CORE 443 - The Proper Order of Things?
Prerequisites: Core seminar, required for graduation CORE 101 through CORE 105 and at least sixth semester standing
From the Monopoly board game to the Periodic Chart, we take the world we live in and put it in order. Understanding how things are categorized gives us a power over our world and finding a new way to order our world results in ground breaking discoveries. Just think of the scientific advances made possible once we understood that the planets revolve around the Sun instead of the Earth! This course investigates the history of set structures and categories established in our own primarily European-based culture, and compares them with how people organize their world in other cultures of contemporary and ancient Asia, Africa, Oceania and Native America.
Readings include selections from: Mark Francis and Randolph Hester, Jr. (eds.), The Meaning of Gardens: Ideas, Place and Action (on landscape design); Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (on classification of artifacts); Martin W. Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of the Continents: A Critique of Metageography (on classifications of geography and mapping); Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination; Nathan Spielberg and Bryon D. Anderson, Seven Ideas that Shook the Universe; Mark Turner, The Literary Mind; and excerpts from contemporary films: Party Girl, Angels and Insects, A Day on the Grand Canal With the Emperor of China.
3 credits
Fall, Spring
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