This course offers first-year students an opportunity to explore the humanities from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives, traditionally Western as well as global, and to make connections between humanistic learning and history. The course is a small discussion seminar in which primary source materials, or classic texts, are used exclusively. An effort will be made to examine the interrelationship of ideas in the different disciplines and to compare history, literary analysis, philosophy, and theory as modes of inquiry and as ways of thinking about documents and texts. The course thereby aims to provide students with the critical tools by which to analyze texts produced in the remote or recent past. The course also serves a related purpose: to familiarize students with the heritage of Western historical tradition and to impart knowledge of the crucial role of history and the humanities as a component in general education. Students may take HIST101 without having to take HIST102. |