English

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Freshman Writing Seminar:  The Heroic Temper  -- A Study of Homer’s Iliad andOdyssey – EN 102
Rebecca Ries

A study of the ancient Greeks reveals their deep-rooted need to think about the most fundamental of human questions—what does it mean to be a living, breathing human being confronted with mortality?  The task of being human was, for the ancient Greeks, the task of a lifetime, wrought with the difficulties of controlling and shaping and understanding their human urges.

In our study, one of our primary goals will be to come to an understanding of this ancient culture through what they valued as recorded in the mythology surrounding the heroes—their actions and the effects of their actions.  And we can do this with an eye toward our own culture:  How far removed are we from the obstacles confronting the Greeks?  What in their experience continues to overlap with our own?  What can these ancient heroes teach us about the human condition?

It is in this last question that we will begin to think about how our study of the heroic temper ties into the larger goal for your liberal arts education here at Butler. For it is with the ancient Greeks that the liberal arts themselves were first conceived, fashioned, and articulated, and later formalized as the very foundation upon which western society became educated, the foundation upon which mankind could be liberated from the shackles of their ignorance.  For the ancient Greek, the key to man’s freedom lay in the workings and development of the human mind.  

Freshman Writing Seminar:  Double Play – EN 102
Robert Stapleton 

Liberal Arts Objective

            Our initial purpose is to interrogate some of the larger, cultural values and meanings implicit within the sporting world. We will examine both how athletics arrive at symbolic value and how, if at all, such moments are reflective of social mores. Aside from reading and writing, we will accomplish this by engaging in debate and public speaking as analytical processes. This collective, ongoing discussion in our community will foster as many questions as answers. Accordingly, this method of inquiry will begin to assume the framework of investigative thinking and living. The Liberal Arts Education asks that you perceive the world and its machinations thoughtfully and critically. You will do exactly this in class on a daily basis and, hopefully, extend this reflective process into your daily life. 

Freshman Writing Seminar:  The Art of Literature Now – EN 102 Grant Vecera

Because quality writing grows out of quality thinking, this will be a thinking person’s class.  An excellent essay is a pleasure to read, not merely for its grammatical competence but because it offers intellectually & emotionally compelling content.  An excellent essay grips and enriches its readers, and it leaves them feeling grateful for having had the opportunity to read it. 

In order to write excellent essays, a person has to possess excellent reading abilities, which means she should read high quality material regularly and with tremendous intellectual attention.  A good reader habitually allows herself much quiet time with which to contemplate what she has been reading.  In academic circles we often call this “intellectual engagement,” or “active thinking,” and it is believed to be a cultivated discipline that develops slowly over time and enhances the overall quality of its adherent’s life.  Accordingly, much class time will be spent this semester in analyzing and discussing our emotional and intellectual responses to what we read.  Each of your own essays, for the most part, will function as a vehicle with which you will analyze, develop, and refine a specific opinion or theory of your own in response to other viewpoints or theories that emerge out of our routine in-class conversations this semester.

In order to get off on the right foot we should all recognize that our seminar is in fact a community to which we all agree to contribute in order to enrich the intellectual growth of one another.  In my opinion, you, as an individual, will benefit in direct correlation to the extent to which you contribute to the quality of the class as a whole.  In fact, this will probably be true for most or all college classes you take and most or all cooperative projects with which you become involved.

American Literature Survey 1 – EN 245
Honors Seminar:  Great Books – HN 200
Grace Farrell

This course is part of the Liberal Arts curriculum in the Humanities, which seeks to develop judgment based upon a depth of historical knowledge rather than to teach technological expertise or skill sets useful in the job market. My assumption is that it is necessary for educated people to understand the traditions that their culture has valued, to understand the traditions of other cultures, and to explore cultural intersections. Just as necessary is the development of critical perspectives on those traditions. Thus we seek

to understand how traditions are constructed retrospectively, creating points of origin that justify unexamined hierarchies of value

to understand how tradition usurps or eliminates that which might challenge those hierarchies

to understand how tradition shapes--both enlarges and limits--one’s sense of self and other.

British Literature Survey One, Beowulf to Blake – EN 265
Marshall Gregory

Literary Content: Students will become familiar with the dominant genres, major authors, conventions, and traditions of each literary period. They will also gain knowledge of some of the social, political, and intellectual contexts within which the literature of these periods was composed and read.  Finally, students will study the technical vocabulary necessary for analyzing literature formally (as art) in lecture, in oral presentations, and in written papers.

Liberal arts issues and contexts:

Students will consider the literary works they read in relation to suffering, as in suffering from the failure of plans and ambitions, from old age, from loss, and from the foreknowledge of death.

The liberal arts objectives of the course also include students working to develop their distinctive human capacities for practical reasoning, for moral deliberation, for imaginative transposition, for introspective thought, and for responding to artistic language with sensitivity and understanding.

Shakespeare – EN 363
William Walsh

LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES:  The college stands for traditional values in education, disciplining and empowering students’ minds through engagement with texts, critical analysis of them, and coherent written and spoken statements off those interpretations. More traditional than a Shakespeare course the college does not get. While there may be people who claim to live meaningful lives without reading Shakespeare, fortunately we are not among them. Harold Bloom claims that Shakespeare created our modern sense of personhood (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) and recently there has been a spate of books about Shakespeare and business management (I did an honors course on these myself). So much for the humanities not being relevant to the ‘real world.’  We could make the case that the humanities are the real world, the space in which we actually live and seek to create meaning in our lives. Let us hope that serious engagement with these plays will enrich our lives.

Junior Research Seminar – EN 390
Jason Goldsmith

Goals: The Junior Research Seminar is meant to prepare you for advanced study in English by developing your research and writing skills. Our primary goal, then, will be to identify and explore interpretive problems in literary texts. But by asking you to move beyond first impressions, to attend carefully to details, to submit the familiar to critical investigation, to think deeply about contradictions and consequences, to seek out, engage with, and respond to others, and to imagine alternative ways of looking at the world, this class will also contribute to your liberal arts education more broadly. The liberal arts tradition emphasizes the development of the individual as an engaged, conscientious, thoughtful, and active participant in his or her community. The skills you learn in this class cross disciplinary and professional boundaries and will serve you well in whatever you pursue after college.

The Medieval Dream Vision – EN 421
William Watts

A course in the Medieval Dream Vision is, of necessity, rooted in a rich Liberal Arts tradition.  Indeed, the medieval constructs of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy) gave rise to the Seven Liberal Arts, and shaped subsequent ideas about the disciplines studied at university. Several of the authors we will study in this course—including Macrobius, Dante and Jean de Meun—comment directly on the Liberal Arts, while several others—including Chaucer, the Pearl- poet and Christine de Pizan—clearly locate themselves within an evolving liberal arts tradition.  Over the course of the semester, then, we will have the opportunity to consider how writers in the Middle Ages thought about the Liberal Arts, and to compare their ideas to our own.

The Fifties in American Literature and Culture – EN 493
Hilene Flanzbaum

This course takes an interdisciplinary look at the decade that inaugurated contemporary, as well as postmodern, American mores and values.  Through fictional, poetic, cinematic, historical, sociological, psychological and political texts, the student will use tools of critical analysis to examine how each of these generic approaches contributes to a reading of a clearly defined period in history.  In class, we will work towards the knowledge that cultural norms and imperatives are historically and contingently created.  In doing so, the student will gain the opportunity to critique the assumptions that his or her time period cultivates, as well as questioning the “certainties” of national identity in the contemporary period.

Liberal Arts Matters