Catalog Entries

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LIBS 588 - CO-OP LIBERAL STUDIES
0.000 TO 6.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 6.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Lecture Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 600 - INDEPENDENT STUDY: LIBERAL STUDIES
Limited opportunities to enroll for course work on an Independent Study basis are available. A student interested in this option should obtain an Independent Study Registration Form from the Registrar, have it completed by the instructor and school dean involved, and return it to the Registrar's Office. Consult the website for policies concerning Independent Study. 0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Independent Study Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 601 - AMERICA AS A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY
This course explores the way in which the United States, throughout its history, has dealt with the internal challenges of reconciling its mostly British origins with an increasingly multicultural population. It emphasizes the tensions and accommodations between aspects of the dominant culture and new ethnic groups and ideas, with a particular emphasis on the "voices" of those outside the mainstream. The course integrates history, literature and law to examine the following themes: (a) the way the nation has been affected by the immigration of groups believed at the time to be inassimilable, from Africans to Catholics to Asians; (b) the political and social forces which have acted to hold the nation together despite the diverse nature of its peoples; and (c) how these forces are affecting contemporary American society. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 602 - THE CONQUEST OF CALIBAN
This course examines the remarkable encounters between European and non-European civilizations, with a focus on the "discovery" and conquest of the Americas. We will study documents written by key participants such as Columbus and Cortes, and western classics from that period, such as More's UTOPIA and Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST. These texts provide insight into the romanticized construction of an identity for "other" peoples, but provide little access into their actual cultures and visions; Shakespeare's "savage", Caliban, when given language, uses it only to curse. To add cross-cultural perspectives, we will read writings from "conquered" peoples in America and elsewhere. In summary, the course explores the momentous cultural, historical, and ecological consequences of these civilizational encounters. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 603 - THE SEARCH FOR MEANING
Every group throughout history has confronted basic issues about the human condition in a quest to define what is ultimately important. Within the context of change and impermanence, peoples have dealt with such issues as the meaning of self, freedom, and love; the definition of insider and outsider; the relationship of the individual to the collective; and the search for meaning. This final Core course integrates material from the other courses into the developmental issue of self-knowledge, in which the process of self-reflection will be used to enhance intellectual enlightenment. Autobiographical journals, cultural comparison, films, music, theater, and traditional readings will be the means to this end. Students will appraise their own personal histories by listening to the voices of women, African Americans, children, gays, the privileged, and the deprived. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 604 - U.S. IN A CHANGING WORLD
After World War II, American society, influenced by philosophical and psychological theories of liberty and self, wrestled with its new preeminence within the community of nations. Relatively soon, it had to consider first, increasing competition from Europe and Japan, then the collapse of the Soviet Union, and finally, the ascendancy of global economic agreements on investment and trade. Within the United States, internal conflict over racial equality (the Civil Rights Movement), foreign intervention (anti-war protests over Vietnam and Central America), gender equality (the Feminist movement), religious and family values, and a sustainable environment served to broaden conceptions of national and cultural loyalties. Students will be invited to link the internal conflicts with the larger, global structural changes, some consequences of which are escalating social class and ethnic strife. We will explore how modern America is affected by the increasing interdependence of nations and the consequent interactions of their cultures. A last objective will be to attempt to shape a vision about the appropriate future role of the United States in a world of changing economic, political, and socio-cultural forces. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 616 - WINNERS AND LOSERS AMONG LEADERS
This course is a psycho historical exploration of the careers, lives, and personalities of a variety of winners and losers focusing on the impact of childhood on adult accomplishments and conflicts. The primary focus will be on the issues of adaptability, childhood experience, coping mechanisms, creativity, innovation, overcoming trauma, and personality. Among those investigated will be Eduard Benes, Otto von Bismarck, George H. W. and George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Bill Clinton, Charles Darwin, Humphrey Davy, Elizabeth I of England. Sigmund Freud, Adolph Hitler, John Kerry, V. I. Lenin, Thomas Masaryk, Richard Nixon, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. Important questions include what behaviors, personality traits, and values make for success and which for failure? Why are certain leaders, such as Richard M. Nixon, ruined by the very success they long for? Among the course requirements are intensive reading and discussion of primary sources and outstanding psycho historical studies. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 617 - iNTERNAT'L CONFLICT:SCOPE & LIMITS OF HUMAN RIGHTS TALK
In this course, participants will examine contemporary concepts of explaining international conflict and the range of responses implicated by approaches to conflict. Students will compare definitions of war: Is it a manifestation of an economic war economy? or as military response to threat? or ethnic conflict? or civil war? These definitions include corresponding political rhetoric such as democracy, freedom, empire and terrorism. Students will examine the public popular conversation articulating the sources of conflict, as well as closely examine the issues underlying conflict in selected case studies. Finally, students explore terms of a dialogue necessary to resolve conflict, including the use of human rights language, with particular attention on how the international use of rights-talk challenges the traditional concept of rights as understood in domestic USA discourse. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 620 - MUSIC AND INDENTITY
In her new book MUSIC IN EVERYDAY LIFE, the British sociologist of music, Tia DeNora, notes that "music serves as a kind of template against which feeling, perception, representation, and social situation are created and sustained," later calling it "a building material of self-identity" and "the cultural material par excellence of emotion and the personal." This seminar examines some of the many ways in which music acts within individual, social and cultural life as a powerful part of the search for identity and meaning. In the process we explore a wide range of music and many different forms of inquiry, drawing particularly upon the backgrounds and experiences of the members of the class. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 621 - MEDIA IMAGES AND KNOWLEDGE
This course explores processes and implications of mediated information dissemination using texts, case studies, screenings, field trips, and experiential processes. Sessions include discussion of Sol Worth's theories and practice of ethnographic films, Raoul Vaneigem's ideas about mediated abstraction, and Shoshanna Zuboff's concerns about panoptic power and social organization. Students will have the opportunity to explore image-making potentials of video, computer, and telecommunication technologies. The underlying themes of this research share the humanistic, values-oriented approach of the Core program. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 622 - THE BRITISH EMPIRE: COLONIZED AND COLONIZER
The course will look at the relationships between colonizer and colonized in the British Empire and India in particular. Although it will include some of the classic colonial writings, for example, Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, and Forster's PASSAGE TO INDIA, the course will also include some of the new historical work done on and in India by scholars associated with "subaltern studies," as well as fiction and criticism written by contemporary Indian writers. The course will consider, as few scholars and teachers have done, the way in which colonial metaphors and modes appeared in social, political, and literary life at home in England during its imperial years, and thus present familiar materials in a very fresh light. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 623 - FROM MAMMIES TO MATRIARCHS: THE IMAGE OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN IN FILM
The representation of African American women in American film will be examined historically and with reference to the relationship between existing feminist theory and issues of race and class. The goal of the course is to permit students to critically assess the nature of media and "entertainment" imagery in relation to sexual, racial, and class oppression. By juxtaposing the images of African American women throughout American cinematic history, students will begin to understand that these images were created not only to "entertain", but also to support and legitimize the existing social, economic, and political realities of the African American condition. We will also examine how the issues of color and "color stereotypes" continue to create and maintain class decisions within the African American community. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 624 - PSYCHOLOGY OF URBAN LIFE
This course begins with a careful consideration of urban life, drawing upon writings by a variety of social theorists and social scientists. This review allows us to trace the development of ideas about urban life that have informed attempts by psychologists to understand the experience of living in cities. The remainder of the course involves an exploration of specific issues and topics that comprise contemporary urban psychology, e.g., the nature of urban friendships and community; living with crime and violence; stimulation, personality and adaptation; density, noise, pollution, and the reality of urban stress; and urban aesthetics and adventure. While the course will focus primarily upon the American city, material will also be drawn from work done in a variety of other countries. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 625 - POPULAR CULTURE: IMAGES OF OURSELVES
