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Critical Inquiry (ID1) is a program of seminars for first-year
students in their first semester at the college. Seminars are taught
by faculty from across the disciplines and engage students in
rigorous reading, writing and discussion on varied topics. The goal
of ID1 is to prepare students to participate fully and successfully
in the intellectual community that is Pomona College. Critical
writing is an essential component of that participation, and to that
end ID1 is a writing-intensive course. All sections of ID1 focus on
writing as a recursive process of drafting and revision. All
seminars meet at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Courses
1. Contemporary Israeli Film and Fiction. Mr.
Abecassis. This course will focus on a series of shorter forms
of prose fiction, especially in the post-1967 period. The topics
included in the readings touch some of the deeper questions facing
Israeli society: being Jewish in Israel; Israel and the Diaspora;
the Arab-Israeli conflict; the ethics of war and peace; as well as
love, death and laughter set against the background of Israel today.
Opting for the study of short novels and short stories, we will have
the opportunity to read closely some of the most protean fiction
written by three successive generations of writers, from the early
twentieth century (S. Y. Agnon and Yosef Chaim Brenner); the period
around Israel’s establishment as an independent state in 1948 (S.
Yizhar and Israel Shamir); and today (including Amos Oz, A. B.
Yehoshua, David Grossman, Aharon Appelfeld, and others). We will
also engage with three award-winning recent Israeli movies and
documentaries. All texts in English.
2. Simply Sondheim. Mr. Bailey. The Hollywood release
of Sweeney Todd in 2007 sparked a renewed interest in American
composer Stephen Sondheim, an undisputed giant of twentieth-century
American musical theater. A study of Sondheim’s Broadway shows
offers a glimpse not only into the history of musical theater, but
of the nation which gave it birth and the social complexities that
are celebrated in his lyrics and music. This seminar will provide an
in-depth study of the composer, several of his musicals, and an
opportunity to engage in the artistic process of writing lyrics and
music.
3. Facebook, Fairness, and Forgery. Ms. Chen. The
increasing presence and power of computers have changed the way we
acquire knowledge, think about privacy, keep in touch with friends,
and even find love. But how are moral, social, and political issues
formulated in terms that allow a computer to find the answer? What
does it mean for a computer to “solve” these problems? And are there
problems that computers can't (yet) solve? In this class we'll both
explore the ways in which computers have expanded our horizons and
debate whether there are, or should be, limits on what we approach
computationally. Along the way we'll read fiction and non-fiction,
we'll learn about current research in computer science, and we'll
see how these ideas are used by individuals, companies, and
governments.
4. Imagining the Environment. Ms. Clark. Since Rachel
Carson’s book, Silent Spring, ushered in the modern environmental
movement, nature writing has expanded to include multiple ways of
imagining the natural world and our relationship to it. For
centuries this genre celebrated the beauty of nature and consoled
humans during times of suffering, but now we see the earth itself in
crisis. According to Lawrence Buell, “Apocalypse is the single most
powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental
imagination has at its disposal.” What other tropes do we use to
imagine the natural world and our relationship to it? What are the
implications of imagining the environment as pastoral? polluted? the
wilderness? the fallen Garden of Eden? In this course we will read
canonical (Berry, Carson, Kumin, Leopold, Snyder, Thoreau, Walker,
Woolf) and non-canonical writers (Harjo, Hogan, Ortiz) who explore
the relationship between literature and the physical environment,
considering such issues as biocentrism, ecocriticism, ecofeminism
and environmental justice.
5. The End of Empire: Spain as a Cautionary Tale. Ms.
Coffey. In what was a complete shock for its citizenry, Spain
lost the last vestiges of its empire in 1898 to the United States in
a war Spaniards now refer to as simply “the disaster.” The blow was
devastating, bringing to a sudden end Spain’s once great colonial
empire. Forced to accept its sharply reduced global importance,
Spain began a century-long process of soul-searching, which often
involved violent internal struggles. In this course, students will
examine literature (novels, essays, plays and films) that represent
Spain’s twentieth-century identity crisis. The War of 1898, the
Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, and the new Spanish
democracy serve as the shifting historical background against which
writers and philosophers search for meaning in the modern world. All
texts in English.
