This course seeks to facilitate students ' critical thinking about history as constructions of the past . In the United States and throughout the world , debates and sometimes violent campaigns have focused on official narratives and commemorative depictions about the past that function to sustain existing norms of status and power . Who contributes to making these choices ? Whose voice , and thus perspective , remains muted ? How does this affect what stories about the past get told and how they get told ? Why do these questions and the manner they get resolved matter ? This course addresses a rich body of literature about collective memory , an emerging literature on cultural forgetting , and case studies relating to various current topics . |
3.00 |
Take ENG-101 . ( Required , Previous ). |
HON-153 |
Philosophy of Humor |
This course examines the basic theories of humor , including incongruity , superiority , and release theory . It covers the main proponents of these theories , from the German rationalists like Wollf and Kant , to the British empiricists like Hutcheson , to more and recent theories by Bergson and Freud and contemporary cognitive science . Students will examine the critical role humor plays in society and related issues in ethics and political philosophy ; the nature of humor in general ; and the relationship between humor and other human activities that make use of a unique relationship to language , ambiguities , or paradox , such as poetry , song , and philosophy . The course will connect to larger issues in the humanities such as the nature of language , temporality , truth , the mind , and representation as well as ethics and political philosophy . This course may be used to fulfill a general education requirement in English or philosophy or an Honors Program requirement under " Rhetoric " or " Dialectic ." |
3.00 |
Take ENG-101 . ( Required , Previous ). |