| Course Title | Description |
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ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL ERAS |
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Medieval Literature |
To get you psyched for this course, read the first three sentences in the description of my undergrad English course with the same title (English 316). Yes, indeed, you’ll come face to face with the Middle Ages itself—not the Middle Ages as fantasized by Spenser or Walpole or Tennyson or whoever. Coursework will include five informal ungraded one-page papers, a final essay exam, a 15-20 page final paper, and an informal ungraded script-in-hand performance of one of the plays. |
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Classical Political Theory |
The leading figures of Western political theory from Plato to Machiavelli. The course will look at Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.
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EARLY MODERN ERA |
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Shakespeare |
This course is devoted to the study of Shakespeare, from his earliest poems and plays of the 1590s through to the end of his writing career in 1613. We will read a wide range of works actively and critically, with a special focus on historicizing Shakespeare’s works and the culture of early modern theater. The range of topics we will examine include (among others) authorship, textuality, history of the book, gender, material culture, race, travel, emergent science, and performance. Students will be asked to offer one in-class presentation, write a series of short response papers throughout the semester, and submit a conference-length essay for a final project.
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AGE OF REVOLUTIONS |
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Comparative History: Modernity and Its Critics in the 19th Century
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By permission of instructor only. See https://alees.rutgers.edu/ for syllabus adn course description and contact Dr. Lees at alees@camden.rutgers.edu for more information. |
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The Life and Writing of Whitman |
In this course we will undertake intensive study of Walt Whitman’s body of writing, with emphasis on how it connects to his experiences in Camden in his late career. We will pay special attention to the digital worlds that Whitman now inhabits and explore local archives and museums that maintain the memory of Whitman. As a class, we will be part of a larger project (an NEH digital humanities grant) that will have us engaged with students at multiple universities (all involved in study of Whitman) in a concurrent, connected, semester-long inquiry into the relationship between a specific locale and a particular phase of the poet’s work. We will use open-source software to collaborate in an online learning environment, and each student will perform original research and publish it electronically through the project website.
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STUDIES OF THE 20TH CENTURY |
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Studies in Fiction: James Joyce |
No modern writer, in any language, has been more influential than the Irishman who set out to “forge the uncreated conscience of [his] race.” In this course we’ll read Joyce’s three greatest achievements, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, with emphasis on his contributions as a realist, prose stylist, humorist, and innovator. During our ten weeks on Ulysses, we’ll situate Joyce’s great epic in numerous contexts: Anglo-Irish relations, the Irish literary revival, modernism and postmodernism, and others. One or two short essays, a substantial term paper, probably a final exam.
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Modern Art 1940-1980 |
Art in America and Europe from 1940 to 1980. Includes discussion of surrealist, abstract expressionist, minimalist, pop, op, and conceptual art; happenings; and site-specific and direct metal sculpture. |
CULTURAL DIVERSITY |
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British Literature: Romantic Women |
This course will examine the significant, but historically overlooked, contribution women writers made to the development of Romanticism. During our investigation we will encounter formal and thematic innovations women made in a variety of genres, including poetry, non-fiction prose, and the novel. Authors will include Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Dorothy Wordsworth among others. |
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Children and Cross Cultural Development |
The richness and diversity of children’s development is best understood by examining socialization norms and child-rearing practices of the world’s various societies. The course focuses on the rich anthropological literature on children in different cultures, but considers as well, cross-cultural psychological and sociological investigations. |
| Contemporary Women and Art Advanced Undergraduate Course 56:606:542:01 Cross-listed: 50:082:305:01 T/Th 1:30-2:50PM Professor Martin Rosenberg mrosenbe@camden.rutgers.edu |
A thematic and chronological study of women as artists, as images in works of art, and an examination of gender issues in art. |
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Politics of Developing Nations
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The “Politics of Developing Nations” seminar emphasizes domestic political development and economic growth, in the context of a highly globalized international context. The central topics of the course include political institutional development, democratization, political economy, the role of the state, ethnic conflict, scarcity and conflict, agricultural reform and urbanization, technology transfer, the use of force to implement policy, and external influences on domestic development. The objectives for studying these issues are to understand the complexities of development, increase critical thinking skills, improve analytic writing skills, gain general appreciation for knowledge and specific mastery of the course material, and explore how the developing world is relevant to our lives as well as our domestic and international politics. The “Politics of Developing Nations” seminar is an advanced course with writing-intensive requirements, including regular critical analysis assignments and substantial writing projects in preparation of an Honors Thesis. The course concludes with a discussion of the contemporary debates and modern dilemmas of development, as well as the prospects for future global conflict and cooperation.
