and often difficult questions. In this way, we can create a kind of oasis in a world too often torn by social and moral discord, division, and misunderstanding. Philosophy is an inherently reflective discipline – it engages us in “art” of asking questions and is at its heart driven by dialogue and debate.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-04 Ignatius Seminar: Creating and Sustaining Community
Fall only
Each of us moves through a series of physical, emotional, spiritual, and virtual communities. Early in life we may be placed in community by circumstance, but from childhood onward we select and create many of our own communities. How do we identify and affilliate with a community? What does it mean to belong?
Although communities are comprised of their own members, in some circumstances they exhibit a continuity and sustainability that transcends those individual members. We will explore the meaning of community, how it is formed and maintained. We will reflect on our own experiences of community and the process of joining and shaping the Georgetown community, as well as the District of Columbia.
Communities, like individuals and families, move through time facing opportunities and challenges. We will examine the individual and collective responses to challenge and disaster at various times and places, including U.S. experiences of Hurricane Katrina, the attacks of 9/11, race riots of the 1960s and coal mining disasters in Appalachia. Through these historical events we explore how individual experience, belief, and action are shaped by, and shape, the larger community, situated in a policy and cultural context. We will learn from several community partners about their perspectives and work on social change in the District.
We evaluate community psychology’s guiding principles, including knowledge within a value system, the role of context, importance of diversity, commitment to social change, and orientation toward strengths. Because the field of community psychology in the U.S. resulted from psychologists’ active questioning of the prevailing models of science and practice in the 1960s, the classroom will be an active space in which we question, evaluate, and debate our views.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-05 Ignatius Seminar: Race, Color, Culture
Fall only
While this is not a history course, it still may help us to remember some words and scenarios from our nation’s own past: “No Irish need apply” (1850s); black Americans being declared by our Supreme Court “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit” (The Dred Scott decision, 1857); Congress passing a deeply restrictive immigration-quota law for the first time since independence, targeting and limiting some European and all East Asian immigrants (1921); our government refusing to allow a ship loaded with German Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany to dock at our ports (1939); by the 2050s, some demographic Cassandras tell (warn?) us, fully half of the U.S. population will be Latinos.
Such political fears and targeting of select, if changing, suspect-groups is a near-constant in U.S. history, and yet .... . In 1960, a wealthy Catholic of Irish descent wins the presidency; less than a half-century later, an African-American repeats the unlikely story; virtually all barriers to the social integration and mutual respect of Americans once hailing from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Germany have been dissolved, a process now steadily expanding to include those from Asia and Latin America. Indeed, a spate of recent books tells us how, over time, the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews each “became white”, or “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.”
In this course we will explore the hues of our humanity, and how they may color our cultural perceptions. We too will be expansive, going beyond the U.S. to other nations where issues of race, color, and culture have been troublesome. For instance, in Peru, where the paler skinned once opined that “[t]he indian is the animal that most resembles man,” a few years ago the citizenry elected president a man of indigenous and peasant background; or Brazil and Japan, wherein a quarter-million Japanese-descent Brazilians returned to their ancestral homeland, which finds it hard to accept the samba and beach-loving returnees.
Scholarly studies of several nations drawn from sociology, anthropology, and history are all critical to our venture, but we also will draw fruitfully from, and actively seek out, materials and studies ranging from population genetics to popular culture, including visual and verbal symbolic representations, such as caricatures, posters, ads, stand-up comedy, movies, and ethnic jokes.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-06 Ignatius Seminar: Touching the Middle Ages: Contact with Physical and Intellectual Cultures
Fall only
What do we know about the European Middle Ages (500-1500) and how do we know it? Can we touch something of what that diverse period was with its many cultures, or are we simply constructing a version of the past that reflects more on who we ourselves are? This seminar takes those questions as the central work of the course and suggests that the neglected physical aspects of the medieval world open up the inconsistency we experience.