Movies, television, music, advertising, the popular press all create attractive images and tell compelling, funny, and sometimes frightening stories which often seem to come from the real world right around us. There is much melodramatic sex and violence, plenty of romanticism, fantasy, greed, and desire. But there are also important elements of realism which reflect, acknowledge, comment on, or even satirize important social issues and tensions. It has become conventional to blame mass media and popular culture for what we don't like about our society, to regard them as powerful conspiracies against traditional values. However, the situation is actually much more dynamic and interesting than that, often open to a surpassing variety of understandings depending upon who one is or where positioned. This course will explore various strategies for interpreting popular culture to consider what it says about our time and how it affects our individual and social lives. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 626 - RELIGION: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTICULTURAL STUDY
This course will study religion from an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective. Although religion is a modern Western concept derived from the Christian usage of the term to signify the worship of God, it is now used to denote any belief in or commitment to an ultimate meaning of life. After surveying the current status of religion in American society, we will turn to a history of religion, from ancient to modern times, ending in a review of the methods now used in the study of religion. The bulk of the course will concentrate on using scientific, historical, philosophical, and theological methods to investigate the significance of religion in world history, concluding with an analysis of the modern conflict between religion and secularism. The aim will be to enable an examination of the entire spectrum of religious practice, an understanding of the function of religion in human life, and an evaluation of the validity of a religious perspective. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 627 - SHAKESPEARE'S STRANGERS
The course title derives from Leslie Fielder's influential work The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972), on an outsider/alien in Shakespeare. Increasing attention is being given to the proposition that when we regard Shakespeare's career within the cultural and economic context of London, of an England eager for expansion, we can observe his interest in the nature and identity of the Other. These strangers manifest themselves to Shakespeare and his contemporaries either through direct contact, translated story, or the narratives of voyagers. The strangers appear as people of color, new world savages, non-believers, or exotics of antiquity or the faraway. This seminar will concentrate on a select body of plays in which Shakespeare depicts encounters with others, such as The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Anthony and Cleopatra. In addition to careful reading of the texts, we will review, through discussion and presentation, the critical literature on the cultural context of the stranger in Shakespeare. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 628 - EAST ASIA: PAST AND PRESENT
East Asia has stood out in human history in many dimensions such as population scale, literate civilization, and economic progress. Its 2,000 year-long history and Confucian culture have amazed the world, while its past social turbulence and recent, rapid industrialization have equally surprised many in the West. Combining an historical survey of the region's political and social development with a topical examination in traditional and contemporary East Asia, this course attempts to: 1) foster an overview of East Asia's culture, history, and society; 2) understand the impact of cultural and social change on human relations; and 3) examine the cultural similarities and differences between the West and the East. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 629 - DEATH AND DYING: A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
Throughout human experience, death has been a vital concern. This is true in both the ancient and modern worlds, in small scale societies and contemporary industrial giants. This course investigates the meaning of human morality to both social systems and individual experience. Changing historical patterns and contemporary development in diverse cultures will be studied. Students will be encouraged to look deeply into values and ethical considerations and to develop a respect and appreciation for the diversity of human experience. This leads to a deeper joy and appreciation of life, an examination of life, an examination of the Socratic dictum, "know thyself," and consideration of the question, "how then shall I live?" 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 630 - GOOD NEIGHBOR, BAD NEIGHBOR: INTER-AMERICAN RELATIONS
This course is an overview of United States/Latin American relations over two centuries. After an examination of the 19th century, we will look more closely at the modernizing of the MONROE DOCTRINE by Theodore Roosevelt. Next we will study Woodrow Wilson's actions in Latin America, followed by the establishment of the Good Neighbor Policy before World War II and the abandonment of this policy after the War. Did the United States become the Bad Neighbor with renewed intervention in the 1950s and continuing until the 1980s? Does the establishment of NAFTA mean orientation for the next century? These are the topics for study, analysis, and discussion. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 632 - NATIVE AMERICANS
This is an interdisciplinary study of Native Americans from the era of European settlement to the present. It seeks to familiarize students not only with the rich and diverse backgrounds of Native groups but also their complex responses to the white man's persistent efforts either to stamp out or romanticize Indianness. Students will explore individual Native cultures and the mythological worlds which have informed them, the history of U.S. Indian policy and the ideological foundations upon which it has been built; and the origins of Native American stereotypes in American culture--notably the Noble and Ignoble Savage--as seen in art, literature, music, and film. They will also have ample opportunity to analyze Native American perspectives on the post-Columbian world, particularly the concerns over what place Indians have within it. Sources will include autobiography, oral history, political essays, music and film. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 633 - POLITICS OF CULTURE
This seminar course will begin by interrogating the models of "culture" deployed in social science and literary criticism. We will consider difference, sameness, in the definition of boundaries (that is identities--cultural, ethnic, and national); uses of the past (history) and ideological interests; and the "invention of tradition." Using a broad definition of "politics" as claims to power, we will then examine practices of culture representation as political tools. Topics for discussion will include: the means of producing and/or constructing "culture;" issues of authority, voicing, and authenticity; definitions and appropriations of "cultural property" (by whom, for what ends); the co modification of "cultures" and their "consumption." Given the instructor's interests and research background, a section of the course will examine the idea of Africa in western discourse, the Afrocentricity movement, and contemporary debates on multiculturalism and cultural pluralism. In the final section of the course, students will research and present an analysis of a topic of their choice to the seminar (ideas: museum exhibitions, curriculum reform, the legal system and First Peoples, the production and control of media images) and submit a paper on their selected material at the end of the semester. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 634 - DOES RACE MATTER?
A new "multiracial" category will allow Americans to identify themselves on government forms as members of more than one race. While this rule reflects sensitivity to a growing demographic transformation, it took four years of debate among Federal authorities to produce, indicating how politically volatile the issue of racial classification is. Inter-group tensions and hostilities appear to be on the rise. This course will look at the roots of racial and ethnic strife in this country by critically reviewing some old and new questions such as: What does "race" mean? Is color the major factor determining people's attitudes towards each other? What are the connections between race, class, gender, and ethnicity in the various groups? How are racism and prejudice related to global economic and political processes? We will examine these questions within theoretical frameworks that highlight the following: (1) the historical construction of the concept of "the other" in Western thought, and (2) recent conceptual developments such as the notion of "whiteness" as a new cultural and political element to be considered in the study of race and ethnic relations. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 635 - THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
In the 1830s, Alexis DeTocqueville used the term "individualism" to indicate the institutionalized mode of life in what we might today call a "private life", but does not equate with egoism. To the eyes of a French aristocrat intimately acquainted with the European past, this social form, with its attendant social theory, represents a major historical change, and his searching analysis of its implications raises serious questions of the "reality" we think to ground our world. The class will examine Charles Darwin's biology, DeTocqueville's work, Karl Polanyi's economic anthropology, and several other texts in an attempt to see the external nature of the "great transformation" and its internal contribution to the way we construct our world and our science. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 636 - EASTERN EUROPE BETWEEN THE WARS
Eastern Europe Between the Wars is an opportunity for students to gain a first-hand knowledge of Central and East Central Europe in the troubled years between the two World Wars. Lasting three weeks (June-July), the program will take students to the Charles University of Prague in the Czech Republic and the University of Bochum in Germany. Through classes and visits to important historical sites, participants will be able to explore the political, economic, social and cultural issues which defined the period and help explain why peace was so short-lived. Ramapo staff will be joined by guest faculty from the two host universities in presenting topics, including the failure of democracy, mounting nationalism, the rise of Nazism and fascism, economic collapse, collective security and avant-garde culture. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 637 - SCIENCE AS MYTH, METAPHOR, AND HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
