Tutorials

A.

art in fiction

Jenny Anger – Art

In this tutorial we will read a collection of novels, plays, short stories, and poems that in one way or another thematize art. We will pay special attention to visual art as it appears in literature, but we will also consider the look, or sound, of literature and music in written texts. We will try to answer questions such as the following: To what ends does the author represent (in writing) art (visual art, literature, or music)? Does the writing elucidate the art, or does the art serve as a prop for the writing? Does the fiction provide any useful material for non-fiction, that is, historical or critical analysis of art, artists, or culture at large? Readings could range from Emile Zola's The Masterpiece, a 19^th century naturalist novel that can be read as a telling, though distorting, historical fiction about the Impressionists, to a recent collection of short stories by A. S. Byatt, The Matisse Stories, which say nothing of Matisse the artist, but imagine how particular paintings by Matisse affect the lives of three different contemporary women (a beauty parlor customer, a maid, and a radical feminist college art student).

B.

the search for self in fiction, film and song

Sigmund Barber – German

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” With this musical syllogism, John Lennon and Paul McCartney suggest an answer to the ageless question: who am I? A deceptively simple question, it is one that has occupied thinkers from the earliest of times to the present. What is involved in defining who we are? What elements, many beyond the individual’s control, play a role in establishing one’s identity? In this tutorial we shall examine how writers have posed these and other questions in exploring in their works the concept of self-identity. We’ll look at works from a wide range of writers, filmmakers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Hermann Hesse, Kimberly Pierce and others.

C.

AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

George Barlow – English

From our nation’s beginnings to the present, historians, poets, politicians, and storytellers of all kinds have attempted to define and describe Americanness. Taken together, the speeches, documents, and various narratives suggest that to be an “American” is something beyond being a citizen of the United States. Individual citizens and groups have often felt compelled to claim their Americanness, to argue for and justify their symbolic identity against factors such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and region—categories which themselves change in meaning over time. This course will use nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographies and personal essays to explore African American attempts at self-definition. We will begin with an examination of chattel slavery in America and two classic slave narratives, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Linda Brent’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Works by Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. will be considered in the context of their respective literary periods.

D.

LIBERAL EDUCATION AND CRITICAL CITIZENSHIP

Bradley Bateman – Economics

The Grinnell College Mission Statement provides “that knowledge is a good to be pursued for its own sake and for the intellectual, moral, and physical well-being of individuals and of society at large.” This tutorial will study historical and conceptual materials on the subject of the liberal arts as the pursuit of knowledge, as well as materials regarding the idea of “critical citizenship,” in order to gain some perspective on what it means to pursue a liberal arts education at Grinnell College.   (Professor Bradley W. Bateman, Economics; a joint tutorial with Professor Ira L. Strauber, Political Science)

E.

The Americas on October 11, 1492

David Campbell – Biology

What was the New World like the day before Columbus landed? How did the Native Americans live? How had they transformed the landscapes of the Americas? Had they caused the extinction of any plants or animals? What crops and animals did they domesticate (including those that have since spread throughout the world, and those that have been forgotten)? How many Native Americans were there? And the most important question of all: how do we know these things? The past two decades have witnessed a restructuring of our understanding of the human ecology of the New World before Columbus—from Amazônia to the Great Plains. This tutorial will embrace landscape ecology, tropical forestry, archaeology, anthropology, agronomy, and population biology to explore these revolutionary new ideas (and the paradigms they replaced).

F.

PLACING OURSELVES: LANDSCAPE, LOCALE AND IDENTITY

Lesley Delmenico – Theatre

Drawing from the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, art history, and literature, this tutorial will explore issues concerning the effects of locality on identity creations. How is this process affected by landscapes, both natural and built? How do different groups of people use places differently? What makes space “sacred?” What creates “home” in a building or community? And how might these definitions differ for immigrants, exiles and tourists? During this course, students will explore a variety of ways of understanding locale, and will experience Grinnell and environs through such methods as participation in farm and prairie tours, visiting other towns, creating personal maps and conducting research into representations and varied constructions of society, place and belonging.

