Core Curriculum Courses

Chris Forhan

The liberal arts are about developing your capacity to think, which means not just improving your knowledge of humans' intellectual and artistic creations but also nurturing your curiosity and your senses of wonder, of mystery, and of doubt. This particular section of the First Year Seminar focuses on the work of poets and fiction writers who will be visiting Butler's campus over the next few months, people whose vocation it is to experience something essential to the liberal arts: a confrontation with-and interrogation of-one's own independent and private sense of what it means to be a human being in the world. Through interacting with these writers and studying their works, we will be inspired to do the same. Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, who will be our final visiting writer this semester, speaks of how poetry is one of the forces that nourish our "inner" or "spiritual" life. It is this inner life that the liberal arts are attentive to, so I will give Zagajewski the last word:

. . . [T]his invisible, discrete inner life is, in its passion, its naïveté, its bitterness . . .and its indefatigable, vivifying enthusiasm, the final and indispensable energy . . . propelling both poetry and people. . . . Contemporary mass culture, entertaining and at times harmless as it may be, is marked by its complete ignorance of the inner life. Not only can it not create this life; it drains it, corrodes it, undermines it. . . . I see the spiritual life, the inner voice that speaks to us, or perhaps only whispers, in Polish, English, Russian, or Greek, as the mainstay and foundation of our freedom, the indispensable territory of reflection and independence shielding us from the mighty blows and temptations of modern life.

Stuart Glennan

The Liberal Arts: The term 'liberal arts' comes to us from the medieval university, where the seven liberal arts formed the core curriculum for free persons - as contrasted with the vocational education of servants, laborers and tradesmen. In its time it was an education for a small elite. While the content of liberal arts curricula have changed a great deal since that time, liberal arts education still at its heart seeks to provide students with the capacities they require to be free and autonomous agents - people capable of making intellectually and morally responsible decisions regarding their lives and of actively and fruitfully participating in the communities to which they belong. To the extent that we think that all human beings deserve such freedom, we should aspire to liberal education for all.

The capacities of a liberally educated person that we should hope to develop are, first of all, concrete communication skills - the ability to read, write and speak. But for these skills to really make anyone free, they must be coupled with the ability to responsibly choose for oneself what to believe and what to value. In this course we shall develop these most important abilities by entering into conversations amongst ourselves and with some great writers who represent the most significant strands of western culture - the literary, philosophical and scientific tradition of ancient Greece, the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, and the thought of the scientific revolution and enlightenment. These writers all are concerned with questions of what to believe, what to doubt, and where to put one's faith. As we consider their texts, we will increase our capacity to make choices for ourselves.

Terri Jett

This course will be taught with the premise that acknowledges the true value of what students learn in this class will not be realized until one is fully and independently engaged in this diverse and complex society and world. By looking at the concept of the "American Dream" from the perspective and voice of a group of people who are systematically and deliberately denied its full actualization, students will eventually understand that a liberal arts foundation is only as good as its values of justice, equality, free expression and multiculturalism, for example, are put into practice. By the end of the year students of this course will be more versed in listening, observing and discerning whether or not Americans truly live by the very creeds they hold as superior. Quite simply it is a call to question.

Through the written and the spoken words of black women, themselves, we will explore the following:

1. Some general history that is shared among black women;
2. Interlocking gender, racial and economic issues that have and continue to marginalize black women;
3. How the experiences of black women have collectively shaped their distinctive political outlook;
4. The complex relationships between black women and black men, white men and white women, and
5. The womanist perspective

Norman Minnick

This seminar will focus on the works of contemporary writers as an introduction to the vitality of the liberal arts. Texts for the course are chosen primarily from the works of writers who will be coming to campus during the year as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.

Topics will be introduced that will allow you to reflect on the "big questions" about yourself, your community and your world. With the proper attention and mindfulness you will gain an understanding of the liberal arts as a vital and evolving tradition. Through careful and open reflection on questions of values and norms, you will develop the capacity to read and think critically, to write clear and persuasive expository and argumentative essays, and to strengthen your capacity for a more enlivened creativity.

