Of courses

I meant to describe and catalogue the fantastic courses I am taking this semester like Mari does, but perhaps it is good I’ve waited this long. It’s been such a change. As a transfer student, it really is like “starting all over again” even if the school is the same. I walk the same grounds, up the same steps, and through the same pathways as I did for the past two years, but I’m viewing it all through a different lens. Five courses is pretty killer for a liberal arts major–I have taken six or even seven courses while in engineering–but the plentiful reading makes it a different kind of courseload.

The 19th Century European Novel
This course is by far my favourite. It addresses two main questions: what is the novel, and what kind of effect did the 19th century have upon it? I just red Stendhal, Balzac and now I’m on Dickens’s Great Expectations, which I read in high school and found it tiresome. But the professor is quite possibly the best lecturer I have ever had the privilege of listening to, and his insights on every book makes the reading enjoyable. The discussion sections are like being in a salon–it is clear that this professor draws in the kind of student who wants to read, wants to learn, and wants to participate.

Literature Humanities
Lit Hum is one of the foundation blocks of the Core Curriculum–first semester is classical Greek works and the Bible. I couldn’t register via computer for this reason, and as a transfer was literally plopped in any section. How I’ve lucked out–my fellow students aren’t all quite up to par to my 19th Century Lit discussion section, since they’re mostly deer-headlit first years, but my professor is wonderful. She is the head of the Slavic Languages & Literature department and was formerly the chair of Lit Hum. The class is small enough to establish real professor-student relations so she knows all the students by name. And since Lit Hum is a two-semester sequence, I have her again next spring!

Muslim Societies
This course focuses on Muslim societies around the world, not merely in the Middle East (though we do get a very long “history of Islam” at the beginning). Probably the only class where the professor is subpar–he reads from his notes most of the time, which he will later put up on the course site. But the readings assigned to us are great. Our first sequence posed the question, “Why do Muslim women choose to wear the veil?” And one of our books was on African-American female converts, with a similar question, “Why would a woman in American choose not to have choices?” alluding to the widespread view that Islam forces women to be submissive to men. Great discussion leader too, but the professor is forgettable, unfortunately.

The Interpretation of Cultures
One of my introductory anthropology courses–both defines culture and an anthropologist’s role in it. The professor is new, but she’s extremely well-organized and enthusiastic. Surprisingly, the workload is benign compared to my other classes. I never have more than 50 pages to read per class, unless it was Hortense Powdermaker’s autobiography–but that was an easy read, a memoir instead of a monograph. The course also acquaints us with the famous pioneering anthropologists: Boas, Mead (both from Columbia!), Geertz, Turner, Crapanzano, Malinowski. However, I’m taking this course at Barnard, and a lot of the other students are self-righteous first years. Honestly, how pretentious is it to call Geertz’s writing style “pretentious”? Where do you get off?

Introduction to Social and Cultural Theory
My other intro anthro course, takes more of the theory side than cultural (as the name implies), more about the empirical nature of society than an anthropologist’s fieldwork. The syllabus is quite different–Sassure, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, Weber, Foucault. It’s taught by the chair of the anthro department, and despite the large class size, he still manages engage the students a dialogue.

What I love about my new classes is that they cross-reference each other–and what I’m noticing is the prominent link between anthropology and literature. A good novel is just an ethnography with plot and characters–isn’t the part of why we read to be transported to another world? The skill in developing that world (fictional anthropology) plays a big role in the believability of the setting. An anthropologist and an author are concerned with nearly the same thing–characters’ interactions with their surroundings–but their vehicles are different, a novel vs. a monograph. I kind of want to write my senior thesis on this. I wonder if it’s allowed?

Seeing how my courses link and stack up next to each other is such fun. “Thick description” popped up in both my 19th Century novel and Interpretation of Cultures classes, which is what started the anthropology-literature connection–and I’m sure Dickens and Flaubert will back this, with the polyphonic voices in their books. Hospitality and gift giving rituals were both studied from theory standpoint (Mauss’s The Gift) as well as in Homeric epics. Ancient Persia from both points of view. Herodotus’s Histories was essentially the first ethnography written down, and my Lit Hum class pretty much concluded that Xerxes was a shitty anthropologist. (Why are the Spartans combing their hair? How ridiculous! -annhilate-)

Plus, college life has much improved. We’ve had some prominent speakers visit so far–both presidential candidates, the presidents of Iceland and Denmark, and NEIL GAIMAN, who did a free reading of the first chapter of the The Graveyard Book. (I purchased it and am treating myself to it today!) I also joined the Science Fiction Society (heehee), and I may be flying out to San Francisco to a Free Culture Conference next weekend.