Current Students
Follow the links to keep involved and informed. Have a great year!

Involvement | Keep Informed | Spring 2008 Course Descriptions

Involvement
As part of the Honors Program, each of you is a member of the Honors Student Organization (HSO). The HSO is comprised of a board of seven honors students who meet regularly to discuss and plan upcoming events that we would like to get involved in. As members of the HSO, you have a say in what you would like to see accomplished, in terms of academic, community service, and entertainment-geared events. You can be involved as much, or as little, as you desire. You can help plan events right from the beginning or just go to the events and have a good time. It's your decision and whichever you choose would be a much appreciated contribution.

The Honors Student Organization is extremely interested in becoming more involved in the community through various service activities. We have helped to prepare Thanksgiving dinners for the homeless, visited nursing homes to sing Christmas carols, and volunteered with Habitat for Humanity. Other, more academic and entertainment-geared HSO events have included a trip to the Bowery to see a production of "The Importance of Being Earnest," bowling nights, and a trip to the Museum of Natural History. Anyone who has ideas for activities or would like to become more active in the HSO is more than welcome to pay us a visit at the Honors Office or attend any or all of our bi-weekly meetings.

Keep Informed
Visit the Honors Office for Program announcements.

Spring 2008 Course Descriptions

HONP 112 01 Honors Seminar in Computing – Dr. Carl Bredlau

To critically examine current issues in computing that affect us.

How do we do that? Ah, that is the purpose of "seminar". We must have already thought about an issue before coming to class. Writing a question/response focuses our attention, so that we now really know what we don't know. We then listen to other points of view.

How do we find issues? How about starting within a historical context? Thus, Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. Other ways will be the Circuits section of The New York Times.

Also, to (re)acquire some rudimentary skills in computing; in particular, the ability to use and adapt to technology.

HONP 101 04 Honors Seminar in Great Books and Ideas II – Professor Gina Balestracci

This particular seminar is meant to discuss great books and ideas from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century.  That’s a lot of territory, so there is going to be a lot of reading.  To help you keep up with the reading, I will ask that each of you take notes on each assignment, jotting down a page or two of observations, questions, and connections to other things that we’ve read or to things that we haven’t read.  If there is a work (not necessarily literary) that is related to something in your field that isn’t on the reading list, introduce it to us.  I’ve had to select the readings for this class looking through my own lens, but I’m open to constructive suggestions.  Please come to class prepared to ask questions, and to offer observations or evaluations. Challenge yourself, your classmates, and me.

Reading assignments may include excerpts from these and other authors:

Medieval lyric poetry (Hildegard, Rumi, St. Francis, troubadours & trouveres)
Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio
Marco Polo
Maimonides, the Qu’ran, the Bible
More: Utopia (excerpts); Erasmus; Macchiavelli
Rabelais: Gargantua & Pantagruel (excerpts)
Renaissance poetry (Petrarch, Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser, Tasso, Marvell, Jonson, Boderie, Herbert)
Marlowe: Dr. Faustus (complete)
Descartes, Newton (General Scholium), Diderot, D’Alembert
Fontaine, Grimm, Calvino
Rousseau, Hannah More, Mary Robinson
Swift, Pope
Blake, Wordsworth, Taylor-Coleridge
Shelley: Frankenstein (complete)
Melville: Moby-Dick (excerpts)
Dickinson, Whitman
Fredrick Douglass: Narrative (complete)
Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments
Lewis Carroll: Alice (excerpts)
Dostoevsky
Poe, Mallarme

 

HONP 101 02 Honors Seminar in Great Books and Ideas II – Dr. Naomi Liebler

We explore Great Books and Ideas in a range of world cultures, from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. What constitutes a “great book” or “great idea” is open to question and challenge, and we will question and challenge while we explore. Some of these works may be familiar; you may be tempted to think that you have already "done" them. You haven't. One of the hallmarks of a "great" book or idea is that it responds to repeated study by opening up deeper layers of insight and information. The works themselves will challenge you, I will challenge you, and, I hope, you will challenge me as well as yourselves. This course replaces for Honors students the college requirements in College Writing 1 & 2; therefore expect to write four papers, most of them short (5-7 pp.) incorporating research (the techniques, strategies, and format of which I will teach you if necessary). Class discussion is the heart of this course. To make it pump, you must come to class prepared to discuss in detail the ideas and difficulties you encountered in your reading. Your primary task is your homework: read and think. I'm not fond of exams, but sometimes they are the only way for me to find out how you're doing. If you don't like exams either, make sure I know, through class discussion and in your papers, how you're doing. The general theme of our course, loosely defined, is the idea of the hero: male, female, comic, tragic, epic, modern, ancient, or anti-.

 

HONP 101 03 Honors Seminar in Great Books and Ideas II – Dr. Neil Baldwin

Three Hundred Years of Western Literature:  “Only The Imagination Is Real”

In the traditional sense, this is a survey course -- a broad selection of great works in several genres. It is likewise a nontraditional survey, because of its over-arching theme: We will read about, discuss and write about the genesis, development and transformation of a powerful concept in literature – the Imagination.

