Core I: Histories of the Present: Violence

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Core I takes up this task through an examination of the ways in which violence has been conceptualized and represented historically. The problems and issues we explore (for example, the relationship between political organization and state violence, the role of literature in pointing to limits that define and enable dominant ways of thinking) involve values and categories such as law and justice, humanitarian intervention, gender and sexual difference, “race”, universalism, cultural affiliation, and individualism.

These ideas play a central role in shaping our present world and figure prominently in apparently intractable debates about the world—whether we define that world in indigenous, local, national, or global terms. More often than not, these debates cannot be resolved through recourse to correct or incorrect understandings of what we assume to be “self-evident.” What Core I seeks to provide, in relation to such debates, is the vantage point of critical distance: the opportunity to think about and critique self-reflexively the consequences of the very things we take for granted.

The approach is two-fold: historical and textual. History is invoked as a capacity for critical self-understanding. The origins of what we take to be self-evident categories are explored but so too are other ways of thinking about violence in its social, political, and cultural dimensions that were marginalized or subject to institutional forgetting. The second approach of the course is textual. To the extent that key categories and practices are a matter for contestation, they require a focus on interpretation: to understand how values and categories posed as true and natural were constructed in debates and urgent political contests.

Core II: Histories of the Present

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Core II continues—with sharper focus and through an array of course offerings—the interdisciplinary investigations begun in Core I. That is, we develop our examination of the ways in which our contemporary self-understandings (political, moral, economic, aesthetic, etc.) emerge from and express commitments and categories that are often regarded as given—so “natural” and “obvious” as to prevent us from thinking clearly about their complexities and ambiguities. Core II courses are taught by a faculty member with interdisciplinary research interests and may be team-taught by faculty whose complementary research interests make for fresh interdisciplinary dialogue. Consult the Scripps Portal for CORE II offerings for the current semester. Core II offerings vary each year and may include:

The Arts and Literature of Zen Buddhism 

Beyond Good and Evil  Contract Enforcement: Histories of the Mafia, Past and Present 

Death 

The Detective in the City 

Desire and Decadence: Interdisciplinary Contexts in Fin-de-Siecle Europe 

Historical Fictions: Contemporary Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Nineteenth Century America 

Incentives Matter: The Economics of Gender and Choice 

Lights, Camera, Murder! Crimes and Trials in France and the U.S 

Nationalism and Culture 

The Nature of “Nature.” 

“Once Upon a Time”: Psychological and Literary Approaches to the Fairy Tale 

Performances of Identity 

Plantation Empires: Gender, Labor, Race and the Construction of “Difference” 

Riotous Americans: Los Angeles and the Poetics of Unrest 

The Roar of the Lion: the Lives and Deaths of Animals 

Sleep: Nature, Nurture, Mystery 

Terms of Modernity 

Tragedy and National Narratives  

Travel, Encounter, and the History of Religion 

Urban Nights: Gender, Work, and Experiences 

What is Avant-Garde? 

Woman/Body/Language 

Why Punish? 

 

Core III: Histories of the Present

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Core III courses are small seminars designed to foster innovation and collaboration among students and faculty. The seminars involve considerable student participation and afford the opportunity to do more individualized, self-directed scholarship in association with a single faculty member working in the area of expertise from an interdisciplinary perspective. The work of the seminars culminates in a self-designed project exploring a particular topic through the lens of “histories of the present.: Exceptional student work will be disseminated to the wider College community. Depending on instructor and subject matter, the Core III seminars involve research, internships with fieldwork, exhibits, performances, conferences, and multimedia projects. Check the Scripps portal for current offerings. Core III courses offerings vary each year and may include those listed below. Courses offered for fall 2013 are identified with *.

Biblical Fictions and the Religious Imagination 

Blues Jazzlines: Past and Present Tense  *

Creating Archives: Archives, Disciplinary Knowledge, and Research 

Cyberculture and the Posthuman Age  *

Discord and Dialog  *

Ecological Justice 

Fighting the Good Fight: Responding to Misogyny in Renaissance Italy 

Foreign Language and Culture Teaching Clinic  *

Islam versus the West? Unraveling the Terms of “Clashing Civilizations”  *

Independent Study Projects 

The Life Story  *

The Mechanical Eye: Photography from Science to Art 

Oral History: Theory, Method, and Practice 

Representations of the Male Body in Contemporary Art and Culture  *

Roots: Agriculture and American Identity 

The Sexuality of Citizenship in the U.S 

Sites of Seduction: Aesthetic Contexts of the French Garden and its Others 

Southern California and Hollywood Film: Human Dreams, Human Difference and Human Desire  *

Space/Place: Critical Human Geography 

The Twentieth-Century Music Schism *

United: Women’s Work and Collective Action 

What is Happiness? 

Women, Girls, and Mathematical Superstitions  *

The Arts: Visions of Humanity  *

Virgins and Goddesses  *

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