We will engage in the writing of contemporary writers, and will have the opportunity for direct interaction with the authors themselves. By our involvement with the fiction and non-fiction in this course, we will broaden our scope of vision and realize what is means to be an active participant in our complicated and diverse world. In addition, we will be memorizing and reciting poems by the poets in our course. This ongoing exercise will provide us access to the complex emotional pathways that can enable the Dionysian nerve hidden in each of us to surface and be stimulated. As a result, you will have the extraordinary experience of knowing a poem directly, on your own, that is part and parcel of any and all learning, at every stage of life.

Robert Stapleton

Our initial objective is to interrogate the boundaries of redemption for characters engaged in criminal activity. In doing so, we will inspect the framework of religious, ethical, and legal values that define those boundaries. More importantly, though, this investigation will begin to shed light on the root system for the values and ethics we each bring with us to the classroom. A Liberal Arts education seeks to have students locate themselves in society as independent thinkers and responsible citizens. Training our collective focus on compromised individual behaviors against dominant value systems will beg clarity and meaning for each of us as enlightened writers, scholars, and humans.

Robert Stapleton

Our collective discussions will trace not only the layered meanings of the journey experience in storytelling, but will also seek to compass the personal journeys we all undertake in our daily lives. We will begin by honing our skills of critical analysis and insight through discussion and composition, then move into personal examination by casting ourselves as the 'hero' in an extended research narrative. Along the way we will practice not only finding answers, but also locating questions that we didn't know we had. 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 then extend this reflective process into your daily life.

Kristen Swenson

A liberal arts education prepares students for a lifelong commitment to critical inquiry, participatory citizenship, and awareness of lives and communities beyond our own. In this course, we will explore issues of gender, class, race, culture, and identity as we question and interrogate our commonly held assumptions. We will develop our critical thinking, writing, and speaking skills in order to communicate differing viewpoints ethically and civilly. Through the biographies and memoirs that we will be reading, we will explore the journey that leads many from personal realization to political activation.

Paul Valliere

First Year Seminar: Faith, Doubt and Reason is your first course in Butler University's liberal arts core curriculum. The liberal arts are a set of educational practices deriving from the medieval universities and Renaissance colleges of Europe. The mainspring of the liberal arts is the creative tension between three distinct but mutually relevant traditions of learning:

1. classical learning, based on the literary and philosophical heritage of Greece and Rome;
2. biblical learning, based on the Hebrew and Greek scriptures and theirinterpretation in Jewish and Christian tradition;
3. scientific learning, based on the systematic investigation of nature that arose in the late Middle Ages and continues through the scientific revolutions of modern times including our own.

In CC 101 you will deal with all three strands of the liberal arts tradition. Among the texts you will encounter are Genesis, Job, and the Song of Solomon from the Bible, and Euthyphro, a dialogue by Plato portraying how Socrates wrestled with religious questions. You will also deal with a philosophical response to the rise of modern science, René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. Finally, you will read literary masterpieces in which you will see all three strands of liberal learning woven together in dynamic and entertaining ways.

Bill Watts

This course is deeply invested in the liberal arts tradition, as it originated in European universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and as it continues to evolve today. Several of the authors we will read in the course, including Plato, Aristotle, Ovid and Virgil, have been part of the curriculum from the beginning, and were deeply influential in defining the very idea of the liberal arts. Later writers we will read, including Montaigne, Flaubert, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, have developed, deepened, extended and reshaped in significant ways our understanding of an enduring liberal arts tradition. Moreover, the skills and habits we will cultivate in studying these works, involving historical investigation, literary interpretation, critical and independent thinking, and the clear and effective expression of ideas, are central to the practice of the liberal arts. For a fuller explanation of how this and other courses at Butler University seek to realize the ideals of a liberal arts education, please see the statement "Liberal Arts across the Curriculum," which is posted at /las/LibArtsMattersHm.aspx.