Science as an intellectual, social, and cultural enterprise has been represented historically in the West as a liberator, oppressor, redeemer, and ground of certainty in an uncertain world by historians and social critics, artists, authors, philosophers, theologians, and scientists themselves. This course will consider the origins of many of the cultural myths about science, its metaphorical meanings, and its intellectual development as narrated by authors in a variety of texts--from Dostoevsky's NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND and Bertolt Brecht's GALILEO to the writings of contemporary philosophers and historians. An emphasis will be placed upon a reflective analysis of the texts and the social and conceptual roots of the images of science those texts present. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 638 - CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Current international standards of human rights and the machinery for their promotion and enforcement are said to emanate from primarily Western cultural perspectives. Conversely, it is assumed or argued that non-Western cultural traditions are reluctant, if not outright opposed, to complying with these standards. This seminar attempts to assess the validity of these and other related propositions and seeks to develop their implications for the formulation and implementation of international human rights. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 639 - WORK, CLASS AND CULTURE IN INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA
This course examines the transformations in work that characterized industrial development in America, from the mechanization of textile manufacturing in 18th century New England to the "rationalization" of factories in the 20th century. It also explores in detail the ways in which many Americans came to understand industrial society as a class society, tracing both the history of class conflict in America and the compelling class ideologies that stood behind that conflict. The course concludes with an extended study of how men and women--both famous and forgotten--expressed these class ideologies in art and literature, with a focus on painting, photography, and film. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 640 - A SENSE OF PLACE
This seminar explores the sense of place as revealed in literature. The knowledgeable appreciation of place rests on a foundation of history, physical geography, and culture, and has been expressed through superb works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. On a personal level, the cultivation of place awareness enriches one's experience of life. For society as a whole, the appreciation of place is a necessary element of harmonious and sustainable inhabitation. Conversely, the widespread absence of this knowledge and appreciation contributes mightily to ecological destruction and to the "faceless ubiquity" of so many modern American landscapes. The writings we will examine range widely, including writers from different parts of the world and different time periods, but the greatest emphasis is on contemporary American literature. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 641 - MARRIAGE AND RELATIONSHIPS IN MODERN LITERATURE
The themes of marriage and relationships have been a central concern of literature since the very first storytellers. This course will examine how 20th century writers have contributed to the ongoing discussion of these themes. As a class, we will look at how cultural norms and historical conditions have influenced the portrayal of relationships over time. As we read through the texts, we will analyze the major 20th century movements that have shaped each author's vision. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 642 - PRIMITIVE OTHER WESTERN ART
The course will take as its central problem the collection, display and interpretation of non-western visual culture from roughly the 18th century to the present. It will explore anthropological and art-historical theories of primitive culture, and the Western phenomenon of "primitivism" in modern art. It will also examine musicological practices in ethnographic and primitive art museums. A major aim of the course is to understand how a larger world history may be written into a museum display or an early 20th century piece of French or German modernist art, or--to put it another way--to understand how such cultural practices may yield ideological, and ultimately, political advantages. An on-going question for the course will be: How has Western thought distinguished its own cultural and artistic products from those made by peoples it has considered "other," "not us" ("primitive," "exotic," less "developed," "folk" or "ethnic")? 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 643 - PARADIGMS OF GENOCIDE
The Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923 and the Holocaust stand as the quintessential instances of genocide in our time. This course will offer students access to the latest scholarship on Nazi Germany's war on the Jews and Ottoman Turk genocide against the Armenians. Whenever possible, original sources and eyewitness accounts will be consulted. At every juncture, problems of interpretation will be brought to the attention of participants. In keeping with the comparative nature of the course, linkages to the genocidal situations of the post-War period will be brought into the discussion, especially the events in Rwanda, Cambodia and former Yugoslavia. The extent to which these events have altered the paradigm will be investigated. It is anticipated that in studying how the paradigm of genocide was established and has evolved students will achieve a greater understanding about the fabric underlying any problem in historical research. Even more, by placing the emphasis on the examination and analysis of primary sources, it is hoped that they will be guided in their investigation of controversial or emotionally laden subjects by scholarship as opposed to polemics and platitudes. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 644 - ASSESSING THE MATRIX: ART AND CULTURE
The elective is designed to introduce students to the ways that art and culture are used and portrayed by artists, dealers, collectors, and art historians/theorists on the world wide web. After an intensive, introduction to the internet, students will join a course called "Art and Technology" which meets only on the web and deals with similar themes. The MALS students will meet for the final week to discuss seminar outcomes and present final projects. Final projects consist of a written plan for an online course that the student might be able to teach in his/her field using internet technology. For more information and to begin the seminar see: http://orion.ramapo.edu/~sgorewit. This is an internet seminar which will meet a few times on campus; the first on campus session is January 21, 2010. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 645 - AMERICAN GOTHIC: LITERARY TRADITION
Although the tradition of the Gothic in American literature has been likened to a "poetics of fear," this is not a course in the horror story. Still, the Gothic is a literature of darkness, as the vocabulary of its study implies. The Other, the doppelganger, the unspeakable, the proscribed, the irrevocable, violence, duplicity, and madness: this is the language of the Gothic. At once subversive and popular, Gothic literature is psychologically complex, morally unsettling, and deeply rewarding. In this class we will explore this literary tradition, begun in the years following the Enlightenment in opposition to the "age of reason." This class will consider manifestations of the Gothic in American literature from Poe to the present. We will consider fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor and others. Recent criticism has considered the work of contemporary writers like Amiri Baraka, Kathy Acker and Paul Auster in a gothic context, so we will not be confined to genre writers. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 646 - SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF HEALING
The society and culture in which a people live shape their illness and healing experience. Illness and disease are determined and defined by the social, cultural, political and economic environment of the individual in his/her society. The type of healthcare sought by and accessible to a sick person is also largely determined by cultural background and socioeconomic class. Different cultures across time have had a variety of explanations for the causes of illness based on their understanding of nature which is reflected in the way they speak about and treat disease. Finally, we will examine the way biomedicine, the established healing art in the West, is practiced today. We will also study the role of non-western therapies practiced by many cultural groups in this country as well as the growing popularity of "alternative and complementary" medicine in the United States. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 647 - WORLD WOMEN'S LITERATURE
The aim of this course is to examine and understand the culture, theory and narrative of difference in World Feminism. The seminars will be organized around themes found in works by women writers from around the globe. We will focus on a vast range of texts which will be set in dialogue with the theoretical works of philosophers and literary critics such as De Laurentis, Gubar, Irigary and Kristeva, and to movies by controversial directors. This course will offer a framework for a comparative analysis of global feminist issues as they emerge in the writings of contemporary women writers of different nationalities. This analysis will impart global awareness and will show how nationality, as well as gender, race and class cut across women's definition of themselves, their personal and public lives and affect their literary creation. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 648 - ISLAM,THE MIDDLE EAST & WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Most Americans think of the "Islamic World" as an entity apart from "the West", and eternally in conflict with it. Indeed, since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this portrait of Islam and the West has proliferated around the world: two civilizations, apparently diametrically opposed, locked in mortal conflict. But this is a very recent phenomenon in history, and one that ignores the overwhelming evidence that Muslims have always considered themselves to be part of western civilization, not its enemies. This course will examine the evolution of Islam's relationship to the Judeo-Christian world, from the time of Muhammad to the present. It will proceed roughly chronologically, with emphasis placed on key periods and their literature. For example: (1) Christian and Muslim chronicles of the Crusades; (2) Writings of Ottoman reformers wrestling with the "western question" in the 1800s; (3) Arab and/Turkish nationalist movements vs. Islamic reform movements, from the 1950s to the present; and (4) Present-day representations of the United States and Israel. The course will stimulate critical thinking by requiring students to examine the nature of religious and racial identities, and how those identities have changed. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 653 - EUROPEAN CINEMA AND LITERARY ADAPTATION
This course explores and analyzes the complex relationship between literary narrative and cinematic discourse, and the factors that determine the transformation. It considers not only about the film making approaches, but also about how adaptation enables film to reinvent and redefine itself as cultural institutional discursive practice with each literary encounter. The course will also explore the major cinematic movements in Europe from the 1900s onwards. The relationship of filmic narration and literary texts will be explored, including European films from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The films chosen for screening can be identified with the two traditions and analyzed vis-a-vis their literary adaptation. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 655 - DARWIN AND DIVINITY