As different as medieval cultures were, we have pervasive influences from them even in postmodern America: the university itself is a medieval creation with physical and ideological implications. Here, we will look at translated texts in the main languages that impacted medieval Britain - Latin, Old English, Norse, French, and Middle English - looking for what both physical and textual cultures suggest we need to research. If we read a dream vision that entails walking through a church, what can we discover about architecture, spatial organization and its significance, beliefs about dreams, relics, and pilgrimage? Looking at “The Song of Roland,” “Beowulf,” or the Norse sagas of exploration, what can we learn of cultural clashes, masculinity, armor and weapons, trade, navigation? Reading a tale of courtly chivalry, what can we discover about dress, feasting, class, sexuality and gender relations? We will also take advantage of what physical resources we have locally, visiting Dumbarton Oaks and the National Cathedral and creating a medieval feast after we have studied spices and cookbooks. The culmination of our intellectual explorations will be participation in an undergraduate medieval conference at Moravian College (PA) in early December. Students will learn to identify their questions, find the resources to research them, and contribute their share to the interdisciplinary project of understanding the medieval as an embodied past.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-07 Ignatius Seminar: Myth and Realization
Fall only
Love thy neighbor. This ancient command becomes almost impossible when thy neighbor is different or other than oneself. One of the things that the Arts and Sciences can do is to enable a student to ‘other’ him or herself enough to bridge the gap of difference. History travels to other people of other times, sociology to other cultures, foreign languages let you be at home with foreign patterns of communication and feeling, literature lets you befriend the world of others’ common human experiences; despite all differences. Astronomy takes the student to a vista from which differences melt.
This seminar is an explorer’s journey through the woods of myth with an eye to the realizations that myths contain. We begin with contemporary astronomy’s story of human location in time, and with ancient Greek myth, especially that of Oedipus. We continue through the blend of Germanic and Christian myth found in the 9th-Century Heliand gospel story and in the 13th-Century myth of Parzival and the Holy Grail. We end with the blending of the three mythic traditions, Greek, Germanic, and Christian, in the story of Snow White and four other tales of the Brothers Grimm, with a poem or two of Rilke added to balance the astronomy of the beginning
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-08 Ignatius Seminar: The End of Education
Fall only
One thing students presumably know most about is education – in all likelihood, entering first years will have been in school for more than a dozen years. One might think the last thing students would need to reflect upon is the purpose, goal, and end of education. Yet, no subject has been as fiercely debated in the course of human history as the purpose of education. A bit like fish’s experience of water, education surrounds us but we often don’t really see it.
In this seminar, we will explore classical and contemporary ideas about the proper ends of education. Education has been alternatively conceived as the formation of virtuous character; as orienting us toward proper worship of the divine; as the means for extending humanity‘s control over nature; as an engine of social and moral progress; as equipping individuals for citizenship, whether of a nation or as cosmopolitans. What do we mean when we aspire to “liberal” education? Is liberal education compatible with civic education? Should students be expected to achieve knowledge of the core texts and ideas in their tradition, or should education mainly seek to expose us to other cultures? What is the role of the teacher, and how best to be a student?
We will explore works ranging from ancient Greek philosophers to Enlightenment authors to modern American novelists and essayists, with special emphasis on the purpose and aim of university education. This will not be merely an “academic” exercise, but an inquiry into the aspirations that will guide your next four years at Georgetown University, and, it is to be hoped, beyond.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-09 Ignatius Seminar: Sex and Gender in History Today
Fall only
From the very beginning of European history, the role of sex and gender in society has been highly contested. The development of a celibate clergy, the relationship between men and women, and the debate over what constitutes “proper” sexuality are just a few of the components that have formed a core part of Western culture. Through the analysis of religious, political, literary, and intellectual realms, we will examine the gender and sexual constructs of society at large. The course focuses particularly – although not exclusively – on the experiences of women during the early modern period (from the Renaissance to the French Revolution). Why were over 80% of all witches women? What effect did the Reformation have on marriage and the household? Did women have a Renaissance? How do those on the margins of society – prostitutes, witches, heretics, and sexual “deviants” – navigate the early modern world and what lessons can we learn from that? Readings include personal memoirs, chronicles, Inquisition trials, plays, satires, and case studies.
The course emphasizes both writing and discussion, with students running discussion, participating in a mock witch trial, and writing (and re-writing) a series of source-based papers. Students will also be asked to pay close attention to present-day news reports and media stories to find examples of enduring conflicts over gender and sexuality. Through the close reading of both primary and secondary sources, supplemented by class trips to the National Gallery and a Shakespeare play, students will practice critical thinking and analysis and will learn to blend together the different voices, events, and influences of pre-modern Europe.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-10 Ignatius Seminar: The Art of Cooking: Practical Science in Action
Fall only
For many people, merely hearing the word
science invokes certain anxieties that are perhaps accompanied by images, thoughts, or even personal memories of complex mathematical formulas and equations, rigorous laboratory experimentation, seemingly obscure physical laws and principles, and of course, eccentric, labcoat-clad instructors. In reality, most people unwittingly use scientific principles and carry out scientific enquiry on a daily basis without even blinking an eye! Cooking is practical science in action, taking place in a “kitchen laboratory” where ingredients become the variables in a formula/recipe for reproducibly obtaining a delectable experimental result. Even relatively inexperienced cooks routinely exercise liberties in altering epicurean formulas to suit their own personal tastes, sometimes after several experimental attempts. Of course, once the experiment (dish) is finished, it needs to be tested (tasted), and the result needs to be further analyzed—did it taste good, and if not, how can it be improved?