Chris Bungard

The stories of the ancient Greeks continue to occupy the modern imagination. With the success of recent films such as Troy and 300, we should ask ourselves what continues to be relevant from these ancient lives to our modern experience as human beings. Greek myths are filled with unbelievable actions and events, and yet we continue to turn to their cultural legacy, which has inspired writers, artists, and musicians for thousands of years.

A study of the literature of ancient Greece reveals a persistent question - what does it mean to be a human, living, breathing, mortal? The stories told by the Greeks are packed with the conflicts of individuals not only against their military adversaries, but also with their fellow soldiers, friends, family, and gods. It is this last element that will be of particular interest to us. As immortals, the gods provide a productive foil to the mortal heroes.

We will begin with Homer's account of the Trojan War, coming to an understanding of the limits of proper human action. This will allow us the opportunity to consider the consequences of passing beyond normal human limits. We will then turn to the Greek tragedians. This will allow us to consider how playwrights such as Aeschylus and Euripides reconsidered and reimagined previous understandings of humanity. Finally, we will return to Homer's account of the story of Odysseus, a narrative that will allow us to follow an extended investigation into the extraordinary life of one mortal.

In following these narratives, we will be interested in how these narratives help us understand our experience as humans. What overlap is there between the conflicts of the ancient Greeks and our modern world? Where do the values of ancient heroes and our modern conception of heroes diverge? What can the experience of the ancient Greeks tell us about our experience as humans in the 21st century?

This last question will give us the opportunity to think about how this course ties into the goal of a liberal arts education. Greek thinkers helped establish the foundations for education which have become the cornerstone of education in the West. Through the development of a critical mind, we are given the skills to examine our world more reflectively.

Rocky Colavito

Course Overview: Fear, and its attendant representations in speech, print, and media, has been part of the fabric of life for as long as there has been difference and conflict. Indeed, we live in an age where some feel that a "culture of fear" is being fostered, and a quick perusal of CNN or a daily newspaper often gives credence to this notion. In this course, we will examine the mechanisms that create fear and the ways in which fear comes to be part of literature, media experiences, and, indeed, of life itself. Students will read broadly in scary literary works, examine real-life presentations of fear-invoking stories, assess critical trends in the definition and study of scary stories, and view and respond to visual texts that depict and exploit fear and visually-driven scary stories. Students will respond to these documents orally through class discussion and oral presentations, and write papers that analyze both the documents themselves and the techniques used to produce them. In keeping with the liberal arts tradition, the formal class activities are reinforced by independent effort to develop an understanding of the roles that fear plays in literary traditions (both oral and written) and the more tangible, more visceral place that fear occupies in our respective everyday lives.

Candace Denning

Students usually have questions about this class, such as: Why do people read short stories? What are they about? Why should I bother to try to understand them? What do they have to do with me?

The challenge of this class is for each student to be able to say at the end of the year that he/she understands the value of short stories and is able to ask questions, make connections and write thoughtfully about them. I hope you will see short stories as a valuable window to better understanding the human experience.

That is what stories reflect -- the human experience. Stories can be about everything from a family fight to a soldier's personal battle in Iraq. Often considered "lies," fiction is actually about truth -- truth artfully compressed by the writer into a form that can give the reader a picture of characters, their struggles and emotions, losses and triumphs. Stories tell about not only the drama in our lives but also the quiet everyday moments. Stories give us a close-up view of what it is to be human.

Reading short stories must be active, not passive. If you read a story quickly and say, "Wow, that girl was weak and stupid but her father is to blame because he doesn't respect women," you have most likely missed the point. We are judgmental because we need to make judgments to survive. But often we make hasty judgments based on personal bias or opinion that prevent us from seeing clearly. In this class students will learn to be more thoughtful in analyzing stories and drawing conclusions. The first thing we'll work on is learning to read with objectivity and we'll go on from there to try to make reading a richer experience from which students can draw knowledge and understanding. I've chosen collections of stories by three authors from widely different cultures because these stories give us the chance to not only learn about different cultures but to practice objectivity.

