Fall 2024 FHC Sections 27-37 with Course Descriptions (2024)

HONR1019727FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IMorris, William

Comedy, humor, and laughter are uniquely human ways of being in the world. While everyone has some sense of humor, what is funny is often rooted in the customs and habits shared among those in a given community or culture. Like love, or justice, or virtue, humor is a complex human activity which is difficult to define for lay and academic audiences alike. This course surveys comedies in Western culture from the Old Comedy of ancient Greece to modern novels and short stories of literary merit to film and stand-up among other comedic artifacts.

• Aristophanes - The Clouds or The Birds
• Dante -Selected Excerpts
• Boccacio - Selected Excerpts
• Shakespeare - Twelfth Night
• Moliere - Le Misanthrope

• Voltaire - Candide
• Swift - Selected Essays
• Alexie - Selected Short Stories
• Films - Silent Era & Contemporary Satires
• Stand-Up- Carlin, Pryor, Rivers, et. al.

Select Scholarship on film and stand-up

HONR1019728FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IUhrig, Karl

Discourse and Agency
Who gets to tell someone’s story? How do they construct reality through the way they tell it? What can we learn about our relationships to ourselves, each other, and society by looking closely at human agency and discourse?

This course is based on 1) the study of human agency, or the ways in which people have the ability to assert control over their circ*mstances, and 2) discourse analysis, the study of the ways in which humans construct understanding of their place in the world through language. Through the lenses of discourse and agency, we will read short stories, poems, and plays by authors from around the world and analyze them through discussion and writing. In addition, I will have you choose your own texts to analyze (any book, news story, movie, music, podcast, TikTok video, etc. that interests you).

Learning the concepts that comprise discourse and agency will take us a very short time, after which our discussions will take off and become extraordinarily interesting. These discussions will provide plenty of material for you to use to write the required essays that focus on specific concepts and specific texts. You will present your ideas and engage in the ideas of your classmates. By the end of this course, not only will you have the tools to engage in any text with a critical, analytical eye, but you will also have the tools to better understand what’s going on in society, in the news, in popular culture, and in your own life.

Texts:

• Persuasion – Austen
• Boule de Suif – de Maupassant
• Hamlet – Shakespeare
• The Poisonwood Bible – Kingsolver
• Things Fall Apart – Achebe
• The Kite Runner – Hosseini
• “Brokeback Mountain” – Proulx

HONR1019729FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IRoman, Christopher M.

Making Comics

This course will teach students how to make comics in a variety of genres. Comics are a unique medium that combine word and picture and are used in a number of settings. Students may be acquainted with superhero comics, but comics are used in a number of fields such as schools, hospitals, and labs, along with the more personal: exploring one’s own life in the form of memoir. As well, comics are useful in making arguments, structuring stories, inviting advocacy, and framing historical events. Throughout the year, students will produce a number of kinds of comics. We will focus on telling your own story through memoir comics, experimenting with the superhero genre, research and writing a historical comic, writing a comic to advocate for a cause, and thinking about how to script a comic for the movies. Along the way, students will learn about framing, narrative arcs, panel use and page design, scripts and storyboarding, and a little history of comics studies in the academic field. By the end of the two semesters, students will have produced a portfolio of various comics. You do not need to have a background in drawing; as we will discuss and examine, anyone can make comics.

Texts for Fall:

HONR1019730FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IHall, Elizabeth A.

The Gods of Urban Fantasy and Imagined Kingdoms

These narratives will take us to real and other-worldly places—at no cost to you. We will also contemplate these ideas:

• The Loss and Death of Gods:Just about every deity is represented in this collection of works. Some have endured longer in “spirit,” both in this literature and the broader public, but others have not fared so well. Can gods be lost or die? What are the wider implications of such a phenomenon; does it indicate a decay of culture or graver consequences?
• “Changing of the Guard”/The Gods of “Now”: If “ancient” or “decaying” gods have lost their power, who has risen to take their place?
• Genres of Speculative Fiction:We will consider what makes urban fantasy different from science fiction or high fantasy—beyond the setting—and define the sub-genres under the broader “fantasy” category.
• Authority in Film Adaptation: We will explore the methods by which authors successfully adapt their own work and what level of “authority” or “rights” they are entitled to.

Texts for Fall:

• American Gods [the novel] — available for free on Internet Archive (PDF and more formats), Libby (limited ebooks and audiobooks), and Kent State University library (limited printed copies)
• The Lost God — available for free on Epub Pub
• Spring Texts
• Anansi Boys(available as PDF)
• Good Omens(available on Internet Archive)
• Selected episodes from the following TV series:Good Omens, American Gods,andAnansi Boys

HONR1019731FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IHall, Elizabeth A.