Our course will center around discussions of the literature on evolution and creationism/intelligent design. We will read and discuss several chapters from Darwin?s Origin of Species, other material that Darwin wrote, and material written by modern evolutionists. We will also read and discuss relevant passages from the bibles and holy books of a cross section of the world?s religion. We will seek to understand the position of the creationist/intelligent movement by reading some material written by Philip Johnson, Wendell Bird, Henry Morris and others who are central to that movement. We will try to understand the opposing positions in important court cases involved with teaching evolution in public schools. We will look into the Scopes, Arkansas, Louisiana cases as well as the recent case in Pennsylvania. .The class will be run as a seminar with students expected to have read the assigned materials prior to class so they can fully participate in the discussion. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Lecture Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 656 - AMERICAN "FOLK": CONSTRUCTING THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Various attempts have been made to capture (or at least define) the "authentic" voice of the American people. Visual artists, performing artists, and literary artists will even create fictional personae for themselves, so they will be identified with "real Americans." This course will examine works by several such American artists. Readings will ask students to question notions of "authenticity" and national identity, as well as ideas of class, race, and gender. Some of our readings will be canonical work by literary artists--Walt Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS, Mark Twain's ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, and John Steinbeck's GRAPES OF WRATH and contemporary poetry, like Tyehimba Jess's LEADBELLY. Some readings will be by what we might term "outsider artists": Lead Belly's ballads, Woody Guthrie's DUST BOWL BALLADS, Harvey Pekar's AMERICAN SPLENDOR. We will also look at popular works by popular performers: Bob Dylan's THE TIMES ARE A'CHANGIN', Bruce Springsteen's THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD. Through free verse poetry; dialect fiction; folk, blues, and rock music; and even comic strips, writers from Whitman to Guthrie share is a desire to capture what they believe to be the voice of the people. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 657 - JEALOUSY, ENVY, REVENGE AND FORGIVENESS
This course is an examination of four passions through the prism of psychology, philosophy, literature, and film. We have all had experiences with these passions, but to explore them as objects of study is another matter. The task then will be to bring our collective emotional wisdom to bear on these topics. Some questions we will ask ourselves include: What purposes do jealousy and envy serve? Can jealousy or envy ever be beneficial, to their bearers or to society at large? Or should they ideally be eliminated? How do we deliberate between revenge and forgiveness? Is true forgiveness achievable? 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 658 - FILM AS HISTORY/FILM AS MYTH
In this seminar, Film as History/Film as Myth, we are exploring the complex relationship between contemporary films and the culture in which they are produced, with special attention to films that base their narratives on historical events and people. What do these films tell us about the events and people they are about, and what do they tell us about the time period in which they were produced? How does the form of films--the choices regarding narrative material, editing, characterization, and visual style--influence the interpretation of important cultural and historical periods or events? What cultural myths do these films create, or reinterpret, about the particular society that produces them? How does evolution and transformation of film genres and genre conventions contribute to the ideological negotiation of meanings in contemporary films? In exploring the relationship of films to society, we will explore the principles of Marxist film criticism, which is premised on the view that the economic structure of a society plays a major role in shaping both the commodity production/consumption and ideological impact of cultural works. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 659 - SOCIAL ETHICS: JUSTICE & CARE
This course will introduce students to two ethical systems "Justice and Care" their interplay and their implications for education. The Justice ethic holds that morality is based on objective rationality, that individuals are freely autonomous, and that human rights must be defended. The Care ethic holds that morality is based on subjective and emotional relationships, that individuals are interconnected, and that human responsibilities must be upheld. After exploring each ethical system we will compare the two and ask: Are Justice and Care really rival ethical systems, or one system? Which one should be employed to live an ethical life? Which one should be employed in making public policy? Are these two ethical theories gendered masculine and feminine? The last unit of the course will assess Justice and Care in education: What place should either ethic have in classroom pedagogy? How do Justice and Care ethics impact important educational debates, such as affirmative action, school vouchers, and sexual harassment? 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 660 - THE ENVIRONMENT & AMER CULTURE
The United States has been blessed, from its first days as a wilderness inhabited only by native Americans, by an extraordinary natural environment. Although certainly inhospitable to the earliest settlers, this environment affected "The New World" profoundly, shaping the burgeoning society growing between its shores by its power, grandeur, enormity, richness and magnificence--From the Puritans to contemporary artists and writers, Americans have continued to respond to this profundity by creating a literature, a cultural heritage of images in art, music and film, which continues to reflect our involvement with nature. Indeed, our natural environment remains a major source of our national identity. This course explores this national identity as it is expressed through our culture, from the beginnings of our explorations to the present. We consider how our environmental experience is reflected in our literary/visual responses to it. These responses are affected in turn by the evolving concepts of man, as well as temporal cultural, political and ideological forces. We will examine how the history of our interaction with our environment has shaped the history of our national literature and cultural responses--how definitions of "nature" and the "wilderness" change from era to era, often as reflections of evolving national self-image. The course will address these issues through a combination of assigned group readings, individual seminar presentations on paintings, films, slides, music, photography, individual readings. There will also be a required museum visit, an extensive individual research presentation, and a weekly "practicum" in environmental perception. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3000.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 661 - REDEFINING GENDER RELATIONSHIPS: JOAN OF ARC
The study of Joan of Arc's brief life, with its meteoric rise and fall, involves issues that inspire passionate response: religion and mysticism; individual rights and responsibilities; love of king and country; recognition of women's abilities and power; upward mobility. In order to understand the 15th-century view of these issues, we look back at earlier stages of the Middle Ages, and the authority that was present in the Church, government, and various social strata. We will accomplish this investigation early in the course through readings and discussions of literature of the Middle Ages, contemporary feminist and revisionist history of the roles and limitations placed on medieval women, and analytic and biographical materials about Joan of Arc herself. Joan's role as symbol for liberal and social movements, social constructions of "woman", and war efforts has continued since the time of the French Revolution. The latter half of the course examines selected readings and images of Joan and her iconographic importance. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 690 - TOPICS:
The topics studied in this course change from semester-to-semester, as well as from instructor-to-instructor. Students should expect to engage in sophisticated discussion, to work independently, and to participate in--and lead--seminar discussions. The course will require students to call on the experience of their previous coursework in the program to produce polished writing informed by research. Students should expect to complete at least one prolonged research assignment and to produce at least 20 pages of polished writing this semester. For this semester's course sections, please see the MALS webpage (http://www.ramapo.edu/academics/mals/) or contact the MALS Director. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 699 - MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES: ELECTIVE
This course designation is used to describe a transfer course from another institution which has been evaluated by the convener. A course with this courseID has no equivalent Ramapo course. It may fulfill a requirement or may count as a free elective. 0.000 TO 1.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 1.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 700 - INDEPENDENT STUDY: LIBERAL STUDIES
The independent study will consist of individual work with a faculty mentor to undertake and write a substantial research paper. For students who chose the independent study and one additional elective for their capstone experience instead of the reading and writing tutorials. Pass/Fail grading only. 0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Independent Study Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 710 - THESIS RESEARCH TUTORIAL
The Thesis Research Tutorial will consist mainly of individual work with a faculty mentor to hone the thesis topic and do research for the thesis or project. By mid-semester, a student enrolled in the tutorial should be sufficiently advanced to write an outline and annotated bibliography of the thesis. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 711 - THESIS WRITING TUTORIAL
The Thesis Writing Tutorial is meant for students who have completed the Thesis Research Tutorial. It is a continuation of work with the faculty mentor to finish doing research and writing the master's thesis. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS
LIBS 712 - THESIS CONTINUATION
Thesis continuation required for students who have not completed either LIBS 710 Thesis Research Tutorial or LIBS 711 Thesis Writing Tutorial in the allotted timeframe. 0.000 TO 0.100 Credit hours 0.000 TO 0.100 Lecture hours Levels: Graduate Schedule Types: Seminar Liberal Studies Department Course Attributes: MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 588 - CO-OP LIBERAL STUDIES