G.

Stories, Story-Tellers, and Audiences: Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron

Elizabeth Dobbs – English

How is a story constructed? Using a model derived from linguistics and applied to narrative, we’ll consider this question as we read stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron and Marguerite of Navarre’s Heptameron. Both are framed collections of tales told by characters brought together by chance and circumstance. Boccaccio’s ten young nobles, fleeing the plague in fourteenth-century Florence, entertain themselves with daily story-telling, while Marguerite’s ten sixteenth-century French travelers, stranded at a monastery in the Pyrenees on their way home from a Spanish spa, decide to imitate the Decameron by taking turns at story-telling.  In both collections, the tale-telling is interspersed with lively discussion about the tales among the tellers and their audience. The members of this Tutorial will study the art of narrative by continuing that conversation.

H.

The Ways of Paradox

John Fennell – Philosophy

A paradox can be characterized as an unacceptable conclusion reached by seemingly acceptable reasoning from seemingly acceptable premises. For example, most people understand that Zeno’s paradox, which concludes that motion is impossible, cannot be true, so appearances to the contrary something must be wrong either with the initial acceptability of the premises and/or the nature of the reasoning, or the supposed unacceptability of the conclusion. Yet, just what is the problem is difficult to detect. Historically paradoxes arise at moments of intellectual crisis and have occasioned deep revolutions in our thinking. Unlike mere ‘brainteasers’, they raise questions of serious philosophical import, pointing to fundamental limitations in the way we understand some area of inquiry, such as the nature of space and time, the possibility of human knowledge, or the rationality of our decision-making and action. We will investigate a selection of well-known paradoxes across these three subject areas with a view to uncovering the historical conditions of their emergence, exploring the cogency of various responses to them, and considering their implications for recent developments in these fields. The authors whose texts we will study are drawn from the history of philosophy and literature and include: Zeno, Russell, Hempel, Goodman, Nozick, Parfit, Borges, Conan Doyle.

I.

Secret Codes

Christopher French – Mathematics/Computer Science

Cryptology is the study of the construction of codes (cryptography) as well as methods for breaking them (cryptanalysis). In this age of the Internet and of identity theft, the need for protecting information by encryption has become increasingly important and relevant to a broad segment of our society. But codes and ciphers have been used for centuries to protect information from falling into enemy hands. Thrones have been lost and empires have fallen because of inadequate encryption, while wars have been won by those who could crack the codes of their adversaries. In this tutorial, we will consider how codes have been used in history, study some particular codes and see how they have been broken, and learn some of the mathematical reasons why modern ones, when correctly implemented, can be so hard to crack.

J.

THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG

Eugene Gaub – Music

Richard Wagner’s cycle of four music dramas is a riveting adventure tale with roots in mythology, a history of the world itself, a demonstration of the corrupting effects of power and of redemption through love, an exploration of the subconscious mind; in short, the Ring tetralogy is the most ambitious piece of musical theater ever conceived.  Through a variety of approaches and interpretations we will explore the layers of meaning in the work, and examine aspects of Wagner himself that have made him the most controversial composer in history.  Music reading ability is not required.

K.

Language in Nonhuman Primates

Janet Gibson – Psychology

We will explore issues and examine research on language competence in bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Conversely, we will consider what the work with these great apes tells us about human language.

L.

Japanese Mythology

Edmund Gilday – Religious Studies

This tutorial is an exploration of the ancient Japanese world portrayed in mythic and legendary narratives of the early 8th century. Two texts in particular, the Kojiki (“Records of Ancient Matters”) and the Nihongi (“Chronicles of Japan”) have come down to us intact and will be the primary basis for our reflections. Depending on the interests of the class, historiographic writings from later periods may be considered in order to see the various ways these texts came to be interpreted in different historical circumstances. We will, finally, examine how some of these myths and legends continue to be remembered and retold through the performing arts even today.

