English

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.

Avantika Rohatgi

This course is a writing seminar, designed to help students extend their writing skills through promoting critical thought, developing analytical skills, and working on the construction and support of an argument. We will be involved in examining the central issue of human rights as they are questioned and redefined in today's global society. Students will be encouraged to think critically and write about key global questions such as the meaning of globalization in relation to world economy, the need for a universal language in a webbed world, the roles of women in today's multicultural society, and the position of America as the world superpower in relation to the rest of the world, esp. the Middle East.

Robert Stapleton

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.

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.

Bill Watts

This course stands squarely in the liberal arts tradition. The study of literature has been an integral element of the liberal arts curriculum since its inception in the Middle Ages. As we seek to understand early works of British literature, we will draw upon the sister disciplines of philosophy and history. We will also seek to cultivate habits and skills that support the liberal arts, including critical thinking and the clear and effective expression of ideas, both in writing and in speech. 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.

Marshall Gregory

Course Goals

1. 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.
2. Liberal arts issues and contexts:
   • Students will consider the literary works they read in relation to some of the enduring existential and social conditions of human life: being citizens of a community or a nation; being children, siblings, and parents; being in love; and wondering about god or gods; and speculating about the purpose and destiny of the world;
   • 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, from the anxiety created by the foreknowledge of death, and from thedeprivations of death itself.
   • The liberal arts objectives of the course also include students working todevelop their distinctively human capacities for practical reasoning, for moral deliberation, for imaginative transposition, for introspective thought, and for responding to artistic language with sensitivity and understanding.
3. Overarching educational goal: The first marker of an educated mind is the cognitive maturity to pay prolonged analytical attention to the interlocking sub-components of complex structures, whether material or conceptual. This is a difficult level of maturity to acquire because human beings find it tiresome and hard to pay prolonged analytical attention to anything, especially to complex structures such as sonnets, bridges, tax forms, historical artifacts, or scientificdata. We can learn to develop analytical attentiveness-and when anyone acquires a level of expertise at doing it within any given area of accomplishment, such as writing well, playing the piano well, doing mathematical proofs well, and so on, then we all learn to love this kind of thinking-but the truth is that it's difficult, unnatural, and takes a certaindedication to hard work, like learning to play scales on the piano in order to become skilled enough to play music. Reading literary workspresents your minds with highly useful forms of practice and exercise at developing this first marker of an educated mind.

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 some of the enduring existential and social conditions of human life: being citizens of a community or a nation; being children, siblings, and parents; being in love; and wondering about God and the destiny of the world;
• 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.

Dan Barden

The fabric of the universe is story. Whether that story is told by God or subatomic particles or a secret cabal of our mothers is something we can argue, but we can't argue that matter and information (a kind of matter) is transformed not only by how we look at it but how often we look it and the color of the glasses we're wearing when we do. When we talk about story, however, we quickly run out of ways to define it. Everyone knows a story when they hear or see one, but not many people can tell you the difference between a mere collection of facts and a story. A story has meaning. A story, perhaps, moves us. A story has a beginning, middle, and end.

Maybe you can see how little this tells you about what a story actually is. I would like to suggest the reason for this mystery by telling you a story:

Two fish were swimming happily in the ocean. Another fish came by and asked them if they knew where he could find water.
"What's water?" they said.
"I don't know," the questioner admitted, "but I've been obsessed with tracking it down since I first heard the word. You want to look with me?"
"Sure," the other fish said.
And so they all went off in search of water.

A liberal arts education is not about what you know or what you can learn. A liberal arts education is about what you can't know and can't learn. As always, we will try to use our powers for good rather than evil.

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. To be a poet is to be constantly questioning and investigating and to be aware that sometimes the closer one gets to truth, the closer one is to ambiguity and paradox. Through studying-and creating-poetry, we experience something essential to the liberal arts: a confrontation with our own independent and private sense of what it means to be a human being in the world. In the words of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, who will be visiting Butler's campus this semester, we nourish our "inner" or "spiritual" life. 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.

Hilene Flanzbaum

Elie Wiesel famously said that "it is impossible to know the nature of twentieth century humanity without first considering Auschwitz." Theodor Adorno said even more notably, "After Auschwitz, no more lyric poetry." He was wrong, of course, for from the Nazi genocide of the Jews, artworks abound. To what extent do they successfully represent what has been called by theorists "unrepresentable"? If a liberal arts education is designed to help us know ourselves and our species more fully, we must look at the very best and the very worst humans have accomplished. By looking at representations of the Holocaust, this course does both. Studying the artworks that have sprung from mankind's most monstrous moments, we follow Wiesel's dictum "to know more deeply the nature of humanity." In addition, by investigating the slippage between reality and representation, we learn about the potential and limitations of the human drive to express itself in artistic forms.

Paula Saffire

The "liberal" of "liberal arts" is related to our word "liberty." We are free - free to wander in fields of imagination, free to speculate on wings of intellect, free to investigate, challenge, argue. We are not tied to wages; we are not limited to the time we live in. We belong to a human family which extends over time and space. Poetry is one way we express, and celebrate, our connectedness.

Paula Saffire

Consider your "self." (Not "yourself.") Has it grown since you were a child? What makes a self grow? Liberal Arts studies are - in one way or another - about growing the self. And Greek tragedy, I would say, does that work supremely well. The Ancient Greeks were relentless investigators of the self. In their tragedies they force us to ask: What we are doing here on earth? What strong forces act on us? And with what power - if any - can we meet or counteract those forces? And where is our goodness, if not in that?

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.

Bill Watts

To read Chaucer is to delve deeply into the liberal arts. Chaucer himself was widely read, and knew the works of contemporary writers in English, French and Italian, as well as works from classical antiquity in Latin. He was also remarkably well versed in philosophy, and he incorporates elements of both ancient and contemporary thought into his poetry. Moreover, he was conversant with the sciences of his day, and wrote an important early treatise on astronomy. As we read Chaucer, we will cultivate the skills and the habits of thought that sustain the liberal arts, including historical investigation, literary interpretation, critical and independent thinking, and the clear and effective expression of ideas. 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.