0.000 TO 6.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 6.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Lecture

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 600 - INDEPENDENT STUDY: LIBERAL STUDIES

Limited opportunities to enroll for course work on an Independent Study basis are available. A student interested in this option should obtain an Independent Study Registration Form from the Registrar, have it completed by the instructor and school dean involved, and return it to the Registrar's Office. Consult the website for policies concerning Independent Study.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Independent Study

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 601 - AMERICA AS A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY

This course explores the way in which the United States, throughout its history, has dealt with the internal challenges of reconciling its mostly British origins with an increasingly multicultural population. It emphasizes the tensions and accommodations between aspects of the dominant culture and new ethnic groups and ideas, with a particular emphasis on the "voices" of those outside the mainstream. The course integrates history, literature and law to examine the following themes: (a) the way the nation has been affected by the immigration of groups believed at the time to be inassimilable, from Africans to Catholics to Asians; (b) the political and social forces which have acted to hold the nation together despite the diverse nature of its peoples; and (c) how these forces are affecting contemporary American society.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 602 - THE CONQUEST OF CALIBAN

This course examines the remarkable encounters between European and non-European civilizations, with a focus on the "discovery" and conquest of the Americas. We will study documents written by key participants such as Columbus and Cortes, and western classics from that period, such as More's UTOPIA and Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST. These texts provide insight into the romanticized construction of an identity for "other" peoples, but provide little access into their actual cultures and visions; Shakespeare's "savage", Caliban, when given language, uses it only to curse. To add cross-cultural perspectives, we will read writings from "conquered" peoples in America and elsewhere. In summary, the course explores the momentous cultural, historical, and ecological consequences of these civilizational encounters.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 603 - THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

Every group throughout history has confronted basic issues about the human condition in a quest to define what is ultimately important. Within the context of change and impermanence, peoples have dealt with such issues as the meaning of self, freedom, and love; the definition of insider and outsider; the relationship of the individual to the collective; and the search for meaning. This final Core course integrates material from the other courses into the developmental issue of self-knowledge, in which the process of self-reflection will be used to enhance intellectual enlightenment. Autobiographical journals, cultural comparison, films, music, theater, and traditional readings will be the means to this end. Students will appraise their own personal histories by listening to the voices of women, African Americans, children, gays, the privileged, and the deprived.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 604 - U.S. IN A CHANGING WORLD

After World War II, American society, influenced by philosophical and psychological theories of liberty and self, wrestled with its new preeminence within the community of nations. Relatively soon, it had to consider first, increasing competition from Europe and Japan, then the collapse of the Soviet Union, and finally, the ascendancy of global economic agreements on investment and trade. Within the United States, internal conflict over racial equality (the Civil Rights Movement), foreign intervention (anti-war protests over Vietnam and Central America), gender equality (the Feminist movement), religious and family values, and a sustainable environment served to broaden conceptions of national and cultural loyalties. Students will be invited to link the internal conflicts with the larger, global structural changes, some consequences of which are escalating social class and ethnic strife. We will explore how modern America is affected by the increasing interdependence of nations and the consequent interactions of their cultures. A last objective will be to attempt to shape a vision about the appropriate future role of the United States in a world of changing economic, political, and socio-cultural forces.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 616 - WINNERS AND LOSERS AMONG LEADERS

This course is a psycho historical exploration of the careers, lives, and personalities of a variety of winners and losers focusing on the impact of childhood on adult accomplishments and conflicts. The primary focus will be on the issues of adaptability, childhood experience, coping mechanisms, creativity, innovation, overcoming trauma, and personality. Among those investigated will be Eduard Benes, Otto von Bismarck, George H. W. and George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Bill Clinton, Charles Darwin, Humphrey Davy, Elizabeth I of England. Sigmund Freud, Adolph Hitler, John Kerry, V. I. Lenin, Thomas Masaryk, Richard Nixon, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. Important questions include what behaviors, personality traits, and values make for success and which for failure? Why are certain leaders, such as Richard M. Nixon, ruined by the very success they long for? Among the course requirements are intensive reading and discussion of primary sources and outstanding psycho historical studies.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 617 - iNTERNAT'L CONFLICT:SCOPE & LIMITS OF HUMAN RIGHTS TALK

In this course, participants will examine contemporary concepts of explaining international conflict and the range of responses implicated by approaches to conflict. Students will compare definitions of war: Is it a manifestation of an economic war economy? or as military response to threat? or ethnic conflict? or civil war? These definitions include corresponding political rhetoric such as democracy, freedom, empire and terrorism. Students will examine the public popular conversation articulating the sources of conflict, as well as closely examine the issues underlying conflict in selected case studies. Finally, students explore terms of a dialogue necessary to resolve conflict, including the use of human rights language, with particular attention on how the international use of rights-talk challenges the traditional concept of rights as understood in domestic USA discourse.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 620 - MUSIC AND INDENTITY

In her new book MUSIC IN EVERYDAY LIFE, the British sociologist of music, Tia DeNora, notes that "music serves as a kind of template against which feeling, perception, representation, and social situation are created and sustained," later calling it "a building material of self-identity" and "the cultural material par excellence of emotion and the personal." This seminar examines some of the many ways in which music acts within individual, social and cultural life as a powerful part of the search for identity and meaning. In the process we explore a wide range of music and many different forms of inquiry, drawing particularly upon the backgrounds and experiences of the members of the class.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 621 - MEDIA IMAGES AND KNOWLEDGE

This course explores processes and implications of mediated information dissemination using texts, case studies, screenings, field trips, and experiential processes. Sessions include discussion of Sol Worth's theories and practice of ethnographic films, Raoul Vaneigem's ideas about mediated abstraction, and Shoshanna Zuboff's concerns about panoptic power and social organization. Students will have the opportunity to explore image-making potentials of video, computer, and telecommunication technologies. The underlying themes of this research share the humanistic, values-oriented approach of the Core program.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 622 - THE BRITISH EMPIRE: COLONIZED AND COLONIZER

The course will look at the relationships between colonizer and colonized in the British Empire and India in particular. Although it will include some of the classic colonial writings, for example, Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, and Forster's PASSAGE TO INDIA, the course will also include some of the new historical work done on and in India by scholars associated with "subaltern studies," as well as fiction and criticism written by contemporary Indian writers. The course will consider, as few scholars and teachers have done, the way in which colonial metaphors and modes appeared in social, political, and literary life at home in England during its imperial years, and thus present familiar materials in a very fresh light.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 623 - FROM MAMMIES TO MATRIARCHS: THE IMAGE OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN IN FILM

The representation of African American women in American film will be examined historically and with reference to the relationship between existing feminist theory and issues of race and class. The goal of the course is to permit students to critically assess the nature of media and "entertainment" imagery in relation to sexual, racial, and class oppression. By juxtaposing the images of African American women throughout American cinematic history, students will begin to understand that these images were created not only to "entertain", but also to support and legitimize the existing social, economic, and political realities of the African American condition. We will also examine how the issues of color and "color stereotypes" continue to create and maintain class decisions within the African American community.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 624 - PSYCHOLOGY OF URBAN LIFE

This course begins with a careful consideration of urban life, drawing upon writings by a variety of social theorists and social scientists. This review allows us to trace the development of ideas about urban life that have informed attempts by psychologists to understand the experience of living in cities. The remainder of the course involves an exploration of specific issues and topics that comprise contemporary urban psychology, e.g., the nature of urban friendships and community; living with crime and violence; stimulation, personality and adaptation; density, noise, pollution, and the reality of urban stress; and urban aesthetics and adventure. While the course will focus primarily upon the American city, material will also be drawn from work done in a variety of other countries.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