Ulf Goebel

This is a course in basic, nuts-and-bolts essay writing skills, essential to every field in the liberal arts and sciences, but with the difference that (1) all formal and informal reading and writing assignments will be on the stated theme of the course and (2) public speaking will consistently be practiced in and through class discussion and by means of formal oral presentations.

 

The meaning of racism is clear enough, but what is race? Are there biological races? Our task in this course will be to examine the concept of race as it has come down to us through history and as we continue to think of it today, against the background of racial divides in the U.S. with its rich and troubling heritage of ethnic diversity. On the one hand there is our historical melting-pot ideal, on the other, our current preoccupation with ethnic identity. We seem increasingly fixated on our differences rather than our similarities. In the course we will distinguish between the reality of ethnicity, loosely referred to in everyday discourse as race, and the illusory racist belief in racial differences that haunts us to this day. Our main topics will be the dire, unresolved consequences of slavery in the U.S. and the anti-Semitism that in Europe under German occupation during the Second World War led to the Holocaust, the Shoah, the Final Solution. Racism of one kind or another continues to bring about genocide around the world today, as happened in Rwanda, and as is happening again today in Darfur. During the two semesters of the course we will read literary works (poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, as well as some criticism) by authors like Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Primo Levi, Audre Lorde, Elie Wiesel, and Richard Wright. We will also see films like Hotel Rwanda, Triumph of the Will, Ghosts of Mississippi, Crash, and The Pianist. The word race in its various forms and the incalculable damage racism continues to cause in our culture today will be our central concern.

 

Formal writing assignments will consist of three essays - expository, analytical, interpretive, or critical. One of these will be a research essay. Every step of the process of research and composition will be discussed and practiced. Students will give oral presentations and field questions on the topic, research, and composition of their research essay, with discussion to follow. Questions of style, usage, and grammar will not be neglected. Mastery of standard English is the proverbial bottom line.

Ania Spyra

While introducing you to a wide range of world literature, this seminar will explore how and how successfully people communicate across national, linguistic and ethnic borders. Since it seeks to encourage you to think of yourselves as cosmopolites, or citizens of the world, it will ask you to think and write about your place in the world and about how your global imagination and your knowledge of other places and cultures are shaped. The course is designed to hone the skills necessary for critical reading, oral communication, and effective writing.

In accordance with the liberal arts mission of Butler University, this seminar will encourage you to ask the most significant of questions: who you are, what shapes your identity and your values. It will also take you on a journey through other cultures to promote reflection on worldviews other than our own so that you stand prepared for the diversity of today's global society.

Andrew Levy

This course's relationship to the liberal arts mission of the college of LAS and of Butler University is manifold. As part of the core curriculum, and of the first-year experience in particular, the syllabus is particularly committed to providing guidance in the areas of writing, discussion, and research. As well, however, this course is committed to the idea of independent and critical thinking as a lifelong practice, an affinity for the humanities as a lifelong avocation, and an appreciation for the role of the individual in the community and in the world at large.

Chris Bungard

The Roman comic playwright Plautus once remarked, "I want to follow up on this, whether we are our own selves or somebody else's, lest one of our neighbors changed us when we weren't looking." The Romans envisioned their national identity in a different way from others of their time. While Greeks spoke Greek, the Romans spoke Latin. While Greek cities restricted citizenship to those born to citizens, the Romans slowly expanded citizenship, eventually granting it to everyone under Roman control throughout the Mediterranean. As Roman influence expanded, the Romans looked at their neighbors, drew inspiration from their learning, and refashioned this knowledge to suit Roman aspirations. On a list of the most famous Roman authors, only Julius Caesar was actually born in the city of Rome. Poets, such as Vergil, Ovid, and Lucan, borrowed Greek models to address Roman concerns. In this course, we will be interested in how these poets understood human lives in a multicultural society. We will ask questions that impact our own lives in the 21st century. How do we understand our relationships to gods, enemies, friends, and family? How firmly are we really the people we say and think we are? Is there any chance we are something more than we realize?

