Subject Concentration Courses | 2008
Bob Dylan and the American Dream Men and Women: Gender Roles in Film, Scientific Research, and Literature Biochemistry – The Integrated Science Character in Writing and Performance Storytelling and the Graphic Novel Designing, Developing, and Maintaining a Website Law and Society American Collective Memory of WWII Biomedical Science
“I was riding on the Mayflower when I thought I spied some land”: so begins the surreal adventure of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” (1965). While that story-song explicitly turns the myth of discovery on its head, Bob Dylan’s entire career can be examined in light of competing visions of America. He became a pop culture icon at a time of radical questioning of traditional notions of America’s values. He adapted a poetic tradition, both experimental and populist, that runs from Walt Whitman through e e cummings, Woody Guthrie, and Allen Ginsberg. At the same time, his music fused elements ranging from nineteenth-century minstrelsy to traditional country, folk, blues, gospel and rock: to listen to his most recent work is to be immersed in the American pop music tradition. This course will examine Dylan’s music and career alongside other writers and recording artists. We’ll read a number of poets and fiction writers (including those listed above), along with cultural critics, record reviewers, and music historians. We’ll also listen to music, talk and write about it, and in the process try to better understand Dylan’s place in American culture.
This course ranges widely across the fields of film, fiction, drama, and poetry—stretching from Die Hard and Lethal Weapon II to the poetry of John Keats and the fiction of Anne Tyler. Undergirding this will be an examination of scientific research on the subject of gender roles. Throughout the course we will discuss science and art, which raise questions about ways in which gender roles are genetically inherent and ways in which they are socially derived. We will view and read works about boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, and brothers and sisters, all the while exploring how and why gender roles shape and color these relationships.
What is biochemistry? How does it tie into the integrated web of science that is the world around us? This course will allow students to use facilities at the College of Charleston and the Medical University of South Carolina to formulate a better understanding of how biochemistry branches into every aspect of science. Basics of biochemistry will be the laid as the groundwork. Each student will have opportunities to use their knowledge and investigate how the common tread of biochemistry ties together much of our daily lives.
In literature and performance what makes great characters great? Defined as representations of a life they spring from the heart and imagination of the artist. Creating great characters requires diving deep into one's own personal experience and inner life while creating through the materials given to us in the outer life. Theater combines the craft of the writer and the interpretive art of acting. Immersing the student in both techniques, students will learn to define character and create their own vivid "representations of life" which will be showcased in a final performance of monologues, scenes and character studies.
We tend to think of graphic novels and comic books as kid’s stuff: brightly colored pictures telling fantastic stories about radioactive spiders, mutants, and super-powered aliens. If this is true, how do we then explain the endurance of the form, the fact those comic book-reading kids grow into comic book-reading adults, the fact that a significant number of comics feature no superheroes at all? This course will consider the graphic novel as a long-form comic that aspires not only to narrative coherence and closure, but to formal complexity and psychological death. We will also look at the ways this comic form differs from both prose and film. We will read Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. We will also view the film versions of V for Vendetta and Ghost World, and the film Unbreakable. Class activities will include a trip to a local comic shop and the making of minicomics.
This course introduces HTML and web design fundamentals. Students will be introduced to a knowledge of the tools and techniques required for effective website development. Topics include HTML, an HTML editor, web design principles, web scripting languages, manipulation of graphical images, and the use of databases as part of the web environment. Through daily hands-on activities, students will develop and maintain a personal as well as a professional website, which will be completed by the end of the program.
Laws intersect virtually every aspect of our lives. This course examines a wide variety of legal issues and the impact these issues have on society. Students will explore specific issues regarding freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of choice, “right-to-die,” plea bargaining, and sexual preference. General areas of law studied will include domestic relations, constitutional law, and criminal law. By studying cases, engaging in debates, participating in mock trials, and writing new laws, students will ascertain the correlation between laws and peoples’ everyday lives.
What did it mean to live through a total war? WWII killed 400,000 Americans and wounded over 1,000,000 more. It established the US as a world power, set the stage for civil rights, provided women with new opportunities, and ironically created unprecedented material prosperity. It also led Americans to inter their fellow citizens in concentration camps, gave us atomic weapons and inaugurated the decades-long Cold War. In other words, it completely changed how we make sense of the world. This course explores American collective memory of WWII by focusing on cinematic representations of total war from the 1940s to the 1990s. We will examine what the war meant to men and women, to minorities, to rich and poor, to leaders and ordinary citizens. As we explore multiple perspectives we will ask ourselves: what is the best way to remember the sacrifices of the men and women who lived through the most hideous conflict in human history? Who gets to decide what the war meant?
The students will explore basic science, the nature of science, and its relationship to modern medicine. Guest speakers from the Medical University of South Carolina will participate, with students taking field trips to clinical and basic science facilities at the Medical University. The first half of the course focuses on the cardiovascular system, building to an understanding of a major SC health issue—heart disease with a focus on congestive heart failure. In the second half, students will increase their understanding of the central dogma and use the techniques of molecular biology to solve forensic cases. They will become familiar with the pipetting, the determination of protein concentration, the preparation of agarose gels, electropohretic separation, and the use of restrictions endonucleases to identify unique genetic patterns. Amplification of DNA by the polymerase chain reaction will also be examined.