Spring 2006
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MALS 70800
Transformations of Modernity, 1914-present
Thursdays, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Sandi Cooper

Twentieth century history, broadly construed to contain the story of “everything,” was fully molded by the First World War, a cataclysm which validated pre-war modernist apprehensions as a new set of truths. Positivist thinking shaped by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution in the west was challenged; notions of progress inherent in the Anglo-Franco-American consciousness were undermined. This course will explore the disruption brought by the First World War to Western, and to a lesser extent, to global realities. While there is no way for a single course to explore all these pathways, this class will examine some of the more striking, using the “Great War” as a benchmark.

Two short papers, 5-10 pages, based on readings are required. Each week,
there will be a rapporteur to lead our discussion, where appropriate.

Background reading: either
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Vintage, 1998) OR
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (Vintage, 1994)
 

MALS 71500
Critical Issues in International Studies
Mondays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Tomohisa Hattori

This course in the field of international political economy introduces students to various approaches to political economy in general and globalization in particular. After introducing the philosophical basis of social scientific studies, the course examines economic nationalism, liberalism, world-system theory, and Marxism. Students will be asked to apply one of these approaches to a specific issue related to international development, foreign aid, and postcolonial North-South relations in their term paper.
 

MALS 72200
Contemporary Feminist Thought
 Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits
(Cross-listed with WSCP 80802)
Professor Alyson Bardsley

This course is envisioned as a survey, rather than as one having an argument. Through theoretical writings, one film, one novel, and some poetry, we will look at such topics as feminist epistemology; reproduction, mothering, and domestic work; women and the state; feminist legal theory; race, gender, and the body; others. Writers such as Harding, Brown, Butler, Kristeva, Collins, Haraway, others. Two informal reaction papers and a substantial research paper required.
 

MALS 73100
American Culture and Values:
Introduction to American Studies
Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Joseph Entin

This course serves as an introduction to the history, theories, and methods of American Studies as an interdisciplinary field. We will begin with a unit devoted to the field's origins and early approaches, especially the "American character" and "myth and symbol" schools that dominated American Studies in the 1950s and 1960s. We will then turn our attention to more recent texts stemming from a range of disciplines, including history, literary criticism, sociology, and cultural studies, that address a range of topics: subcultures and popular culture; working-class culture; the cultural meanings of race, sexuality, and gender; border zones and diaspora; transnationalism and empire. Our reading will be guided by several questions, including: why and for what purposes was American Studies created and institutionalized? How has the field developed and why? What constitutes an American Studies approach? What are the theoretical, political, and practical stakes of such an approach?

Course requirements include active participation in discussions; an oral presentation; a short paper assessing one of the week's readings; a longer paper surveying interdisciplinary scholarship on a particular phenomenon in American culture.


MALS 74300
Bioethics: Policies and Cases
Tuesdays, 5:30-7:30 p.m., 3 credits
Mt. Sinai School of Medicine
Profs. Rosamond Rhodes and Ian Holzman

Most people who consider the ethical rules that should govern the practice of medicine assume that the ethics of medicine is no different from the rest of morality. For that reason, people who write about medical ethics draw on the classical sources of ethical insight. They discuss autonomy in Kantian terms, allocation of scarce resources in utilitarian terms, access to health care in terms of rights, and professionalism in terms of virtue. This dominant view was articulated by K. Danner Clouser in his Encyclopedia of Bioethics article on “Bioethics” where he explained that “bioethics is not a new set of principles or maneuvers, but the same old ethics being applied to a particular realm of concerns.” This strategy is most prominently expounded by Beauchamp and Childress in the five editions of their Principles of Medical Ethics and further explained by Gert, Culver, and Clouser in Bioethics: A Return to Fundamentals. In those volumes the authors identify the common features of morality, and show how to apply those principles to the practice of medicine.

This course will explore the major theoretical approaches to bioethics: principlism, ordinary morality, virtue theory, casuistry, narrative ethics, feminist bioethics, constructivist bioethics. We shall read and discuss this literature in the context of cases from the practice of medicine. Our study will be guided by two goals. First, we shall try to understand what the key theories have to say to inform our thinking about medical ethics. Second, we shall try to assess whether these theories are actually appropriate to the practice of medicine. Do any of them actually identify appropriate principles for the ethical practice of medicine? Do they provide a useful guide to the ethical practice of medicine? Do they offer helpful tools for resolving controversies within medical practice?