M.

family tragedy in literature

David Harrison – French

According to Tolstoy, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  In this Tutorial, we will focus on literary depictions of disastrous, dysfunctional, and dramatically aberrant families. Our goal, however, is not to determine what constitutes a good family (an impossible task), but rather to understand why these particularly tragic families create such compelling stories. We will analyze how literature uses family relations to explore vital notions such as justice, equality, women's and men's social roles, and race. We will attempt to isolate the different techniques that writers use to create character, suggest opposing points of view, and solicit reader sympathy. We will pay extremely close attention to the specific words used in the texts that we read, and the writing assignments will require careful and precise examination of the particular literary details of each work. Readings include Euripides' Medea, the Biblical story of David and Absalom, Truman Capote's crime thriller In Cold Blood, and Suzan-Lori Parks's Pulitzer-prize drama Topdog/Underdog.

N.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: EMPOWERING PEOPLE, EFFECTING CHANGE

Chris Hunter – Sociology

“Organizing,” writes activist Si Kahn, “is people working together to get things done.” This tutorial examines community organizing—efforts by people working together to improve their neighborhoods, their communities, and their workplaces. We will focus our attention on the organizer and on the organizing effort itself, asking such questions as: Why do people become community organizers, union organizers, or social activists? How does their activism affect them?  What are the skills and roles of a good organizer? Since people have a lot of other things to do in their lives, how do effective organizers and leaders build organizations and get people to participate actively? What kinds of organizing are there? We will try to answer such questions by analyzing a wide range of material on organizing, including autobiographical writings, manuals for activists, case studies of organizing attempts, and documentary films.

O.

freedom

Daniel Kaiser – History

Is freedom the “natural” condition of humankind, as some theorists maintain, or are humans instead subject to forces over which they can exercise little control? Indeed, do humans covet freedom at all, or do they, as Dostoevsky has the Grand Inquisitor say, prefer to exchange the possibilities of freedom for the security of happiness? From numerous perspectives, both classical and modern, this tutorial will examine freedom and its limitations. We will consider how dystopian fiction, religious discipline, slave narratives, Nazi culture, neuroscience, and molecular biology, among others, contribute to our understandings of freedom and its boundaries, and what these understandings mean for a liberally educated person. 

P.

Manipulation or Subversion? Popular Culture in American Experience

Jean Ketter – Education

Who should have the power to define what is true, beautiful, or what it means to be fully human? Do omnipresent pop culture images and messages influence and even create our beliefs and desires, or does popular culture simply mirror our values? Does popular culture reflect the worst in human nature—its prurience, greed, and superficiality—or does it reflect our ability to subvert and transcend the reality imposed on us by a dominant culture? Is popular culture a creation of subversive artists who speak for the people in their critique of the status quo, or do multinational corporations with billion-dollar advertising budgets manipulate artists’ desire for originality by encouraging artists to sell out? We will begin our discussion of these questions with an exploration of theories of culture and then, for the remainder of the semester, use multiple critical perspectives to analyze artifacts of popular culture. Participants will discuss their analyses of texts chosen from varied generic expressions of popular culture: film, music, written texts, visual arts, architecture, and multimedia productions.

Q.

The Language of Color: Practice and Perception in Art and Culture

Matthew Kluber – Art

Color both enriches and complicates our human experience and communications. We will examine color as light affected by the qualities of surfaces and the working of visual perceptions. We will also consider the evocative nature of color as a source for symbols and metaphors in Modern and Contemporary Art and Culture.

R.

Dear John: Restoring the Lost Art of the Letter

Heather Lobban-Viravong – English

In this tutorial we will write and read letters while keeping in mind the important features of this specific genre. We will explore the use of letters in film, novels, and poetry, and consider such issues as voice and audience. As we contemplate the use of this dying art form, we will ask the following questions:  How does the letter form vary across time and space? How does the writer portray his or her self in relation to specific events and relationships? In relation to a specific culture? How can we resolve the tension that results when a private form of expression is offered for public consumption?