The Gods of Urban Fantasy and Imagined Kingdoms

These narratives will take us to real and other-worldly places—at no cost to you. We will also contemplate these ideas:

• The Loss and Death of Gods:Just about every deity is represented in this collection of works. Some have endured longer in “spirit,” both in this literature and the broader public, but others have not fared so well. Can gods be lost or die? What are the wider implications of such a phenomenon; does it indicate a decay of culture or graver consequences?
• “Changing of the Guard”/The Gods of “Now”: If “ancient” or “decaying” gods have lost their power, who has risen to take their place?
• Genres of Speculative Fiction:We will consider what makes urban fantasy different from science fiction or high fantasy—beyond the setting—and define the sub-genres under the broader “fantasy” category.
• Authority in Film Adaptation: We will explore the methods by which authors successfully adapt their own work and what level of “authority” or “rights” they are entitled to.

Texts for Fall:

• American Gods [the novel] — available for free on Internet Archive (PDF and more formats), Libby (limited ebooks and audiobooks), and Kent State University library (limited printed copies)
• The Lost God — available for free on Epub Pub
• Spring Texts
• Anansi Boys(available as PDF)
• Good Omens(available on Internet Archive)
• Selected episodes from the following TV series:Good Omens, American Gods,andAnansi Boys

HONR1019732FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IFrench, Danielle

Mainstream culture’s obsessionality with true crime still dominates contemporary entertainment and news media with thousands of podcasts, films, music, and endless literature dedicated to the topic, but this interest has been a mainstay in popular culture for centuries. Though used as a horror trope and easy plot device in both speculative and fantastical fiction, “madness” is often linked with criminality in unsettling ways. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), “In 2021, there were an estimated 57.8 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with AMI [any mental illness],” which “represented 22.8% of all U.S. adults” (para. 5). Ranging from mild to severe in their impact on the individual and community, “young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of AMI (33.7%)” (para. 5). The AMI for the 18-25 age group has increased 4.3% since 2019, indicating instances of AMI are steadily rising. The troubling connection of mental illness with criminal or deviant behavior demands consideration and critical inquiry.

In this course, students will delve into historical and contemporary iterations of madness and murder across mediums and genres. As even fiction is often based in reality, students will be examining mental illness depicted in creative nonfiction, fiction, podcasts, music, and film and consider the many ways disorders of the mind are often misdiagnosed, untreated, stigmatized, and criminalized. How does entertainment media romanticize, fetishize, or essentialize madness and link mental illness to deviant or criminal behavior? Students will reflect on historical and contemporary understandings of psychopathology and analyze course texts to produce meaningful discussion and writing on madness, murder, and true crime.

Texts for Fall:

• Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
• Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925)
• Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942)
• Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
• Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire (2012).

Texts for Spring will be elected entirely by past and present student votes from a curation of true crime books and media. Students will spend a week working with archival materials from the Borowitz Collection, housed in the Special Collections and Archives on campus, contribute to season three of our class podcast, Madness and Murder (available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Amazon Music), and consider the ethical implications of true crime media production and consumption and also consider the impact of dark tourism.

HONR1019733FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IWagoner, Elizabeth A.

Come for the glow in the dark cats and neurotic AIs, stay for the discussions of ethics, philosophy, and pop cultural representations of science! This section explores major issues in science fiction, as well as issues raised by popular discussions of science today, through themed units focusing on larger philosophical, ethical, and theoretical ideas. Each unit will contain works from literature, comics/graphic novels, film, and nonfiction science writing. Science-fiction issues covered in this course include:

• Science Fiction as a Genre – Contested, Lowbrow, Beloved, and now Quite Difficult Due to the Speed of Innovation
• Progressivism – Is humankind advancing toward a more evolved or better state of being through technological innovation?
• Space Travel – The Science Required to take us to Mars and Beyond.
• The Apocalypse in Science Fiction – AI, Viral, Nuclear, and Climate Disasters
• Science vs. Superstition – Pseudoscience, Logic, and the Battle for the Human Mind

Examining the ways scientific ideas are framed through these texts, we will gain a richer awareness of major issues in science fiction and science today. In addition to weekly writings and discussion, there will be several researched essays, and film analysis.

Texts for Fall:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick.
• Binti: The Complete Trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor, and Interstellar, Christopher Nolan.

Texts for Spring:

• The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Silent Spring – excerpts, Rachel Carson.
• Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, and Dune: Part One by Denis Villeneuve.

HONR1019734FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM ICLARK, PATRICK J.

CRIME FICTION, FILM NOIR, & THE SENSATION OF TEXT-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATIONS

This course is a journey into the smoky, hardboiled, sometimes glamourous world of crime novels and films noir, focusing on the interplay between crime fiction stories and their film adaptations: how literature is adapted for the silver screen, the constraints of doing so, and the differences in how we respond to novels and their film counterparts. This course will include novels and their film counterparts ranging from the 1930s to the present day.