6. Life at the Edges: From Deep Sea and Subsurface to Outer
Space. Mr. Crane. The discovery of life at the bottom of
the sea and deep beneath the surface of the earth has changed our
assumptions both about what is necessary for life and about what
forms living creatures can take. Almost all environments on earth
can support life, and the variety of organisms appears endless, but
there do seem to be some immutable laws governing life on earth. In
this seminar, we’ll investigate these laws—is there a minimum size
for a living thing? is there a minimum number of individual “parts”
required for a free-living and replicating organism?—and we’ll think
about how what we know about life on earth might help us to
recognize extraterrestrial life if we saw it. Readings will be drawn
from fields such as deep sea exploration, deep subsurface
microbiology, and extraterrestrial life detection.
7. “Flashpoints” in Rock & Roll History. Mr. Dettmar.
Rock & roll has had a rocky public reception since its earliest
days: Bill Haley & the Comet’s “Rock Around the Clock” provoked
riots across the country, and rock quickly developed a snarling
public image. High-profile dust-ups continue to characterize rock’s
relationship with its public: Amy Winehouse being released from
rehab for her live-via-video rendition of “Rehab” at this year’s
Grammys is only the most recent installment. In this seminar, we
will trace the “scandalous” history of rock & roll via its public
controversies: Dylan “going electric” at Newport, Hendrix burning
his guitar at Monterey, Sinead setting fire to the Pope on Saturday
Night Live, Milli Vanilli revealed as frauds . . . In such moments,
we learn a great deal about what rock hopes to be, about its
intrinsic contradictions and structural instability, and about the
resistance it meets from its own fans.
8. War and Peace. Ms. Dwyer. Leo Tolstoy's War and
Peace has been hailed as “the greatest European novel” and derided
as a “loose baggy monster.” In this seminar, we will immerse
ourselves in this controversial, enduring, and influential novel. We
will see what War and Peace can tell us about Russian history and
culture during the Napoleonic Wars of 1805-1812 (when the novel is
set) and during the revolutionary period of the 1860s (when it was
published). We will also pay close attention to War and Peace as a
work of art: What are the hidden linkages that hold this “monster”
together? Finally, we will consider how Tolstoy can help us grapple
with questions that are (once again) urgent: What is the nature of
war? How does one represent history and experience? What
possibilities are there for individual human action in the world at
large? All texts in English.
9. Philosophies of Education. Ms. Eisenstadt. Since
antiquity, philosophers have reflected on how we learn and why we
sometimes fail to do so. From Plato through Rousseau and bell hooks
to Neil Postman, they’ve asked whether nature trumps nurture, how
humans develop as psychological beings, and what the relationship
between teaching and character formation actually is. To what extent
are children born paragons of innocent virtue, bundles of selfish
inclination, or “blank slates”? To what extent should education be
training in citizenship, and to what extent should it be liberation
from social conditioning? In reading twenty-first century
philosophies of education, we will think in particular about issues
of race and technology: Can education be fair? What kind of testing
fosters learning? How can we best reconcile and integrate the
central goals of education today: the development of critical
thinking, the delivery of information, and – in the great shibboleth
of contemporary educational debates – “access”?
10. Perspectives on Environmental Thinking. Mr. Elderkin.
Why are animals generally given rights, but not trees? Should all
living things be given rights? Even bacteria? What role should
economics play in deciding? What environmental considerations should
be included in economic decisions? Could Thoreau, writing over 150
years ago, really have anything to say on these matters that will
help us make decisions in the twenty-first century? How about Aldo
Leopold or Rachel Carson, 100 years more recently? How can we train
ourselves to have anything better to say? We shall read from these
and others more contemporary, such as religious philosopher John
Cobb and economist Herman Daly. We shall be bold enough to develop
and then assert our own points of view!
11. People, Power, and Religion in the Middle Ages. Mr.
Eldevik. Was there really a cult dedicated to free love in the
Middle Ages? How did a radical preacher and his peasant army nearly
topple the English monarchy in 1381? How did the Crusades begin as
part of a religious reform movement but become a vehicle for a
full-scale invasion of the Middle East by Christian knights? This
course will examine the diverse worlds of medieval religion with a
focus on ideas about social power, justice, and reform. In the
context of medieval Christianity, religious ideologies were not only
mechanisms for dominance and social control; they also helped form a
powerful discourse of resistance and popular dissent in early
European society, though not necessarily with positive outcomes.
