The Honors College Spring 2013 Fifth Century Athens: Readings in Intellectual, Literature, and Political History Instructor: Course Number: Class Number: Day & Time:
Dué Hackney CLAS 4305H 34609 W 4:00–7:00 pm
Communications Media and Society This is a hybrid course—includes online and face-to-face components.
(Petition for Honors credit.) There are two sections of this course available.
This course gives an overview of intellectual trends and political history of fifth-century BCE Athens. Topics include the development of Democracy, the birth of Tragedy, the Persian Wars, Athenian Empire, court system, art and architecture, the Peloponnesian Wars, the Sophistic movement, and the death of Socrates. The readings come from the primary sources of the period, including Herodotus and Thucydides, Greek comedy and tragedy, and the dialogues of Plato. This course was designed for the Classics major and minor, as well as the Phronesis, World Cities, and World Cultures and Literatures minors, but all are welcome. It fulfills the Writing in the Disciplines Core requirement.
Myth and Dreams among Ancients and Moderns Instructor: Course Number: Class Number: Day & Time:
Armstrong CLAS 4353H 34607 M 4:00–7:00 pm
This course will look to the function of myths and dreams as they play out in certain key texts from antiquity, and how modernity in turn uses the concepts of myth and dreams in the reception of ancient culture. Assignments will include dream analysis, so all wild dreamers are welcome. Readings will draw from Egyptian, Greek and Roman literature as well as modern authors like Bachofen, Schiller Nietzsche and Freud.
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Instructor: Course Number:
Schiff COMM 1301
Class Number: Day & Time:
36420 TH 10:00–11:30 am
Class Number: Day & Time:
17659 T 10:00–11:30 am
The mass media are the primary institutions of adult education and political influence in the country. The class meets once a week for an undergraduate seminar where we debate with each other face-toface. This course examines media corporations, mass audiences and the manufacture of ideological consent. I teach the class from a critical cultural perspective. We explore the history, technology, economics and politics of the media. We study how a few multi-national corporations dominate each media industry. We examine the upper class slant to the news, so-called television “reality,” public relation spin doctors, the media-friendly biases of advertising, the myths of film, music fads and Internet hype. We look at research on the effects of digital network convergence and the televised invention of reality. The media generate above-average profits and create jobs for 1.5 million professionals. For those who want to be reporters, editors, authors, magazine writers, sound recording artists, radio DJs, film producers, TV celebrities, PR spin doctors, advertising executives and online media stars, this class is designed for you. If you are just a consumer bombarded by massproduced cultural products and information overload, this class offers you protective brain ware.