Our exploration of crime noir will focus on defining what "noir" is, what makes a novel ripe for adaptation, limitations that confront screenwriters, and how directorial ambition and production meddling can affect the final product. Additionally, the class will discuss the social influences that popularized and maintain film noir. The course will also examine how film adaptations inspire newcomers to the crime fiction genre.

All the novels we will read are familiar and popular and represent different styles within the crime genre, including psychological thrillers, hardboiled detective novels, whodunnits, modern Western crime fiction, Nordic noir, and light comedy-mysteries, among others.

Texts for Fall:

Fall semester will focus on the Golden Age of Hollywood.

• Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man & The Maltese Falcon
• James M. Cain, Double Indemnity
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
• Dorothy Hughes, In a Lonely Place
• Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train.

The texts warrant a study of directors W. S. Van Dyke, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, and Alfred Hitchco*ck.

Texts for Spring:

Spring semester text will look at modern films adaptations.

• Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley.
• Patrick Süskind, Perfume: the Story of a Murderer
• Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
• Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Directors include Anthony Minghella, Tom Tykwer, The Coen Brothers, Niels Arden Oplev, David Fincher, and Stacie Passon.

HONR1019735FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IFrench, Danielle

Mainstream culture’s obsessionality with true crime still dominates contemporary entertainment and news media with thousands of podcasts, films, music, and endless literature dedicated to the topic, but this interest has been a mainstay in popular culture for centuries. Though used as a horror trope and easy plot device in both speculative and fantastical fiction, “madness” is often linked with criminality in unsettling ways. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), “In 2021, there were an estimated 57.8 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with AMI [any mental illness],” which “represented 22.8% of all U.S. adults” (para. 5). Ranging from mild to severe in their impact on the individual and community, “young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of AMI (33.7%)” (para. 5). The AMI for the 18-25 age group has increased 4.3% since 2019, indicating instances of AMI are steadily rising. The troubling connection of mental illness with criminal or deviant behavior demands consideration and critical inquiry.

In this course, students will delve into historical and contemporary iterations of madness and murder across mediums and genres. As even fiction is often based in reality, students will be examining mental illness depicted in creative nonfiction, fiction, podcasts, music, and film and consider the many ways disorders of the mind are often misdiagnosed, untreated, stigmatized, and criminalized. How does entertainment media romanticize, fetishize, or essentialize madness and link mental illness to deviant or criminal behavior? Students will reflect on historical and contemporary understandings of psychopathology and analyze course texts to produce meaningful discussion and writing on madness, murder, and true crime.

Texts for Fall:

• Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
• Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925)
• Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942)
• Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
• Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire (2012).

Texts for Spring will be elected entirely by past and present student votes from a curation of true crime books and media. Students will spend a week working with archival materials from the Borowitz Collection, housed in the Special Collections and Archives on campus, contribute to season three of our class podcast, Madness and Murder (available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Amazon Music), and consider the ethical implications of true crime media production and consumption and also consider the impact of dark tourism.

HONR1019736FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IRabbitt, Greg

Social Justice League: Comics, Censorship, and Diversity While comics and comic book adaptations have exploded in popularity in the last twenty years, they have long been an underground medium that has struggled for legitimacy, fighting to be taken seriously as “art” or “literature.” However, comics is a unique medium that blends words and images and composes them using innovative techniques that handle time, space, and the senses in a visual language all its own. As a medium that is both “visual art” and “written literature,” comics are worth examining for this complexity alone.

Furthermore, comics have long been at the forefront of social and political movements. Despite, or perhaps because of, their marginalization, comics have often served as the voice for the disenfranchised. Owing to their complex and unique blend of art and prose, they have often been employed to examine difficult topics such as memory, trauma, racism, gender identity, and sexual orientation. They have also been the target of frequent censorship campaigns, from the 1940s up to today as everyone from concerned parents, to school boards, to Congress itself debate what is and isn’t appropriate to address in a medium that has often been seen to appeal to youth audiences. This course will examine the place of comics in American culture, and particularly how they have been used to represent the struggles of the disenfranchised and marginalized and to give them a voice. Along with that, we will be examining censorship and moral panics in America, how these campaigns impact what is portrayed in art and literature and how those texts are received and perceived. We will learn how to analyze the unique style of comic books, where medium and message become intimately entwined. We will question what even is Art or Literature, what gives a medium “legitimacy,” and what topics or voices are worthy or “appropriate” of depiction and discussion.

Potential Texts

• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art and Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud
• Selections from Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere, Hillary Chute
• Maus, Art Spiegelman
• X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, Chris Claremont
• The Sandman: A Game of You, Neil Gaiman
• Exit Stage Left, Mark Russell and Mike Freehan
• V for Vendetta, Alan Moore
• Genderqueer: A Memoir, Maia Kobabe
• American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang

HONR1019737FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IKlenovich, Mischa

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