S.

WEIRD MUSIC

Eric McIntyre – Music

What is weird music? Who creates weird music, and why? Who listens to weird music, and why? In this course, we seek to understand music that has deviated dramatically from dominant trends and the people who compose and enjoy it. Through a series of listening, reading, and writing assignments we will examine a broad array of musical styles, eras, and artists from Carlo Gesualdo to John Zorn and Mike Patton, and a variety of topics, including definitions of music, the aesthetics of “weird,” and the cultural significance of weird music. Readings will include interviews with contemporary artists and articles by composers John Cage and Frank Zappa among others. Writing assignments will range from music reviews to discussions on the philosophy of weird music. Students will also collaborate on the creation of new weird musical events, including a “happening” and the composition of new scores. The ability to read traditional music is NOT necessary for this course.

T.

HUMANITIES I: THE ANCIENT GREEK WORLD

Edward Phillips – Classics

Through close reading of selected works from the poetry, drama, history, and philosophy of  the ancient Greeks, this tutorial introduces students to works which became primary sources for “Western culture”; it thus provides an effective foundation for further study in the liberal arts. The course might be subtitled “Love, War, and the Human Character,” for these texts address issues that are at the heart of human experience and identity. We read and discuss Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Sappho's lyrics, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Euripides' Bacchae, Aristotle's Poetics, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, and Plato's Apology, Crito, and Symposium. While this tutorial will be especially useful to students who wish to study literature (it functions, for example, as a prerequisite for certain courses in English, Classics, and Theatre), the excitement and challenge of studying these classic texts should offer a fine beginning for any student of the liberal arts.

U.

FIELDS OF GENES

Vida Praitis – Biology and Biological Chemistry

Grinnell, Iowa is surrounded by miles of corn and soybean fields. All of these food crop plants have been genetically modified by centuries of selection for specific traits that humans find desirable, such as higher sugar content and pest resistance. Over the last 50 years, advances in molecular biology have given us the technology to directly manipulate single genes in these important plant crops. Is this technology safe? We will explore the history of genetic modification in food crops, the science behind genetically modified organisms, the ecological impact of genetic modification and agriculture, alternatives to conventional farming practices, and the business and economics of agriculture in Iowa. The course will include readings of scientific and popular literature and discussions with local food producers.

V.

Victoria’s Secrets

Elizabeth Prevost – History

Queen Victoria both defined and defied the age which bears her name. The Victorian period was a time when both women and monarchs were prevented from exercising significant political influence, but the almost universal celebration of Victoria’s public and private persona suggests a more complicated story of female power and authority. This tutorial will examine the formation of nineteenth-century identity and culture around Victoria’s image as queen, empress, public servant, Protestant, wife, mother, and British citizen. The iconography surrounding Victoria herself will serve as a starting point for a wider exploration of how Victorians within and outside Britain understood women’s role in the social order, how Victorian women made sense of a rapidly changing world, and how various individuals and groups transgressed the rigid boundaries of respectable womanhood. We will also consider how twentieth-century cultural representations of the Victorian period and its figurehead have invoked and critiqued nineteenth-century conceptions of gender.

W.

ONEROUS OWNERSHIP? INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE 21st CENTURY

Samuel Rebelsky – Mathematics/Computer Science

In recent years, the concept of “owning ideas” has moved from an area primarily of interest to a few scholars and lawyers to a central issue in many national and international debates, particularly as it applies to genetics and to computers and the Internet. For example: Can someone own life (or patterns of life)? What rights does the purchaser of a computer program or digital audio file have? Who owns an analysis or synthesis of a native remedy? How does the notion of “fair use” apply to biological and digital materials? In this tutorial, we will explore the main forms of Intellectual Property law—primarily copyright and patent, with some detours into trademark and trade secret—in the context of a number of current cases and controversies in genetics, computers, and the Internet.

X.