Movies, television, music, advertising, the popular press all create attractive images and tell compelling, funny, and sometimes frightening stories which often seem to come from the real world right around us. There is much melodramatic sex and violence, plenty of romanticism, fantasy, greed, and desire. But there are also important elements of realism which reflect, acknowledge, comment on, or even satirize important social issues and tensions. It has become conventional to blame mass media and popular culture for what we don't like about our society, to regard them as powerful conspiracies against traditional values. However, the situation is actually much more dynamic and interesting than that, often open to a surpassing variety of understandings depending upon who one is or where positioned. This course will explore various strategies for interpreting popular culture to consider what it says about our time and how it affects our individual and social lives.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 626 - RELIGION: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTICULTURAL STUDY

This course will study religion from an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective. Although religion is a modern Western concept derived from the Christian usage of the term to signify the worship of God, it is now used to denote any belief in or commitment to an ultimate meaning of life. After surveying the current status of religion in American society, we will turn to a history of religion, from ancient to modern times, ending in a review of the methods now used in the study of religion. The bulk of the course will concentrate on using scientific, historical, philosophical, and theological methods to investigate the significance of religion in world history, concluding with an analysis of the modern conflict between religion and secularism. The aim will be to enable an examination of the entire spectrum of religious practice, an understanding of the function of religion in human life, and an evaluation of the validity of a religious perspective.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 627 - SHAKESPEARE'S STRANGERS

The course title derives from Leslie Fielder's influential work The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972), on an outsider/alien in Shakespeare. Increasing attention is being given to the proposition that when we regard Shakespeare's career within the cultural and economic context of London, of an England eager for expansion, we can observe his interest in the nature and identity of the Other. These strangers manifest themselves to Shakespeare and his contemporaries either through direct contact, translated story, or the narratives of voyagers. The strangers appear as people of color, new world savages, non-believers, or exotics of antiquity or the faraway. This seminar will concentrate on a select body of plays in which Shakespeare depicts encounters with others, such as The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Anthony and Cleopatra. In addition to careful reading of the texts, we will review, through discussion and presentation, the critical literature on the cultural context of the stranger in Shakespeare.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 628 - EAST ASIA: PAST AND PRESENT

East Asia has stood out in human history in many dimensions such as population scale, literate civilization, and economic progress. Its 2,000 year-long history and Confucian culture have amazed the world, while its past social turbulence and recent, rapid industrialization have equally surprised many in the West. Combining an historical survey of the region's political and social development with a topical examination in traditional and contemporary East Asia, this course attempts to: 1) foster an overview of East Asia's culture, history, and society; 2) understand the impact of cultural and social change on human relations; and 3) examine the cultural similarities and differences between the West and the East.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 629 - DEATH AND DYING: A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Throughout human experience, death has been a vital concern. This is true in both the ancient and modern worlds, in small scale societies and contemporary industrial giants. This course investigates the meaning of human morality to both social systems and individual experience. Changing historical patterns and contemporary development in diverse cultures will be studied. Students will be encouraged to look deeply into values and ethical considerations and to develop a respect and appreciation for the diversity of human experience. This leads to a deeper joy and appreciation of life, an examination of life, an examination of the Socratic dictum, "know thyself," and consideration of the question, "how then shall I live?"
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 630 - GOOD NEIGHBOR, BAD NEIGHBOR: INTER-AMERICAN RELATIONS

This course is an overview of United States/Latin American relations over two centuries. After an examination of the 19th century, we will look more closely at the modernizing of the MONROE DOCTRINE by Theodore Roosevelt. Next we will study Woodrow Wilson's actions in Latin America, followed by the establishment of the Good Neighbor Policy before World War II and the abandonment of this policy after the War. Did the United States become the Bad Neighbor with renewed intervention in the 1950s and continuing until the 1980s? Does the establishment of NAFTA mean orientation for the next century? These are the topics for study, analysis, and discussion.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 632 - NATIVE AMERICANS

This is an interdisciplinary study of Native Americans from the era of European settlement to the present. It seeks to familiarize students not only with the rich and diverse backgrounds of Native groups but also their complex responses to the white man's persistent efforts either to stamp out or romanticize Indianness. Students will explore individual Native cultures and the mythological worlds which have informed them, the history of U.S. Indian policy and the ideological foundations upon which it has been built; and the origins of Native American stereotypes in American culture--notably the Noble and Ignoble Savage--as seen in art, literature, music, and film. They will also have ample opportunity to analyze Native American perspectives on the post-Columbian world, particularly the concerns over what place Indians have within it. Sources will include autobiography, oral history, political essays, music and film.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 633 - POLITICS OF CULTURE

This seminar course will begin by interrogating the models of "culture" deployed in social science and literary criticism. We will consider difference, sameness, in the definition of boundaries (that is identities--cultural, ethnic, and national); uses of the past (history) and ideological interests; and the "invention of tradition." Using a broad definition of "politics" as claims to power, we will then examine practices of culture representation as political tools. Topics for discussion will include: the means of producing and/or constructing "culture;" issues of authority, voicing, and authenticity; definitions and appropriations of "cultural property" (by whom, for what ends); the co modification of "cultures" and their "consumption." Given the instructor's interests and research background, a section of the course will examine the idea of Africa in western discourse, the Afrocentricity movement, and contemporary debates on multiculturalism and cultural pluralism. In the final section of the course, students will research and present an analysis of a topic of their choice to the seminar (ideas: museum exhibitions, curriculum reform, the legal system and First Peoples, the production and control of media images) and submit a paper on their selected material at the end of the semester.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 634 - DOES RACE MATTER?

A new "multiracial" category will allow Americans to identify themselves on government forms as members of more than one race. While this rule reflects sensitivity to a growing demographic transformation, it took four years of debate among Federal authorities to produce, indicating how politically volatile the issue of racial classification is. Inter-group tensions and hostilities appear to be on the rise. This course will look at the roots of racial and ethnic strife in this country by critically reviewing some old and new questions such as: What does "race" mean? Is color the major factor determining people's attitudes towards each other? What are the connections between race, class, gender, and ethnicity in the various groups? How are racism and prejudice related to global economic and political processes? We will examine these questions within theoretical frameworks that highlight the following: (1) the historical construction of the concept of "the other" in Western thought, and (2) recent conceptual developments such as the notion of "whiteness" as a new cultural and political element to be considered in the study of race and ethnic relations.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 635 - THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION

In the 1830s, Alexis DeTocqueville used the term "individualism" to indicate the institutionalized mode of life in what we might today call a "private life", but does not equate with egoism. To the eyes of a French aristocrat intimately acquainted with the European past, this social form, with its attendant social theory, represents a major historical change, and his searching analysis of its implications raises serious questions of the "reality" we think to ground our world. The class will examine Charles Darwin's biology, DeTocqueville's work, Karl Polanyi's economic anthropology, and several other texts in an attempt to see the external nature of the "great transformation" and its internal contribution to the way we construct our world and our science.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 636 - EASTERN EUROPE BETWEEN THE WARS

Eastern Europe Between the Wars is an opportunity for students to gain a first-hand knowledge of Central and East Central Europe in the troubled years between the two World Wars. Lasting three weeks (June-July), the program will take students to the Charles University of Prague in the Czech Republic and the University of Bochum in Germany. Through classes and visits to important historical sites, participants will be able to explore the political, economic, social and cultural issues which defined the period and help explain why peace was so short-lived. Ramapo staff will be joined by guest faculty from the two host universities in presenting topics, including the failure of democracy, mounting nationalism, the rise of Nazism and fascism, economic collapse, collective security and avant-garde culture.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 637 - SCIENCE AS MYTH, METAPHOR, AND HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

Science as an intellectual, social, and cultural enterprise has been represented historically in the West as a liberator, oppressor, redeemer, and ground of certainty in an uncertain world by historians and social critics, artists, authors, philosophers, theologians, and scientists themselves. This course will consider the origins of many of the cultural myths about science, its metaphorical meanings, and its intellectual development as narrated by authors in a variety of texts--from Dostoevsky's NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND and Bertolt Brecht's GALILEO to the writings of contemporary philosophers and historians. An emphasis will be placed upon a reflective analysis of the texts and the social and conceptual roots of the images of science those texts present.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 638 - CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Current international standards of human rights and the machinery for their promotion and enforcement are said to emanate from primarily Western cultural perspectives. Conversely, it is assumed or argued that non-Western cultural traditions are reluctant, if not outright opposed, to complying with these standards. This seminar attempts to assess the validity of these and other related propositions and seeks to develop their implications for the formulation and implementation of international human rights.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 639 - WORK, CLASS AND CULTURE IN INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA

This course examines the transformations in work that characterized industrial development in America, from the mechanization of textile manufacturing in 18th century New England to the "rationalization" of factories in the 20th century. It also explores in detail the ways in which many Americans came to understand industrial society as a class society, tracing both the history of class conflict in America and the compelling class ideologies that stood behind that conflict. The course concludes with an extended study of how men and women--both famous and forgotten--expressed these class ideologies in art and literature, with a focus on painting, photography, and film.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 640 - A SENSE OF PLACE

This seminar explores the sense of place as revealed in literature. The knowledgeable appreciation of place rests on a foundation of history, physical geography, and culture, and has been expressed through superb works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. On a personal level, the cultivation of place awareness enriches one's experience of life. For society as a whole, the appreciation of place is a necessary element of harmonious and sustainable inhabitation. Conversely, the widespread absence of this knowledge and appreciation contributes mightily to ecological destruction and to the "faceless ubiquity" of so many modern American landscapes. The writings we will examine range widely, including writers from different parts of the world and different time periods, but the greatest emphasis is on contemporary American literature.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 641 - MARRIAGE AND RELATIONSHIPS IN MODERN LITERATURE

The themes of marriage and relationships have been a central concern of literature since the very first storytellers. This course will examine how 20th century writers have contributed to the ongoing discussion of these themes. As a class, we will look at how cultural norms and historical conditions have influenced the portrayal of relationships over time. As we read through the texts, we will analyze the major 20th century movements that have shaped each author's vision.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 642 - PRIMITIVE OTHER WESTERN ART

The course will take as its central problem the collection, display and interpretation of non-western visual culture from roughly the 18th century to the present. It will explore anthropological and art-historical theories of primitive culture, and the Western phenomenon of "primitivism" in modern art. It will also examine musicological practices in ethnographic and primitive art museums. A major aim of the course is to understand how a larger world history may be written into a museum display or an early 20th century piece of French or German modernist art, or--to put it another way--to understand how such cultural practices may yield ideological, and ultimately, political advantages. An on-going question for the course will be: How has Western thought distinguished its own cultural and artistic products from those made by peoples it has considered "other," "not us" ("primitive," "exotic," less "developed," "folk" or "ethnic")?
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 643 - PARADIGMS OF GENOCIDE

The Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923 and the Holocaust stand as the quintessential instances of genocide in our time. This course will offer students access to the latest scholarship on Nazi Germany's war on the Jews and Ottoman Turk genocide against the Armenians. Whenever possible, original sources and eyewitness accounts will be consulted. At every juncture, problems of interpretation will be brought to the attention of participants. In keeping with the comparative nature of the course, linkages to the genocidal situations of the post-War period will be brought into the discussion, especially the events in Rwanda, Cambodia and former Yugoslavia. The extent to which these events have altered the paradigm will be investigated. It is anticipated that in studying how the paradigm of genocide was established and has evolved students will achieve a greater understanding about the fabric underlying any problem in historical research. Even more, by placing the emphasis on the examination and analysis of primary sources, it is hoped that they will be guided in their investigation of controversial or emotionally laden subjects by scholarship as opposed to polemics and platitudes.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 644 - ASSESSING THE MATRIX: ART AND CULTURE

The elective is designed to introduce students to the ways that art and culture are used and portrayed by artists, dealers, collectors, and art historians/theorists on the world wide web. After an intensive, introduction to the internet, students will join a course called "Art and Technology" which meets only on the web and deals with similar themes. The MALS students will meet for the final week to discuss seminar outcomes and present final projects. Final projects consist of a written plan for an online course that the student might be able to teach in his/her field using internet technology. For more information and to begin the seminar see: http://orion.ramapo.edu/~sgorewit. This is an internet seminar which will meet a few times on campus; the first on campus session is January 21, 2010.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 645 - AMERICAN GOTHIC: LITERARY TRADITION

Although the tradition of the Gothic in American literature has been likened to a "poetics of fear," this is not a course in the horror story. Still, the Gothic is a literature of darkness, as the vocabulary of its study implies. The Other, the doppelganger, the unspeakable, the proscribed, the irrevocable, violence, duplicity, and madness: this is the language of the Gothic. At once subversive and popular, Gothic literature is psychologically complex, morally unsettling, and deeply rewarding. In this class we will explore this literary tradition, begun in the years following the Enlightenment in opposition to the "age of reason." This class will consider manifestations of the Gothic in American literature from Poe to the present. We will consider fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor and others. Recent criticism has considered the work of contemporary writers like Amiri Baraka, Kathy Acker and Paul Auster in a gothic context, so we will not be confined to genre writers.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 646 - SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF HEALING

The society and culture in which a people live shape their illness and healing experience. Illness and disease are determined and defined by the social, cultural, political and economic environment of the individual in his/her society. The type of healthcare sought by and accessible to a sick person is also largely determined by cultural background and socioeconomic class. Different cultures across time have had a variety of explanations for the causes of illness based on their understanding of nature which is reflected in the way they speak about and treat disease. Finally, we will examine the way biomedicine, the established healing art in the West, is practiced today. We will also study the role of non-western therapies practiced by many cultural groups in this country as well as the growing popularity of "alternative and complementary" medicine in the United States.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 647 - WORLD WOMEN'S LITERATURE

The aim of this course is to examine and understand the culture, theory and narrative of difference in World Feminism. The seminars will be organized around themes found in works by women writers from around the globe. We will focus on a vast range of texts which will be set in dialogue with the theoretical works of philosophers and literary critics such as De Laurentis, Gubar, Irigary and Kristeva, and to movies by controversial directors. This course will offer a framework for a comparative analysis of global feminist issues as they emerge in the writings of contemporary women writers of different nationalities. This analysis will impart global awareness and will show how nationality, as well as gender, race and class cut across women's definition of themselves, their personal and public lives and affect their literary creation.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 648 - ISLAM,THE MIDDLE EAST & WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Most Americans think of the "Islamic World" as an entity apart from "the West", and eternally in conflict with it. Indeed, since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this portrait of Islam and the West has proliferated around the world: two civilizations, apparently diametrically opposed, locked in mortal conflict. But this is a very recent phenomenon in history, and one that ignores the overwhelming evidence that Muslims have always considered themselves to be part of western civilization, not its enemies. This course will examine the evolution of Islam's relationship to the Judeo-Christian world, from the time of Muhammad to the present. It will proceed roughly chronologically, with emphasis placed on key periods and their literature. For example: (1) Christian and Muslim chronicles of the Crusades; (2) Writings of Ottoman reformers wrestling with the "western question" in the 1800s; (3) Arab and/Turkish nationalist movements vs. Islamic reform movements, from the 1950s to the present; and (4) Present-day representations of the United States and Israel. The course will stimulate critical thinking by requiring students to examine the nature of religious and racial identities, and how those identities have changed.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 653 - EUROPEAN CINEMA AND LITERARY ADAPTATION

This course explores and analyzes the complex relationship between literary narrative and cinematic discourse, and the factors that determine the transformation. It considers not only about the film making approaches, but also about how adaptation enables film to reinvent and redefine itself as cultural institutional discursive practice with each literary encounter. The course will also explore the major cinematic movements in Europe from the 1900s onwards. The relationship of filmic narration and literary texts will be explored, including European films from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The films chosen for screening can be identified with the two traditions and analyzed vis-a-vis their literary adaptation.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 655 - DARWIN AND DIVINITY