How have definitions of “the mind” and what it “does” changed from Elizabethan times to the turn of the twentieth century, and into the present day?
What various methods have creative thinkers and authors employed to delve their way into the mysterious and often hazardous realms of consciousness?
Are there any limits to the human capacity to create new worlds through words?
As twenty-first century readers, should we accept that there are limits to our capacity to understand and learn from the voices of the past… 
…or should we – as I obviously believe – take full advantage of this Honors Seminar to stretch our mental muscles beyond their assumed, customary boundaries?
And finally: How real is our collective imagination?

We will read:

Shakespeare – (Selected) Sonnets
Descartes – (Selected) Meditations
Goethe – Sorrows of Young Werther
Shelley – Frankenstein
Thoreau – Walden
Freud – (Excerpts from) The Interpretation of Dreams

These assignments will be amplified by handouts and carefully-selected links to additional readings on helpful web sites.

I look forward to our intellectual and poetic adventure together.

Neil Baldwin, PhD. Distinguished Visiting Professor, Department of History.

***Please visit my web site, www.neilbaldwinbooks.com***
There you will find out about my past career and the books I have written.
Any questions? Write to me - baldwinn@mail.montclair.edu

 

HONP 103 01 – HONORS SEMINAR IN CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATION – Dr. David Del Principe

This seminar offers students an introduction to field of Ecofeminism and its basic premise that oppression based on gender is related to the oppression of nature, the environment, and animals. A particular focus of the course is the provocative relation between food and gender and how we forge our cultural identities through eating. An introduction to these issues, recently of great, topical interest, and to the relation between male- and human-centered views of the world will be approached from American and British perspectives. Students will read and discuss theoretical excerpts from pioneer authors such as Carol J. Adams and Greta Gaard, Tom Regan, and Peter Singer, and examine 19th-century views on diet and speciesism in Europe and in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

HONP 201 01 – HONORS SEMINAR IN CREATIVE PROCESS – Professor Mark Polishook

 Louis Armstrong said “If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.” His phrase suggests either jazz defies description or is so obvious as to render description superfluous. What happens if we transpose Armstrong's statement from jazz to creativity? “If you have to ask what creativity is, you'll never know." Does creativity resist definition? Is a definition of creativity superfluous?

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in his famous ruling on pornography wrote: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it." Definition and recognition are central to the argument. Can we claim, as does Justice Potter, to comprehend qualities we can't describe? 

The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed "What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence." In other words, we can't conceptualize what we can't describe. Is it possible that things we can't describe don't exist? 

In a seminar on creative process, we could answer a "what is creativity" question with, like Armstrong or Potter an obvious practical answer. We could take a cue from Wittgenstein: there's nothing to say. We could use a contemporary tool to see who else has attempted to answer a "what is creativity" question; a Google search on "define creativity" return over a million links.

The approach of the seminar to the "what is creativity" question will be to use computers, the Internet, and other such technology (Web 2.0 applications, YouTube, some very simple introductory-level programming/coding, etc.) to (1) examine the idea and practice of creativity and  (2) develop strategies to promote creativity as an individual and a group process. At the end of the seminar, we may or may not be able to define creativity but we will feel that we have been creative.

HONP 100 05 – HONORS SEMINAR IN GREAT BOOKS AND IDEAS II – Dr. Monkia Elbert
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to always remain a child.”—
    Cicero, First Century B.C.
The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, vol. 2, ed. Sarah Lawall  (most recent edition)
Kafka’s Selected Stories, Norton, ed. and transl. Stanley Corngold
Course Objective: 

Reading literary texts, we will survey intellectual, artistic, and cultural contributions to modern Western thought.  We will explore the legacy of Western tradition and thought by studying literature and ideas that helped shape Western thought from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. We will see how the past impinges upon the present, and how various intellectual  movements caused counter-movements or cycles of change.  The texts we will study represent major cultural ideas from the Enlightenment onwards and include Voltaire's _Candide_, Goethe's _Faust_, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler_, and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." 

HONP 103 04 AND 05 – HONORS SEMINAR IN CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATION –  Dr. Tom Benediktsson and Dr. Amy Srebnick

CONTESTED CITIES
Overview:  A team-taught double section of the Honors Seminar in Contemporary Civilization; this course fulfills the General Education Core Requirement for Global Contemporary Issues.  We will study three contemporary “contested cities:” Jerusalem, Tehran, and London.  For each city we will provide historical overviews and contexts for current issues, but our focus will always be on primary sources: political documents, personal memoirs, fiction, poetry, and films.  In the process we hope to accomplish three general goals.  First, you should come away from each unit with a better understanding of the conflicts, both local and global, that emanate from three important places.  Secondly, you will have the opportunity to discuss a variety of broad contemporary questions: the nature of twenty-first century cities, national and international identity, immigration, globalization, postcolonialism, the new imperialism. And finally, through our exploration of such themes as gender, family relationships, and coming of age in a time of conflict, you will have the opportunity to observe the relationship between the political and the deeply personal: when cities are “contested,” citizens are too.

 

HONP 103 03  – HONORS SEMINAR IN CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATION - Dr. C.Y. Chang

Dr. C.Y.Chang,  Philosophy and Religion Department, Montclair State University
This seminar introduces Honors Program students to the major global issues of the 20th century that led to the globalization of the emerging 21th century. Issues to be considered will include intellectual trends (with particular attention to philosophy and religion), cultural trends, science and technology, economic trends, social and political trends, and international relations.  This seminar will pay special attention to the relationship between the United States-Europe and Asia, given the expectation that Asia will play an important globalization role during the 21th century.