CORE 1: INTRODUCTION TO THINKING AND WRITING
IDST 1050 – 01 Funny Business: Professional-Grade Humor
Instructor: Dr. Michael Gleason. Nothing kills humor like trying to explain it. Let’s do it anyway. As an introduction to this college’s liberal arts abilities, this course is designed not only to sharpen your writing and thinking but also to foster historical and cultural insight. Your job is to analyze a wide array of elements in the prose and poetry of funny, famous, and not-so-famous “Southern” writers, including Mark Twain, Nikki Giovanni, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Padgett Powell, and Zora Neale Hurston. Ranging over two hundred years and several genres, in both fiction and non-fiction, our selections include works by men and women, blacks and whites, native Southerners and the honorary sort. The targets of their humor—or sometimes just the means to achieve it—are the Lofty and the Traditional, such as sex, race, religion, politics, and education; but sometimes the themes are less lofty—from fishhooks to bar fights, from first dates to last rites, and from county fairs to family feuds. Whatever the topic, our discussions and your essays will closely examine form and content in order to formulate reasoned, evidence-based arguments in support of your analysis of literary humor. MWThF @ 8:00.
IDST 1050-02 The Problem and Promise of Race in America.
Instructor: Dr. Kristen Oertel. In his 1903 work,The Souls of Black Folk, black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois argued that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." Just over one hundred years later, DuBois's concerns continue to resonate with the American people, as we struggle to reconcile the promise of America with its reality. In this course we will study DuBois and others who have written about race and racism, focusing especially on the idea of whiteness and how white, black, brown and ethnic or immigrant Americans have forged their racial identities in the land of equality and opportunity. TTH @ 10:00.