Brent Hege

The liberal arts have a long history in Western education, dating to the great medieval universities of Europe. While the content of the liberal arts has changed over time, the basic principle of this approach to education has remained the same: to train persons to think and act freely, creatively and responsibly in their own lives and in their communities. In order to accomplish these objectives, persons pursuing a liberal arts education are invited to immerse themselves in the study of the great figures, movements and ideas of the past and present, standing in the three streams of the Western intellectual tradition: the classical heritage of ancient Greece and Rome, the biblical heritage of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures and the tradition of their interpretation in Jewish and Christian communities, and the scientific heritage of disciplined empirical observation of the world, its creatures, systems and laws. At the convergence of these three streams stand several fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human? What are the possibilities for authentic community? Where have we come from, and where are we going? What sense can we make of the world and our place in it? What is the meaning of life?

Drawing deeply from each of these three streams of the Western intellectual tradition, we can identify five hallmarks of a liberal arts education:

1. The opportunity to immerse oneself in the study of the great figures, movements and ideas of the past and present
2. The challenge to expand one's horizons and experiences beyond the familiar
3. The demand for clear and effective communication of ideas
4. The responsibility to enrich and enhance the lives of individuals and communities
5. The invitation to find joy and inspiration in the pursuit of truth

A liberal arts education prepares women and men to meet these challenges by providing opportunities to hone certain essential skills and crafts, including:

1. Thinking: In his famous essay, "What Is Enlightenment?" the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, issued a radical call to modern persons: Sapere aude! [Roughly translated, "Dare to think!"] The liberal arts train and encourage persons to think, to reason, to ask insightful questions, to weigh evidence, to construct arguments, and to take personal responsibility for informed leadership in the global community. In a liberal arts program, students will learn how to think more creatively and critically, how to weigh and present evidence more carefully, and how to construct and make arguments more effectively.
2. Reading: The written word is the foundation of Western intellectual life. The liberal arts train and encourage persons to read texts critically and creatively and to engage texts on a variety of levels, including cognitively, emotionally, and existentially. In a liberal arts program, students will learn how to read texts more critically and creatively and to understand more fully the texts and their authors, contexts, and influences on the past and the present.
3. Writing: Developing skills in effective communication is an essential component of a liberal arts education. One primary means of communication is writing, which can take several different stylistic forms. In a liberal arts program, students will learn how to write more clearly, concisely, and appropriately in order to persuade, challenge, and critique the received tradition. By so doing, students contribute their own voices to the body of knowledge created, sustained and expanded by generations of women and men dedicated to understanding the world and our place in it.
4. Speaking: Speaking is another primary means of communication, and in a liberal arts program students will learn how to present their ideas more clearly, concisely, and appropriately and to engage one another in thoughtful, respectful, fruitful dialogue on a number of important and challenging topics in a variety of contexts.

Candace Denning

Stories have come to us down through the ages and storytelling, originally an oral tradition, has developed as a written art that is extraordinary in technique, scope and imagination. Why are stories so compelling that we have listened to and read them for centuries? Because stories not only entertain us, they reveal us to ourselves. In this class we will read short fiction, discuss the structure and art of short story-writing, and explore how stories reveal the human experience in various dramatic contexts. We'll begin the semester by looking at a range of contemporary American authors and then move to the in-depth study of stories by three individual writers. The humanities colloquium is writing intensive with the aim of developing the student's ability to gather ideas and make connections, to think analytically and to generate original arguments. These skills are not just useful for literary analysis, they are analytical skills that will be a part of the way you think and reason from now on.

Jason Goldsmith

Description: This class is not about drugs, but rather the representation of drug culture in literary texts. Who gets to write the narrative of drugs: politicians, doctors, users, scientists, suppliers, producers? How do different societies define and delimit the use of psychotropic substances? As we examine how writers make use of their drug experience to shape their lives and their texts, we will investigate the ideologically charged relationship between drugs, self, and community in order to understand the force of representation. Our goal in this class will be to understand how "drugs" work on our minds both chemically and rhetorically - that is, how the stories we tell about drug use simultaneously describe and create the reality of drugs and those who use them.