Through readings of original sources from the period, as well as
current scholarship, we will attempt to understand the intersection
of faith and politics in the Middle Ages as ordinary people
experienced it.
12. Baseball in America. Mr. Foster. Why is baseball
America’s game? This course will evaluate the cultural, economic,
historical, and political aspects of Major League Baseball. The
purpose of this course is to determine if baseball is more than a
“sport” in America. In addition to reading and writing about
baseball, each student will have to attend at least one major and
minor league game. All students will be required to keep score on a
baseball scorecard.
13. Pomona Goes Green. Mr. Gorse. The Earth Charter
states that “we stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a
time when humanity must choose its future.” How do our choices – as
individuals in our daily lives, and as members of the planned
community of Pomona College – affect this future? How does the
concept and goal of “sustainability” unite academic, artistic,
pragmatic, and social endeavors? In this course, we will investigate
these questions, using Pomona College as our case study: How can we
make this a more sustainable “campus,” and how can and should such a
campus be a model for our global future? In our search for answers
we will read authors such as Italo Calvino, Leo Marx, and William
McDonough; write about campus organizations and initiatives; and
engage with scholars in the field at the Hart Institute series on
“Environmental History.”
14. Election 2008. Mr. Green. What difference will the
election make? That is, what policies are the major candidates for
President likely to pursue? What are the advantages and
disadvantages of those policies? In pursuing these questions, we
will choose a few significant areas. As I write this in the spring,
Iraq and health care are the leading contenders. Separate groups
will research and analyze each candidate’s views, building arguments
about the feasibility and desirability of the various programs.
We’ll thus develop research questions and arguments by exchanging
work in progress, and will find that our investigations take us
beyond downloading position papers from the web. Strong partisans of
one party or the other may enjoy the course, but I should warn you
that I will encourage you especially to research the other side’s
views.
15. Space: To Boldly Go? Mr. Grosfils. With an initial
robotic exploration of the solar system only decades from
completion, humankind is on the brink of launching itself out into
space. This forces us to consider a fundamental issue that has, as
yet, remained unresolved: Is human exploration of the solar system
something we should pursue? Science may provide the means, but it
will not provide the right to move out into space; that is a
decision we face, a course our society must evaluate. What’s out
there that’s worth the risk? What are the physical, economical,
political, scientific, religious, and ethical costs and implications
if we choose to proceed? What are the costs and implications,
perhaps not least to the human spirit, if we don’t? In our
exploration of these questions, we will strive to improve our
insight into how the interplay between scientific advances and
philosophical, political, and religious values affects our lives.
16. The Heart of a Doctor. Ms. Hoopes. In literature,
doctors are often portrayed as caring deeply about patients. But as
medicine becomes more complex and technology-driven, the ability of
a doctor to feel empathy towards patients can be compromised. In
this seminar, we’ll read the Hippocratic Oath and consider the
hearts of today’s doctors. We’ll think about how medical training
affects students, and what we ask when we expect doctors – who
frequently must watch their patients die – to respond to the
feelings of patients and families. We’ll consider what different
cultures expect of doctors, and the challenges doctors face when
caring for patients who come from cultures radically different from
their own. To increase our insight, we’ll read selections from
Robert Marion’s Intern Blues, Pauline Chen’s Final Exam, Lori
Alvord’s The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, Abraham Verghese’s My Own
Country, Dang Thuy Tram’s Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, Tracy
Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, and other sources.
17. Cultural Psychology. Mr. Hurley. We begin with the
assumption that the culture that one experiences
(socio-cultural-historical context) has a primary and powerful
influence on perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral development.
Since context is literally everything, everywhere, across time, how
can the science of psychology expect to study it in any meaningful
way? This seminar takes an exploratory look at the how the recent
Cultural Psychology movement fights to avoid being overwhelmed by
the sheer magnitude of what it hopes to study by thinking outside
the discipline, compromising when necessary, and otherwise letting
the questions (rather than traditional methodologies) lead the way.
Students will learn the structure and style of writing/inquiry in
the social sciences.
18. The European Enlightenment. Mr. Kates. European
society in the eighteenth century was riddled with inequalities of
all kinds: religious bigotry and political despotism, as well as
racism, colonial slavery, gender inequality, and class strife. The
writers and artists associated with the Enlightenment proposed
radical ways to address these problems. These proposals addressed
both the political and social realms, imagining new forms of
friendship and marriage, as if those relationships might constitute
analogies to politics itself. In doing so, they blurred the lines
between the governmental and the social, the political and the
private, and established a moral foundation for our modern era.
