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HONR 102

Honor Scholar First-Year Seminar

A continuation of HONR 101.

Distribution Area Prerequisites Credits
1 course

Spring Semester information

Andrea Sununu

102A: HONR FYS:Striking Unasked, Surging Past

Quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gjertrud Schackenberg's poem "Strike Into It Unasked" (The Paris Review, Spring 2021) describes the miraculousness of poetic inspiration: "The wonder of it, that the briefest touch / Can instigate a shock that's mutual." Just as the windhover's "Headlong freefall" culminates in "A blowing-by / As rapturous as if creation / Were an end unto itself," Schnackenberg's lines compel us to see, in poetry, "a glimpse / Of the creation, surging past---: the final dash in a text punctuated only by commas and dashes is, in itself, a miraculous coda. The "striking" and "surging" imagery of this foundational poem will complement images from Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own (1929) as we explore works both artistic and literary in which dislocation or potential catastrophe turns into opportunity, loss into restoration, apathy or shock into awe. Works will include poems by Hopkins, Keats, Schnackenberg, Vaughan, and Wordsworth; art by Van Gogh, Kurosawa, and two Flemish painters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jacob Pieter Gouwy; Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night; selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses and from Cathy N. Davidson's 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan; Paul Kalanithi's memoir, When Breath Becomes Air (2016); and five novels: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Barbara Kingsolver's Unsheltered (2018), and Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts (2022). Although we are all mortal and therefore vulnerable, our post-pandemic, climate-changing world has given age-old questions special urgency. I hope that as we marvel at the gift of inspiration and probe the effects of xenophobia, racism, and systemic injustice on the world that we have inherited, we can try, both individually and collectively, to give meaning to our lives.


Julia Bruggemann

102B: HONR FYS:After Catastrophe: Germany and the legacy of the Holocaust

This course will explore the complex historical, moral, and political history of the Holocaust as well as the legacies of the war, dictatorship, and Holocaust for Germany after 1945. We will address questions of guilt and responsibility, victimhood and agency and the ways these terms have been understood over time. Some important questions we will explore are: How can we understand the physical, moral, political, and ethical destruction of the war and Holocaust and how did it influence Germany's reconstruction in the postwar context? How did contemporaries, historians, politicians, artists etc. participate in these processes? How have these discussions changed in recent years as most eyewitnesses are dying and new generations develop their own interpretations? Some of the debates that surround these questions are: Who has the right to remember and be remembered? Who can claim to be a victim, in other words: were Germans victims - or perpetrators -- or both? Can a new German state be "normal" and overcome its historical baggage? What's the difference between guilt and responsibility and how does it affect future generations? How have discussions changed over the past decades?


Joseph Porter

102C: HONR FYS:Utopias and Dystopias

Has capitalism given us heaven on Earth--or hell? And is Heaven itself really all that heavenly? In this course, we will explore different political and religious perspectives on utopia--the optimal human society--and ask whether they are in fact dystopic. We will read excerpts from a wide range of texts including the Communist Manifesto, the Bible, and Brave New World.


Jeffrey Kenney

102D: HONR FYS:9/11 & the War of Terror

This seminar explores the historical and political origins of 9/11 and America's subsequent global response, the War on Terror (sometimes referred to as the Global War on Terror). It begins with the backstory: the rise of political Islam--both moderate and militant--in the Middle East, the militant turn from the "near enemy" of regional governments to the "far enemy" of the West, and the successful Afghan war against Soviet occupation, which served as an inspiration and training ground for al-Qaeda's global jihad. Then the focus turns to America's decades-long WOT that resulted in two U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with temporary occupations and faltering attempts at nation-state building in both countries; massive loss of life, especially among local populations; expenditure of trillions of dollars; and the creation of an extra-legal detention center at the Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (Cuba) to hold "terrorists." This event history provides the opportunity 1.) to discuss and debate Islamist ideology, the rise of global jihad, and Western foreign policy in the Muslim world; and 2.) to wrestle with some important and uncomfortable questions: Did U.S. foreign policy play a role in 9/11? Was the WOT necessary or legal? Is America safer as a result? Is the Middle East more stable? Has "terrorism" diminished?


Rebecca Schindler

102E: HONR FYS:The Archaeology of Democracy

Demokratia, the idea that people have the power to rule themselves, took root in ancient Greece in the 6th century BCE. Underlying this movement were the principles of freedom, equality, and justice. By the late 5th century BCE, the historian Thucydides claimed that Athens' great cultural, economic, and military successes were made possible by her belief in freedom. Around the same time, the emerging city of Rome rejected monarchy and established a democratic Republic. Modern Europe and America have invoked the 'achievements' of the Greeks and the Romans as models for modern democratic states. But what are the connections between the past and the present?

In this course we will take a deep dive into the past. Through the discipline of archaeology, which brings together evidence from excavation, works of art, and ancient texts, we will explore the origins of democratic thought and the institutions that those ideas created. From Herodotus to Cicero, we will consider what liberty, equality, and justice meant in societies that restricted citizenship and where part of the population was enslaved. From the Athenian Agora to the Roman Forum, we will look at how visual rhetoric reinforced particular ideologies. Most importantly, we will ask, what Demokratia meant in Greece and Rome, and to what extent is contemporary democracy dependent on that past? As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, we frequently hear reports that Democracy as a viable political system is in crisis. Through examining Democracy's past, this course will grapple with its present and consider its future.