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 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 will learn here cross disciplinary and professional boundaries and will serve you well in whatever you pursue after college.

Jim Keating

The purpose of this class is to examine important writers and the ways they experienced and described the human condition at various times and places. Through their words we can better understand the connections that link them to us and in turn, us to the future. The advancement of understanding is essentially the key that unlocks the door to all other forms of advancement. Through the liberal arts we move not just from one isolated fact to another but through vital linkages to new ways of seeing, to entirely new visions. Great writing helps us stand where others stood when they first envisioned their realities. Thus, we see ourselves from a perspective we could otherwise never have were it not for what they wrote. So liberal arts study is not just about the past, or even just about the future, but it is about the context in which we see ourselves in the present moment.

Rebecca Ries

In this colloquium we will examine how one particular artist, William Shakespeare, makes meaning of the life that surrounded him. Within the artificial world of his dramas he will supply the very real values and morals of his time-complete with the conflicts that result-as these impinge upon the individual's experience and his or her desire. . . .

On a larger scale, this colloquium and our topic fit into the academic pursuit of the liberal arts, that aspect of human endeavor that attempts to make meaning of human life. Butler has no question but that the study of the liberal arts is central to your undergraduate curriculum, and the reasons are bound to the institution's value for the world of ideas and images and sounds, a world much larger than a single mind can imagine. But you may still wonder why: Why study the fictions of writers, dead or living, male or female, writers whose constructed worlds are not even real, only imagined? Couldn't you survive without this? Of course, you know you could. You could survive. You could live your life without reading Shakespeare or experiencing any other artist. Thus the question isn't a matter of survival, not in any physical sense. But it remains a question about life, about the quality of life itself-about the kind of life you choose to live.

So how might Shakespeare and his plays help us choose how to live our lives? That, my friends, will be turned over to us to make our own examination. So . . . Let's read Shakespeare and see for ourselves!

Robert Stapleton

Our initial objective is to examine a kind of aesthetic synesthesia: literature as music and music as literature. Our investigations in these fields will invariably center on the gait and force of rhythm, but we will also move beyond the boundaries of composition and learn to interrogate the social and political forces that acted upon or within the artist. In doing so we will locate, unpack, and comprehend more fully the humanity embedded into the work itself. A Liberal Arts education seeks to have students locate themselves in society as independent thinkers and responsible citizens. Exacting a focused intimacy with two of the 20th century's great art forms will heighten for us a renewed understanding of the beauty and poignancy of the human experience.

David W. Stocking

In keeping with a liberal arts education that is devoted to an understanding of all of our human faculties, this course will examine, through literature, a side of our nature that is as intriguing as it is baffling. You will develop both your cognitive and emotional intelligences in analyzing the texts of stories which deal with the phenomenon of fear in our lives. Scary Stories is a window that allows us to see how the human spirit grapples with that which would defeat it.

Grant Vecera

The "humanities" are mainly comprised of literature, history, psychology, sociology, all of the arts, religious studies, & philosophy. These are known to be the disciplines that most intensively investigate human constructs and concerns. To participate in a "colloquium" is toparticipate in a scholarly conversation. Our aim in ID103 is to study and maintain a "scholarly conversation" of the humanities, as just defined, by virtue of what our course texts have to offer.

Our course theme, "Literature For Wisdom," arises out of two theories I have concocted. One is that wisdom is typically not something one locates and identifies so much as it is something one cultivates by virtue of the very act of searching. My other theory is that exercising and developing one's intellectual muscles enriches the overall quality of one's own life as well as the lives of others, including people & other sentient beings with whom one may never physically cross paths. Consequently, studying the humanities should be as fun as it is meaningful because acquiring wisdom, in my opinion, is both fun and meaningful.