Students will need a special permission number from to sign up for this course. |
STUDIES OF IDEAS |
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Is the Universe Elegant?
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This seminar focuses on building a conceptual understanding of important recent developments in Physics. The twin pillars of Modern Physics, Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, are fundamentally incompatible and break down in extreme environments such as found in Black Holes. More recently, String Theory offers the hope of uniting these two theories, but presents certain challenges and problems of its own, leading some eminent Physicists to dismiss it as “Philosophy” rather than a proper scientific theory. In this seminar, we will review Classical and Modern Physics with as little mathematical development as possible. Wherever possible we will “do” Physics through interactive exercises. Finally, we will discuss the limits of scientific knowledge and consider the intersection between Physics and Philosophy, particularly with respect to questions involving epistemology and ontology. |
ARTS AND LITERATURE |
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Southern American Literature |
Fraught with mourning for a lost way of life, biting irony, freakish characters, odd obsessions, gothic grotesque, and violence presented in an aesthetic manner, Southern literature has a beauty all its own. In many ways, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind crystallizes the “lost cause” theme of Southern literature. In this course, we will encounter a literary tradition in which Southern authors express their self-consciousness about the rise of a new, modern world and the dissolution of the Old South. The places and people that represent the Old South disappear, over and over again, in dramatic scenes of natural disaster or murder. We begin with the destruction of the family and manor in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839, 1845), then watch the Old South try to stave off the new rhetoric of science and law in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893), a viciously satirical novel that applies “the Prince and the Pauper” paradigm to racial ambiguity in slavery-ridden America. We will then look at the floods of modernity in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1900) and the car accidents on Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932), both novels awakening and driving the coming Southern Renaissance. Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz (1932) will give us the inverse side of the Jazz Age, and William Faulkner’s demanding epic Absalom Absalom! (1936) will disturb us to the core. The hostile humor of Caldwell will have prepared us for the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Porter. We may sample the poetry of Robert Penn Warren and the plays of Tennessee Williams, as well as the unpalatable violence of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. We then turn to the various murders that only punctuate the end of a way of life in Carson McCullers’sReflections in a Golden Eye (1942) (among other McCullers’s work), Harper Lee’sTo Kill A Mockingbird (1960), Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), and John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994). Berendt asks what “queer mystery” lurks in Savannah. The answer is a question: the question of whether the Old South can be restored—and by whom. Requirements include a presentation on the historical, literary, and cultural context of a particular state (with peers); a 12-pp research paper; ongoing active participation; and an exam. Each is 25% of your grade.
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POLITICS AND SOCIETY |
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Issues in Health Policy |
This course introduces the framework of policy analysis through which students will explore the complexities of health policy and the challenges of health reform. Students will analyze the major health reform initiatives of recent years, in the context of the historical evolution of US health policy and the nature of political decision making in the US. |
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Contemporary Propaganda |
In the 21st century ideas, religious and secular, are competing for global dominance. Military force to impose one value system over another is increasingly stymied by asymmetric warfare and low intensity conflict, as well as by the preference of the international community for peaceful dialog over force. Since propaganda has emerged as an increasingly potent weapon in the war of ideas and this course will define propaganda, examine and analyze how and why it is disseminated, and investigate whether democracies or dictatorships are better at conducting propaganda campaigns. |
| Law and American Civilization Advanced Undergraduate Course 56:606:622:01 Cross-listed: 50:790:409:01, 50:050:201:06 MW 1:20 – 2:40PM Professor Alan Tarr tarr@camden.rutgers.edu |
An introduction to the history and philosophy of law and American legal institutions. |
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Colloquium in Urban History
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Evaluation of the urbanization process in America, with attention to spatial development, social and economic processes, ethnicity, mobility, and politics. |
RESEARCH IN LIBERAL STUDIES |
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56:606:689:01 |
Independent study of a special interest to the student, under supervision of an advisor chosen in consultation with the program director. |
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56:606:690:01 |
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MATRICULATION CONTINUED |
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56:606:800:01
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If for some reason, you cannot register for courses in Fall 2008, you should register for Matriculation Continued. You pay only a $57 fee, which allows you to remain a member in good standing of the Liberal Studies Program, use the Rutgers library and other facilities, and saves you from the trouble of being re-admitted in the following semester. |
Go to Graduate School–Camden site
Master of Arts in Liberal Studies
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