Readings will include primary works from the period by such authors
as Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Richardson.
19. Dangerous Books. Ms. McWilliams. In 2005, the
journal Human Events released a list of the “most harmful books of
the 19th and 20th centuries.” The existence of this and similar
lists begs the questions: What does it mean to say that a book is
harmful – or dangerous? Once we deem a book dangerous, how should we
treat it? Readings will include selections from Darwin’s Descent of
Man, Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Hitler’s Mein Kampf,
Kinsey’s The Kinsey Report, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,
among others. Students will also research and write about dangerous
books of their choosing.
20. Creativity in Science. Ms. Perini. Scientists work
with data: their observations. But one of the most striking things
about science is the generation of new ideas that are distinctively
different from prior hypotheses and the data itself. How do
scientists go beyond what they already know – beyond what they have
seen – to think up new hypotheses? Are scientific discoveries truly
creative, or are they merely valuable but inevitable results from
using scientific methods? When powerful new ideas and methods are
generated in science, is that primarily due to special
characteristics of individual scientists, like genius, or to social
factors, like scientific institutions or cultural context? How does
scientific creativity compare to creativity in the arts and other
endeavors? We will consider cases, including early insights about
the cause of planetary motion and the double-helix model of DNA, and
draw on the history and philosophy of science, cognitive science,
and representations of scientists and creativity in popular media.
21. Mathematics and Music: A Marriage of Muses. Ms.
Radunskaya. Mathematics and music have been intertwined since
the beginning of recorded history. The Pythagoreans considered both
mathematics and music a form of mysticism; and the two disciplines
share at least one muse, Polyhmnia, the muse of “many hymns” and of
sacred geometry. More recent mathematical giants, such as Euler,
Newton and Einstein, were also talented musicians, while great
composers, such as Bach and Mozart, were formidable and creative
puzzle-solvers. We will explore the connections between mathematics
and music by listening to a selection of pieces, by discussing what
others have written on the subject, and by creating our own musical
manifestations of mathematical ideas. Musical examples will span the
centuries from the Renaissance to the computer age; readings will
include both fiction and non-fiction, history, anecdote, and
speculation. No special expertise is required beyond high school
mathematics and an enjoyment of music.
22. Music and the Order of the Universe. Mr. Rockwell.
Philosophers and scientists throughout history have worked under the
premise that the universe is fundamentally musical – Plato, Ptolemy,
Boethius, Kepler, and Newton all regarded the study of musical
harmony to be a key to understanding natural order. How, then, do
harmonic proportions, mathematical structures, musical performances,
and the cosmos relate? What accounts for the prevalence and eventual
decline of the unified study of these topics? We will address these
questions by tracing ideas of music and natural order from Greek
music theory through the Scientific Revolution. We will also utilize
mathematical and cosmological conceptions of music to analyze
examples by Bach, Bartók, Hindemith, Pink Floyd, and Madonna, as
well as the soundtrack to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
23. The Ethics and Poetics of Friendship. Ms. von
Schwerin-High. We speak of a “fair weather friend” dismissively,
believing that true friendship doesn’t diminish during hard times.
But Hannah Arendt points out that the ancient Greeks understood
friendship as a relationship that legitimately flourished during
times of good fortune or prosperity. What, then, is friendship, and
how are friendships represented? Can a friendship be used
strategically to further goals that lie outside of the friendship’s
circumference, or does the very idea of strategy undermine the
notion of friendship? In this course, we will examine a range of
literary, epistolary, and theoretical accounts of friendship,
including examples from Antiquity, the Enlightenment, Romanticism,
and Postmodernism. Authors also include Aristotle, Schiller, Goethe,
Bettine von Arnim, G. E. Lessing, Orhan Pamuk, and Philip Roth. By
writing critical essays that put these constructions of friendship
into conversation, you will ultimately develop your own
understanding of what it means to write about a friend as well as to
write as a friend.