Degradation and Development in Tropical Forests

J. Montgomery Roper – Anthropology

What’s happening to the world’s tropical forests? Why are they disappearing, why should we care, and what can be done about it? In this course, we will take an interdisciplinary examination of deforestation and development in tropical forests, focusing on Latin America and particularly on the Amazon basin. We will examine the social and ecological value of tropical forests, the various stakeholders in tropical forests and the relations between them, and how these actors relate to the causes and consequences of unsustainable development. Finally, we will explore the costs and benefits for people living in and around these areas of a variety of alternative development options.

Y.

Dis Lit: Illness, Disability, and Contemporary Life Writing

Ralph Savarese – English

In honor of the fifteen-year anniversary of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), we will spend the semester reading memoirs by disabled writers. Possible course selections include Nancy Mairs’s Waist-High in the World, John Hockenberry’s Moving Violations, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl Interrupted, Kay Jameson’s An Unquiet Mind, Kenny Fries’s Body, Remember, Reynolds Price’s A Whole New Life, Stephen Kuusisto’s Planet of the Blind, Rod Michalko’s The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness, Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures, and Donna Williams’s Nobody Nowhere. We will investigate the peculiar genre of life writing, paying close attention to issues of voice and identity and remembering always that any act of self-representation is always much more complicated (and less immediate) than it may appear. At the same time, we will soberly master a set of concrete skills: writing arguments, doing research, learning proper citational procedures, giving individual and group presentations, engaging critically with course materials and other participants. The course should be of interest to anyone concerned with issues of normalcy, diversity, body image, civil rights, and plain-old engaging narrative.

Z.

HOLLYWOOD’S RADICAL IDEAS

Janet Seiz – Economics

“America is the land of freedom and opportunity, where hard-working individuals make their dreams come true.” “America is a society obsessed with money, ruled by the rich for the rich, riddled with injustice.” Many different “messages” may be found in American films, which both reflect and influence public perceptions. This course will examine portrayals of capitalism in a number of important American films from the 1930s to the 1990s. To better understand how movies “work,” we will learn about basic filmmaking techniques. We will also read about the history of the film industry, looking at the complicated interrelations of art, technology, moneymaking, and government. In the last two weeks of the semester, students will give oral presentations on their research papers.

AA.

ZERO AND INFINITY

Karen Shuman – Mathematics/Computer Science

This tutorial will explore two fundamental notions of mathematics: zero and infinity. For millennia, mathematicians and theologians, philosophers and physicists have grappled with these strangely linked ideas. The paradoxes of zero and infinity have produced awe, fear, and denial; some who have studied zero and infinity have been ridiculed, jailed, and institutionalized. Our tour from zero to infinity will take us from ancient times to the present, acquainting us with great thinkers along the way: Zeno, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Cantor, and Russell.

BB.

MODERN IRAQI LITERATURE

Saadi Simawe – English

In this tutorial, students will read, discuss, present critical reports, and write short papers on selected modern Iraqi literary texts such as fiction, poetry, essay, and drama. We will begin with a general overview of the Iraqi literary tradition and its cultural context highlighting especially the major themes, techniques, and styles. The complexity of the Iraqi ethnic and religious map requires a careful selection, within the limited English translation, of authors and texts among Arab, Kurdish, Turcoman, on the one hand and Muslim, Christian, Jewish on he other. In our discussion of the literary text, we will consider themes of war and violence, the West and colonialism, Communism, Islam, and women. In terms of literary techniques and styles, we will discuss the traditional Iraqi literary and esthetic values in their interaction with the impact of Western modernism.

CC.

