Summer Program for Juniors (TASP) | 2009 Programs
"No one had wanted me to truly think before, and TASP came not politely asking, but demanding that I read and analyze, present my view and then defend it."
- Meredith Durkin, student
Cornell I Program
Cornell II Program
University of Michigan Program
UT Austin Program
Cornell I Program
Pleasure and Danger: Bodies in History, Science, Literature and Philosophy
Telluride House, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
June 28 - August 8, 2009
Faculty: Professor Masha Raskolnikov, Department of English, Cornell University; and Professor Gregory Tomso, Department of English and Foreign Languages, University of West Florida
Factotum: Eli Schmitt, Deep Springs College
Nothing seems more natural to us than our own flesh and blood. We experience our bodies as if they are simply “here,” so much a part of who we are that we take them for granted. Yet what we call the body is in fact a historical object. This seminar traces the social and cultural construction of the body from Plato to the present day.
How have we come to know the body as possessing attributes called “gender,” “sexuality” and “race”? Why have some bodies in history been seen as monstrous, perverted, and unholy? What makes bodies pleasurable and dangerous? We will ask these questions and many others while examining a broad range of evidence from the ancient era to the present day, including philosophy, science, literature, painting, photography and film.
Our survey of the body’s history will include a consideration of the nineteenth-century “medicalization” of the body, a process that produced such diverse subjects as “hysterical women,” “homosexuals,” and representative racial “types,” including the Hottentot Venus, whose black female body was an object of scientific and popular fascination in both Europe and America. We will look closely at philosophies of the body, considering the ways in which it has been a problem for Western thought in the writings of Plato and Descartes. And we will look at how the body can stand in for the “real” and the most utterly phantasmatic, from the history of drag and gender transformation to the way in which historically distant periods like the Middle Ages, which seem to survive as mere words, can seem so present when those words speak to us about the very stuff of embodied life.
Texts for the seminar will include, among others, selections from Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy; Loren Cameron, Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits; and films such as Tod Browning’s Freaks.
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"TASP has changed the way I look at history, society, and even myself."
- Sasha-Mae Eccleston, student
Cornell II Program
Empire of Prisons
Telluride House, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
June 28 - August 8, 2009
Faculty: Professor Tamar Carroll, Department of History; and Professor Barry Maxwell, Departments of Comparative Literature and American Studies, Cornell University
Factotum: Stephanie Kelly, Cornell University
The United States now ranks first in the world in its rate of incarceration, with one out of every 100 adult Americans in jail or prison and millions more on probation or parole. The U.S. prison population is remarkable not only for its size (five times historic norms) but also for its marked racial disparities. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in jail or prison in his lifetime, and one in seven black adult males has lost the right to vote as a result of felony disenfranchisement. As the domestic prison population has continued to skyrocket, the U.S. military and intelligence services have built a network of overseas, often secret, prisons for the detention of alleged terrorists. Additionally, through financial and military aid programs and other incentives and impositions, the United States exports its prison regime to countries across the globe. This course will interrogate the American penal system at home and abroad in both historical and contemporary contexts.
In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe wrote that “in looking back through history . . . we should pass over all the biographies of ‘the good and the great,’ while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows.” Following Poe, we will seek to get at the experience of prisoners through studying their own creative output, as well as by reading official documents against the grain. We will consider a wide variety of sources, including prisoners’ writing, raps, song, slang, graphic art, and plays, as well as policy reports, government documents, activist documentation, carceral theory, the history of criminal justice, and documentary film to address these key themes: criminalization (of substances, relationships, acts, populations, poverty); architecture, enclosure, and citizenship; imperialism, morality, and the political economy of incarceration; race, class, gender, and criminal justice; sexuality, the family, and imprisonment; and governmental, creative, and activist responses to the U.S. penal system. Readings on chain gangs in the post-Reconstruction South, the Attica prisoner uprising, the Rodney King case, the war on drugs, the policing of gangs and the California State Prison system, and torture and the war on terror, among others, will serve as case studies for investigation of our central themes.
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University of Michigan Program
Physics, Philosophy, Fiction
Telluride House, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
June 28 - August 8, 2009
Faculty: Professor Benjamin Paloff, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Professor Katie Peterson, Robert B. Aird Chair in the Humanities, Deep Springs College
Factota: Jessi Holler, Swarthmore College; and Benjamin Morris, Harvard University
A great deal of emphasis is placed today on interdisciplinary practices whenever we undertake advanced work in the humanities and sciences. But what does this interdisciplinarity mean, and how can it be applied? In this seminar, we will examine outstanding examples of interdisciplinary thinking from the ancient world to the present and consider how science, philosophy, and the arts have complemented and complicated each other in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. From Lucretius’s pre-Christian verse treatise on atomic physics to Albert Einstein’s reflections on the consequences of relativity; from eighteenth century epics about evolution by Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) to the recent poems they have inspired; from Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R., which introduced the word “robot,” to contemporary debates about artificial life, we will examine how the recent resurgence of interdisciplinary thinking in the academy represents less a new development than a return to foundational methods.
Source material will include works by Thales, Empedocles, Aristotle, Lucretius, Mary Shelley, Emily Dickinson, H. G. Wells, William Carlos Williams, Karel Capek, C. P. Snow, David Bohm, N. Katherine Hayles, Elizabeth Willis, and others.
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UT Austin Program
Documenting Reality: Producing and Reading the Literature of Fact
The University of Texas at Austin
June 28 - August 8, 2009
Faculty: Professor J.B. Colson, Department of Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin; and Professor William Stott, Departments of American Studies and English, The University of Texas at Austin
Factota: Andrew Lyubarsky, Columbia University; and Ashley Tulloch, Northwestern University
“Fifteen apparitions have I seen,” wrote the poet W.B. Yeats. “The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.” Though we know a good deal about the way great fictions work, we are only beginning to learn how to deal with what may be called the literature of fact, that coat on the hanger. This course will explore and analyze the theory and practice of written, photographed, and filmed documentary, oral history, human-interest journalism, and participant-observer social science.
Students in the course won’t only analyze nonfiction documents; they will also create them. After the first two assignments—the first an introspective ethnography (in plainer words: an autobiographical statement), the second a classmate report—students will document, alone or, if they choose, with others, subjects that honestly interest them. Such documentation may be done in writing, photographs, recorded interviews, video, or webpages—but in every case the documentary projects will be created with input from both professors and the quality of presentation will be evaluated as well as the significance of the content.
Like any city with a university campus, the state capital, omnipresent high-tech industry, the mother store of Whole Foods, and a world-class natural urban swimming pool, Austin offers innumerable topics for documentation, and the professors promise to tempt students with at least 50 possibilities. However, it will be up to each student, alone or with one or two fellow TASPers, to choose the subject he or she will undertake.
The course assignments will likely include portions of the following: Hortense Powdermaker’s
Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist; Leon Dash’s
Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America; George Orwell’s
The Road to Wigan Pier; Janet Malcolm’s
The Journalist and the Murderer; Bill Stott’s
Documentary Expression and Thirties America; and examples of classic “new journalism.” The documentary films assigned will probably include:
Love Tapes;
The Six O’Clock News;
The Confessions of Rosa Lee; Cannibal Tours;
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Revisited; and
42 Up. In addition, students will examine 30+ “documentary” (i.e., photo-and-text) books in the Photographic Collection of UT’s Humanities Research Center.
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