Course Title: Challenges of Modern Culture
Campus Course Code: HUMN 3303
Campus: UT El Paso
Program: Non-Program
Course Description
This is an upper-division multi-discipline Liberal Arts course which investigates the elaboration of ideas within the frame of Western Culture (the intellectual traditions, events, and personalities associated with European and North American cultures between 1640 and the present). Texts for this course are seminal texts for ideas and concepts vital to the shaping of western cultural institutions and practices, drawn from the fields of history, literature, political science, music, theoretical science, religion, and the fine arts.
The course relies heavily on involved student reading and moderated asynchronous group discussion.
This course is designed for the liberal arts major, providing the soon-to-graduate student with context for more specialized studies in his or her discipline. When successful, the student will master the assumptions informing his or her own major, but will have the knowledge necessary to contextualize those assumptions in the context of fields other than his or her own, becoming conversant concerning the assumptions of other fields traditionally assigned to the liberal arts.
In the modern world, reading is pursued as an individual, lonely task of self-enrichment or entertainment. In this class, we will be reading the same texts for the same purposes, as investigators, detectives, searching our ideas and their permutations through fiction, politics, philosophy, religion, and science. Behind this investigation is the assumption that ideas are recursive within a culture—a political idea, in time will spawn a religious form, or will re-shape or re-inform the arts, and vice versa. Thus the idea that nature is worthy of study in its own right without reference to religious dogma best articulated by Jean Jacques Rousseau will inspire poets like Schiller and Wordsworth to write poems that celebrate nature without reference to nature’s god.
Objectives
The student will
- Identify social contexts that implicitly inform texts
- Recognize ideas and idea sets as each author represents them, noting how historical and social change affect ideas as well as institutions
- Engage art in the context of the ideas that give shape to the art form and the idea of the artist
- Discuss ideas with students from different disciplines and locales, honing one’s ability to communicate effectively via written discourse
Materials
Visit the Bookstores page for links to campus bookstores that provide information on course materials.
Prerequisites: Completion of freshman composition and research writing.
Credits:3
Level:Undergraduate
Faculty
Robert Wren
wren@utep.edu
915-747-5288