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Advanced Electives

FALL 2013

Freshmen are not permitted to enroll in Advanced Electives without permission from the Honors Director

CMA 359 Introduction to Game Design

Professor Bertozzi

Students will engage as participants in many kinds of games as a preliminary to learning how to critically analyze play environments and construct games. Course readings range from German philosophers to current game theorists. Students will research player experience, the changing content of games, and the effects of playing games on players. The results of research are then used to develop new games.

Students are encouraged to design what are known as Serious Games/Games for Change. This includes games that have a pro-social focus such as teaching chemistry as part of spell casting or explaining how too much high calorie food will make an avatar obese.

ENG 359 Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll: 1950s American Literature and Culture

Professor Fahy

Just as 1950s seemed to embrace homogeneity, prosperity, and conformist values, it was also a period characterized by profound anxiety and uncertainty. The maniacal efforts of McCarthyism encouraged a culture of fear. The success of Playboy magazine, the popularity of Marilyn Monroe, and the shocking findings of Kinsey's report on female sexuality undermined the images of female domesticity as popularized on television sitcoms. The Civil Rights Movement demanded radical changes in American racial hierarchies. And rock 'n' roll deepened the generational divide, suggesting to many a crumbling of traditional moral values. This course will examine the contradictory impulses of this era through literature, film, and television. Some of the literary texts will include James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, Flannery O'Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

ENG 359 The Horse in Literature

Professor Digby

From the ancient Greek world of Plato and Aesop to the wilderness of the American West, the horse has generated brilliant literary works of every genre in literature. This seminar will take an historic and genre-based approach to the themes, symbols and narratives centered on the horse in literature. Students will read short fiction, novels, plays and poetry.

FIN 359 The Business of Clean Technology

Professor Boyer

This course would focus on clean technologies such as solar, wind, and geothermal, the prospects for financial viability of these industries. It would also discuss how environmental issues are ethical issues that businesses should be aware of and involved in the solutions to environmental problems. The course would also discuss start-up capital (venture capital), early stage financing, capital structure decisions, initial public offering or other exit strategies, plus the operating finances explaining why it will take time to show a profit. Thus, these clean tech businesses can be looked at from an investment standpoint as well as a corporate standpoint in terms of the financial viability of capital budgeting projects and operating finances.

MUS 359 Beethoven: The Man and Artist

Professor Kim

Ludwig van Beethoven stands as a monument of artistic zenith in music. His creative spirit has dominated his era during the Age of Revolution and his powerful influence continues unabated to our current age. This course examines the life and music of this composer. The romantic notion of artist as hero is fully embodied in Beethoven, whose triumph of the spirit and eloquent utterances of the soul are deeply etched in his works. It is the aim of this course to illuminate our understanding of Beethoven the man by tracing his creative outlet through his music. Conversely, we will also seek to better understand his music by considering outer influences through the study of his life and times. Among the major topics we will examine include Classicism, Romanticism, revolution (political, social, and artistic), compositional innovations, instrumental virtuosity, changing role of the aristocracy, his family dysfunction, doomed love life, and deafness. This course is open to both music and non-music majors alike; ability to read music is not required.

PHI 359 William James: Philosopher, Psychologist, Psychical Researcher

Professor Lothstein

William James is arguably our greatest American Philosopher and Philosophical Psychologist. He has also been called by the Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead one of the four greatest thinkers in the Western tradition. The three others being Plato, Aristotle, and the 18th century philosopher, Leibnitz. We will explore in this course the central concerns in James' major writings, including some of his most famous essays in popular philosophy (i.e. "Is Life Worth Living?," "The Moral Equivalent of War," "The Will to Believe," "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," and "What Makes a Life Significant?")