The assigned texts will be supplemented by recent articles and case descriptions.

Assigned Texts:

Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress. Principles of Medical Ethics, fifth edition. Oxford UP: New York. 2001.
Bernard Gert, Charles M. Culver, and K. Danner Clouser in Bioethics: A Return to Fundamentals. Oxford UP: New York. 1997.
Albert R. Jonsen, Mark Seigler, and William J. Winslade. Clinical Ethics: A Practical Approach to Ethical Issues in Clinical Medicine, fifth edition, McGraw-Hill 2002.
Edmund D. Pellegrino, David C., Thomasma Virtues in Medical Practice. Oxford UP: New York. 1993.
Hilde Lindemann Nelson (editor). Stories and Their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics, Routledge, 1997.

MALS 77200
History of Film I: 1895-1930
Mondays, 11:45 a.m.-2:45 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Marc Dolan

This is a course in the history and historiography of the silent cinema, from the zoopraxiscope experiments of Eadweard Muybridge to the reluctant conversion of industries, artists, and audiences to fully synchronized sound.

Much of the course will explore how the foundations of modern filmmaking evolved out of the rudimentary work of the earliest filmmakers--how the Edison and Lumiere "actuality" films led to the explicitly labeled "documentary," the cinematic tricks of Georges Melies to the fantastic action/adventure film, the early melodramas of Porter, Guy-Blache, and Griffith to the so-called "classical" narrative style, etc.

However, the course will not employ an exclusively auteurist approach. We will also consider the developments of specific national film industries, particular genres, and the points of intersection between those two sets of developments (e.g., American slapstick, Italian historical epics, Swedish naturalism, German expressionism, Soviet montage).

Moreover, the play between identifiable national cinemas and the syncretic medium of international cinema will be a central theme of the course, especially since the idea of film as a potentially universal language was one of the most powerful dreams of the silent era. (List of films available upon request.)

Students will view on reserve and in class individual examples of all these types of films, and two classes during the term will be devoted to reconstructed programs (including short subjects, newsreels, cartoons, etc.) of what a typical audience might have seen when they went to the movies in 1912 and in 1927.

Readings will primarily be drawn from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film History: An Introduction and Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen’s anthology Film Theory and Criticism, but other readings will be put on reserve to reflect the specific interests of registered students.

Course requirements: Class participation; one 15-minute presentation; a 20-page final paper, reflecting students’ original scholarship. (NO AUDITORS, PERMITS, NON-MATRICS)
        

MALS 78100
Issues in Urban Education
Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Bethany Rogers

This interdisciplinary course draws on both theoretical research and experiential learning to analyze the roots of the crisis in urban education as well as its current forms and issues. Integrating texts and perspectives from history, sociology, urban politics, education and anthropology, the course aims to create a foundation for research and practice in urban education. While the course itself is organized around several key questions, it also means to support students in developing their own research interests and questions. Major concerns of the course begin with the history of urban spaces and their schools, responding to the belief that coherent policy responses to the issues of urban education require understanding of the complex factors that have contributed over time to contemporary problems. A second anchoring question of the course probes the experiences in the past and present of those who have taught and attended urban schools; and a third major area of inquiry lies in the reforms over time that urban schools have undertaken in efforts to meet the various needs of their populations. Factors of race, ethnicity, gender, and class will be considered, along with familiar educational policy matters of governance, school finance, community relations and teacher quality, and the larger context of social ecology, social geography and economic structures of cities. Readings and discussions will, when possible, focus on New York City and be supplemented by field activities in the “virtual laboratory” of New York City and its schools.

SPAN 78600
 Practicum in Translation
Translating Film Scripts: English-Spanish;
Spanish-English
Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Nora Glickman

This course will focus on topics of Hispanic immigration, exile and diaspora. It will derive its material from movie scripts, documentaries and fiction.

Translations from Spanish into English: Previously untranslated Hispanic film scripts include works by Jorge Goldemberg, Laura Restrepo, Miguel Barnet and Luis R. Sánchez.

For translations from English into Spanish the material will be based on fiction and on critical articles on immigration, exile and diaspora.

Several professional translators and film producers will be sharing their experiences with the class.