Our course will center around discussions of the literature on evolution and creationism/intelligent design. We will read and discuss several chapters from Darwin?s Origin of Species, other material that Darwin wrote, and material written by modern evolutionists. We will also read and discuss relevant passages from the bibles and holy books of a cross section of the world?s religion. We will seek to understand the position of the creationist/intelligent movement by reading some material written by Philip Johnson, Wendell Bird, Henry Morris and others who are central to that movement. We will try to understand the opposing positions in important court cases involved with teaching evolution in public schools. We will look into the Scopes, Arkansas, Louisiana cases as well as the recent case in Pennsylvania. .The class will be run as a seminar with students expected to have read the assigned materials prior to class so they can fully participate in the discussion.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Lecture

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 656 - AMERICAN "FOLK": CONSTRUCTING THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Various attempts have been made to capture (or at least define) the "authentic" voice of the American people. Visual artists, performing artists, and literary artists will even create fictional personae for themselves, so they will be identified with "real Americans." This course will examine works by several such American artists. Readings will ask students to question notions of "authenticity" and national identity, as well as ideas of class, race, and gender. Some of our readings will be canonical work by literary artists--Walt Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS, Mark Twain's ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, and John Steinbeck's GRAPES OF WRATH and contemporary poetry, like Tyehimba Jess's LEADBELLY. Some readings will be by what we might term "outsider artists": Lead Belly's ballads, Woody Guthrie's DUST BOWL BALLADS, Harvey Pekar's AMERICAN SPLENDOR. We will also look at popular works by popular performers: Bob Dylan's THE TIMES ARE A'CHANGIN', Bruce Springsteen's THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD. Through free verse poetry; dialect fiction; folk, blues, and rock music; and even comic strips, writers from Whitman to Guthrie share is a desire to capture what they believe to be the voice of the people.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 657 - JEALOUSY, ENVY, REVENGE AND FORGIVENESS

This course is an examination of four passions through the prism of psychology, philosophy, literature, and film. We have all had experiences with these passions, but to explore them as objects of study is another matter. The task then will be to bring our collective emotional wisdom to bear on these topics. Some questions we will ask ourselves include: What purposes do jealousy and envy serve? Can jealousy or envy ever be beneficial, to their bearers or to society at large? Or should they ideally be eliminated? How do we deliberate between revenge and forgiveness? Is true forgiveness achievable?
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 658 - FILM AS HISTORY/FILM AS MYTH

In this seminar, Film as History/Film as Myth, we are exploring the complex relationship between contemporary films and the culture in which they are produced, with special attention to films that base their narratives on historical events and people. What do these films tell us about the events and people they are about, and what do they tell us about the time period in which they were produced? How does the form of films--the choices regarding narrative material, editing, characterization, and visual style--influence the interpretation of important cultural and historical periods or events? What cultural myths do these films create, or reinterpret, about the particular society that produces them? How does evolution and transformation of film genres and genre conventions contribute to the ideological negotiation of meanings in contemporary films? In exploring the relationship of films to society, we will explore the principles of Marxist film criticism, which is premised on the view that the economic structure of a society plays a major role in shaping both the commodity production/consumption and ideological impact of cultural works.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 659 - SOCIAL ETHICS: JUSTICE & CARE

This course will introduce students to two ethical systems "Justice and Care" their interplay and their implications for education. The Justice ethic holds that morality is based on objective rationality, that individuals are freely autonomous, and that human rights must be defended. The Care ethic holds that morality is based on subjective and emotional relationships, that individuals are interconnected, and that human responsibilities must be upheld. After exploring each ethical system we will compare the two and ask: Are Justice and Care really rival ethical systems, or one system? Which one should be employed to live an ethical life? Which one should be employed in making public policy? Are these two ethical theories gendered masculine and feminine? The last unit of the course will assess Justice and Care in education: What place should either ethic have in classroom pedagogy? How do Justice and Care ethics impact important educational debates, such as affirmative action, school vouchers, and sexual harassment?
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 660 - THE ENVIRONMENT & AMER CULTURE

The United States has been blessed, from its first days as a wilderness inhabited only by native Americans, by an extraordinary natural environment. Although certainly inhospitable to the earliest settlers, this environment affected "The New World" profoundly, shaping the burgeoning society growing between its shores by its power, grandeur, enormity, richness and magnificence--From the Puritans to contemporary artists and writers, Americans have continued to respond to this profundity by creating a literature, a cultural heritage of images in art, music and film, which continues to reflect our involvement with nature. Indeed, our natural environment remains a major source of our national identity. This course explores this national identity as it is expressed through our culture, from the beginnings of our explorations to the present. We consider how our environmental experience is reflected in our literary/visual responses to it. These responses are affected in turn by the evolving concepts of man, as well as temporal cultural, political and ideological forces. We will examine how the history of our interaction with our environment has shaped the history of our national literature and cultural responses--how definitions of "nature" and the "wilderness" change from era to era, often as reflections of evolving national self-image. The course will address these issues through a combination of assigned group readings, individual seminar presentations on paintings, films, slides, music, photography, individual readings. There will also be a required museum visit, an extensive individual research presentation, and a weekly "practicum" in environmental perception.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3000.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 661 - REDEFINING GENDER RELATIONSHIPS: JOAN OF ARC

The study of Joan of Arc's brief life, with its meteoric rise and fall, involves issues that inspire passionate response: religion and mysticism; individual rights and responsibilities; love of king and country; recognition of women's abilities and power; upward mobility. In order to understand the 15th-century view of these issues, we look back at earlier stages of the Middle Ages, and the authority that was present in the Church, government, and various social strata. We will accomplish this investigation early in the course through readings and discussions of literature of the Middle Ages, contemporary feminist and revisionist history of the roles and limitations placed on medieval women, and analytic and biographical materials about Joan of Arc herself. Joan's role as symbol for liberal and social movements, social constructions of "woman", and war efforts has continued since the time of the French Revolution. The latter half of the course examines selected readings and images of Joan and her iconographic importance.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 690 - TOPICS:

The topics studied in this course change from semester-to-semester, as well as from instructor-to-instructor. Students should expect to engage in sophisticated discussion, to work independently, and to participate in--and lead--seminar discussions. The course will require students to call on the experience of their previous coursework in the program to produce polished writing informed by research. Students should expect to complete at least one prolonged research assignment and to produce at least 20 pages of polished writing this semester. For this semester's course sections, please see the MALS webpage (http://www.ramapo.edu/academics/mals/) or contact the MALS Director.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 699 - MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES: ELECTIVE

This course designation is used to describe a transfer course from another institution which has been evaluated by the convener. A course with this courseID has no equivalent Ramapo course. It may fulfill a requirement or may count as a free elective.
0.000 TO 1.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 1.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 700 - INDEPENDENT STUDY: LIBERAL STUDIES

The independent study will consist of individual work with a faculty mentor to undertake and write a substantial research paper. For students who chose the independent study and one additional elective for their capstone experience instead of the reading and writing tutorials. Pass/Fail grading only.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Independent Study

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 710 - THESIS RESEARCH TUTORIAL

The Thesis Research Tutorial will consist mainly of individual work with a faculty mentor to hone the thesis topic and do research for the thesis or project. By mid-semester, a student enrolled in the tutorial should be sufficiently advanced to write an outline and annotated bibliography of the thesis.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 711 - THESIS WRITING TUTORIAL

The Thesis Writing Tutorial is meant for students who have completed the Thesis Research Tutorial. It is a continuation of work with the faculty mentor to finish doing research and writing the master's thesis.
0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 3.000 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

LIBS 712 - THESIS CONTINUATION

Thesis continuation required for students who have not completed either LIBS 710 Thesis Research Tutorial or LIBS 711 Thesis Writing Tutorial in the allotted timeframe.
0.000 TO 0.100 Credit hours
0.000 TO 0.100 Lecture hours

Levels: Graduate
Schedule Types: Seminar

Liberal Studies Department

Course Attributes:
MLS COURSE FOR GRAD FEE ASSESS

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Catalog Entries		Spring 2012 Apr 18,2024