Liberal Education and Critical Citizenship

Ira Strauber – Political Science

The Grinnell College Mission Statement provides “that knowledge is a good to be pursued for its own sake and for the intellectual, moral, and physical well-being of individuals and of society at large.” This tutorial will study historical and conceptual materials on the subject of the liberal arts as the pursuit of knowledge, as well as materials regarding the idea of “critical citizenship,” in order to gain some perspective on what it means to pursue a liberal arts education at Grinnell College.  (Professor Ira L. Strauber, Political Science; a joint tutorial with Bradley W. Bateman, Economics)

DD.

the illness experience across cultures

Maria Tapias – Anthropology

Understandings of the body, risk, healing and the very experience of health and illness are shaped by the social, cultural, political and historical contexts in which people live. In this tutorial we will examine the spectacular diversity that exists in how illnesses, disabilities and life events such as childbirth are experienced and interpreted across cultures. We will explore how the spread of Western biomedicine has impacted local perceptions of health and practices of healing and will examine how western medicine itself is a cultural system. Particular attention will be paid to health-provider/patient interactions and the potential misunderstandings and barriers to communication that can arise when both parties work from different systems of meaning. 

FF.

RESTORATION OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL CEILING:  CHEMISTRY AND CONTROVERSY

Elizabeth Trimmer – Chemistry

Michelangelo’s frescoes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling depict the Book of Genesis in nine vibrant panels. The frescoes were unveiled on November 1, 1512; however, centuries of smoke, incense, and grime from papal services in the chapel darkened and clouded the great work. In 1981, the Vatican began a multi-million dollar cleaning and restoration of the ceiling panels. Completed in 1990, the restoration returned the frescoes to their original brilliant colors. Some art historians, however, have vociferously argued that the Vatican conservators ruined the frescoes. In this tutorial, we will first explore the historical and religious significance of the ceiling frescoes painted by Michelangelo. We will then focus on how the frescoes were created chemically and how the restorers used their chemical understanding to clean and restore them. We will try to understand the controversy behind the restoration and strive to answer the question of whether the restoration was done properly.

GG.

Political Lives

Barbara Trish – Political Science

All people have political dimensions to their lives. For some their “political lives” are overt and are seen clearly in the activities that mark the conduct of their days and their years. For others a political life is present most vividly in its apparent absence; structuring a life that is, on the surface, void of politics is itself a political decision. In this tutorial we will consider political lives, focusing on those who have overt ones, but shying away from elites, whose lives we know most about. Instead, we will look at what influences and structures the political lives of those we might consider average people. We will read accounts from essays and memoirs and let scholarly ideas frame our exploration.  

HH.

Man Talk, Woman Talk: Beyond Words

Carmen Valentin – Spanish

This tutorial is an approach to gender-differentiated language. Students will have the opportunity to explore the causes of the use of language by men and women and how this difference in speaking patterns may affect communication between the sexes. In addition, we will reflect on how both gender and discourse together must be taken into consideration as we think of identity, connection and power at different life-stages (e.g. adolescence) or within domains of interaction (e.g. family, workplace). The course will not address issues of sexism in language.

II.

THE FAIRY TALE IN 20^th CENTURY RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND FILM: IN SEARCH OF A MAGICAL KINGDOM

Anatoly Vishevsky – Russian

Fairy tales have always reflected people’s dreams and hopes for a better tomorrow. The Russian path to this better life is perilous and hard; it is inhabited by such terrible creatures as Koshchei the Deathless, Baba Yaga (a witch), and Zmei Gorynych (a serpent). It is in the battle with these and other monsters that the folk heroes Ivan Tsarevich and Ivan the Fool win their kingdoms and their fair brides. A number of writers saw the Soviet Union—the system that was created by the communists in 1917—as one of these fairy-tale monsters, and the common person as a fairy-tale hero. Indeed, fairy tale and fantasy created a metaphor for a heroic struggle against the system. Writers also concealed their criticism of the evil system behind familiar and timeless images and characters, through an Aesopian language saying the obvious, yet implying the hidden. With the decline and eventual fall of the Soviet Union, there came a time of turmoil and unrest. Today, though in a different way, writers continue to employ fairy tale and fantasy as a means of searching for answers for the future in the never-ending story of the fantastic land of Russia. We will read and discuss a number of Russian fairy tales, and then follow our familiar heroes through the pages of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian prose and the silver screen.