Cooking is an iterative process of revision and result assessment, which is mainly the approach used in experimental science. Most people realize that obvious physical laws are used in everyday cooking but don’t necessarily think of them as being scientific. By understanding the basic theories, cooking experiments can be refined and one’s overall epicurean skills improved.
The aim of this course will be to understand and apply some basic scientific principles involved in the preparation of food—and in so doing, appreciate the art of cooking through science. Practical demonstrations will be an integral part of the course, as will be the development of a class cookbook and a cook-off competition between class participants.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-11 Ignatius Seminar: Us and Them: The United States and Mexico in Film, Literature, and
Fall only
Few nations live more entangled than the United States and Mexico. We share much of a continent. At the moment of U.S. independence in 1776, Spain ruled far more of the current territory of the U.S. than Britain. Key regions from Texas to California were Mexican to 1847. Today, Mexicans form the largest part of a Hispanic population becoming the largest “minority” in the U.S. – as minorities approach majority status. Meanwhile, Mexicans in Mexico produce energy, food, cars, and workers essential to the U.S. economy in the age of NAFTA and globalization.
Still, we view each other with suspicion. Many Mexicans cannot forget that the U.S. invaded Mexico in 1847 to take the regions from Texas to California – regions essential to U.S. prosperity. Many in the United States see floods of Mexicans coming to work in the U.S. as another invasion, taking jobs and prosperity from “us.”
This seminar looks at key 20th century encounters to explore how people in the United States have understood Mexico and Mexicans. The classic 1950s film “Viva Zapata” was written by John Steinbeck, directed by Elia Kazan, and starred Marlon Brando – all trying to interpret the 1910 Mexican Revolution for Americans facing the Cold War. Later in the decade “Giant” took on the rise of Texas within the U.S., focusing on Anglo-Mexican relations during and after World War II – the challenge brought to national attention by Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. More recently, “La Familia” and other films brought visions of Mexican-American culture to the cinema, while “Traffic” made “us” face the dark side of a drug economy that is not entirely “them.”
This seminar will engage such films along with related literary texts (Steinbeck’s study of Zapata; the autobiography of a Mexican migrant worker), scholarly studies (John Womack’s “Zapata and the Mexican Revolution”; David Montejano’s “Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas”; José Limón’s “American Encounters”), and more to seek a better understanding of how diverse people in the U.S. have understood Mexico and Mexicans. Participants should gain a new understanding of Mexico, the United States, and themselves – wherever their origins and current lives place them in relations of us and them that are ever more entangled.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
IDST-010-12 Ignatius Seminar: Interior Freedom and the Academy
Fall only
The motto of Georgetown University is Utraque Unum, the Latin words for “both into one.” I have always found our motto to capture an essential dimension of the work of the Academy: to take points of tension, to understand what is at stake in the tension, and to seek reconciliation, if possible, between points that seem intractable. Significant points of tension are not always amendable to a wide array of proof, yet we are confronted with the need to make choices – to decide and act. In this Seminar, we will explore a set of tensions that can inform our understanding of our capacity for action and self-knowledge. These tensions are captured in a range of questions that are present in the contemporary Academy:
• What is the purpose of knowledge we seek to acquire in a university? What are we learning and why? Do we pursue knowledge for instrumental purposes or is there an intrinsic value to knowledge pursued for its own sake?
• When we learn something, are we discovering something that is part of the world or are we constructing something new for ourselves?
• What can we know with certainty? What knowledge is relative to our specific time and place and what knowledge has the status of universal or objective knowledge?
• Why are the academic disciplines organized the way they are, and how has this structure evolved? How do we understand the nature of progress in the various disciplines? What differentiates the work of intellectual development and the formation of character?
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
|
 |
Other academic years
There is information about this course number in other academic years:
More information
Look for this course in the schedule of classes.
The academic department web site for this program may provide other details about this course.
|