24. DNA in the USA: Science, Perception, and Policy. Mr.
Seligman. The United Sates is the world’s leader both in
scientific research and development and in the training of research
scientists, but according to a 2007 Gallop Poll, about 50% of
Americans do not believe in evolution. Situated between these two
extremes, many Americans find themselves simultaneously excited and
made uncomfortable by biotechnological advances. How, then, can we
rationally craft laws and public policy that govern this complex and
ever-changing field? This course will explore intersections between
biotechnology and policy in this country. We will first consider the
Eugenics movement of the early part of the twentieth century, where
scientific ideas merged with societal biases to create an
environment in which egregious laws and policies could flourish.
What lessons from that period can we draw upon as we deal with
contemporary issues such as transgenic foods, gene patents, stem
cell research, and gene therapy?
25. The Wilderness, Paradise on Earth? Mr. Steinmetz.
Environmentalists see the preservation and extension of wilderness
areas as necessary for the environmental health of the planet.
Planners, by contrast, view them as impediments to the prudent
utilization of limited strategic resources such as lumber and oil.
This seminar will focus on America’s stewardship of wilderness
areas, examining questions about their political, philosophical, and
physical place in the nation today. What is the distinctive ecology
of the wilderness? What spiritual and cultural values does it
embody? What is the best approach to its management? The class will
explore these questions through the close reading and discussion of
classics by proponents of the wilderness, such as John Muir and
Edward Abbey, and by experiencing the wilderness directly through
field trips to Joshua Tree National Park and a nearly pristine site
in the San Gabriel Mountains.
26. Languages of the Stage. Mr. Taylor. How does a
play mean? What are those people up there on the stage really trying
to tell us? This seminar is an exploration of the various means of
expression utilized by artists in creating works for drama, dance,
and musical theatre. Our exploration will focus on a detailed
examination of theatrical language in all of its manifestations –
including the text-based language of the playwright; the verbal and
physical language of the actor and director; and the visual language
of the designers. We will also investigate the aural language of the
theatrical composer; the kinetic language of the dancer and
choreographer; the analytical language of the critic; and the
experiential language of the audience. A key component of the
seminar will be attendance at live performances of drama, dance and
musical theatre, both on-campus and at professional venues
throughout the Los Angeles area.
27. Light, Perception, and Art. Mr. Whitaker. How does
the Mona Lisa smile so coyly? Why does the sun in a Monet painting
seem to glisten? In this course we will attempt to answer these
questions by learning how light interacts with matter and how we
have evolved to process light information. We will begin by learning
how early twentieth-century physicists described light, and we’ll
use that knowledge to help us understand how light interacts with
matter – and how images are formed on our retinas. We’ll then
explore the more recent breakthroughs in neuroscience that describe
how this information is processed into “images” in our minds.
Ultimately, we’ll think about how painters such as da Vinci, Monet,
Mondrian, and Close used an intuitive understanding of light/body
interaction to create images we find beautiful and compelling.
28. Graphic Novels. Ms. Worley. Is there a difference
between graphic novels and comic books, and if so, what is it?
Answering these two questions (however provisionally) is the central
task of this class. So that we can be precise about our terms, we
will begin by looking at the history of comic books, from the Bayeux
Tapestry to the Death of Superman, as well as the history and theory
of the novel. We will then read and discuss a slew of comic
books/graphic novels (including web comics), as well as some
theoretical essays that will help us focus our thinking. Finally, we
will refine and articulate our understanding of the genre as well as
pursue individual research questions. By the end of the term, we
will have had a good time reading comics, and will also have given a
lot of thought to narrative theory, word-text interaction, and the
future of the book.
29. Globalization: Good or Evil? Ms. Bromley. In 1999,
Seattle was temporarily shut down as thousands of people from around
the world protested a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Such
demonstrations are now commonplace at high-level international
economic meetings, suggesting widespread agreement that
globalization is dangerous and must be stopped. At the same time,
recent pools show that most Americans believe that globalization
benefits this country, and the World Bank argues that it reduces
poverty and increases overall welfare globally. In this seminar, we
will seek to understand the benefits and dangers of
globalization—economic, cultural, environmental, and political—by
considering three specific cases: McDonald’s, movies, and climate
change. How do we determine which aspects of globalization are good
and which are evil? In grappling with these questions, we’ll read
contemporary popular, political, and scientific texts, including
Fast Food Nation, Jihad vs. McWorld, An Inconvenient Truth, and One
World: The Ethics of Globalization.
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