Fall 2015

FRESHMAN SEMINAR PROGRAM

UNCG College of Arts and Sciences

REASONING AND DISCOURSE I GEC category: GRD

Also carries credit equivalent to ENG 101. You may not receive credit for both FMS 115 and ENG 101.

Course / Days/Time/Place / Course Title/Description / Instructor
FMS
115-01 / T,R
8:00-9:15 / The Monsters We Make: Narrating the Communal Enemies. It has been long assumed that few things bring people together like a scapegoat or an enemy, someone against whom a group can define itself. Storytelling has been one of the most common and effective ways for establishing this enemy identity, but a number of writers find ways to disrupt a group’s assumption about what is evil or outcast. Accordingly, this FMS 115 course will encounter texts that explore and challenge the creation of enemies and communities in a number of contexts. Students will engage with these texts through spoken and written activities that contest not only the ideas expressed in the assigned readings, but also their own assumptions about their communities and biases. / Joe
George
FMS 115-02 / T,R
9:30-10:45 / The Monsters We Make: Narrating the Communal Enemies.
See FMS 115-01 for course description / Joe
George

LITERATURE GEC category: GLT

Course / Days/Time/Place / Course Title/Description / Instructor
FMS
120-01 / WI / T,R
9:30-10:45 / Dystopian Fiction. It’s hard to ignore the sudden interest in dystopian fiction. Go to the movies, and you’ll find any one of the many Hunger Games films. Pop into the bookstore, and dystopian works line the shelves of contemporary fiction. These fictional societies endure scientific experiments gone wrong, computers that are self-aware, and governments that want to rip novels and music from their people’s hands. Why are these works so popular? And even if they are set way into the future, what are they trying to say about contemporary life? Throughout this course, we’ll read various dystopian novels and short works. We’ll read stories like “The Lottery,” published in the 1950s that still hold many truths today. As a class, we will fight along Katniss from Hunger Games, explore new planets like Billie in Stone Gods and just like Snowman, we will worry about the impacts unlimited scientific advancements in Oryx and Crake. And most importantly, we’ll learn to answer questions like what is a dystopian work? Why do the authors use the genre’s conventions to critique society? What are we supposed to take away from these novels? How are these works, regardless of their historical context, still relevant today? / Emily
Hall
FMS
120-02 / WI / T,R
11:00-12:15 / Dystopian Fiction.
See FMS 120-01 for course description. / Emily
Hall
FMS 120-03 / WI / T,R
9:30-10:45 / A Tarheel Born and a Tarheel Read. How does North Carolina look through the eyes of its local contemporary novelists? How do writers build a convincing sense of place in the worlds they build with their words? In this course, we will read from the mountains to the beach, sampling work from Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Jill McCorkle, among others. During our tour, we’ll consider what it means to be a North Carolina novelist and how language, place, and truth interact. Nancy Bucknall has lived, worked, and read in North Carolina for 29 years, which makes her a naturalized Tarheel. She enjoys North Carolina’s mountains and its beaches, and longs to visit the Great Dismal Swamp, to see if it’s really all that dismal. / Nancy
Bucknall

FINE ARTS GEC category: GFA

Course / Days/Time/Place / Course Title/Description / Instructor
FMS
130-01 / WI / M, W, F
10:00-10:50 / Acting Change in America: Human Rights Onstage. In this course we will look at the rich legacy of American plays that have, at their center, the struggle for equality in a chaotic world. These dramas reflect the nation’s political, social, and moral norms which have been in constant flux in the tumultuous 20th century and they bring into sharp focus the troubling prejudices and conformities that have influenced and sometimes dominated our culture. / Jeff
West
FMS 130-05 / WI
SI / T,R
9:30-10:45 / Singing the American Dream. The Broadway musical is America’s unique contribution to world theatre. Combing romantic story-telling with song, dance, spectacle and stellar performances, musical theatre is a cultural mirror that both reflects and distorts the reality of a particular time and place. In this course we will investigate how the musical has captured, expressed and promoted the American Dream during the past hundred years. We will read and discuss John Bush Jones’ Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre as well as a representative sampling of classic musical scripts. We will listen to recordings, view DVDs and attend musical productions. / Robert
Hansen
FMS 131-01 / WI / T,R
5:00-6:15 / Italian Zombies, French Cannibals, and Japanese Ghosts: The Globalization of the Extreme Horror Film. American blockbusters like Ironman, Gravity, Spiderman, and The Hobbit have colonized the global film market for years. Less understood is the fact that extreme horror films from Italy, France, Japan, Thailand, and elsewhere have also become a global phenomenon. So popular have these films become that Hollywood has invested in expensive, star-cast remakes, often with their original directors, and, in one case, an award-winning cable series (The Walking Dead). This course will examine ten original extreme horror films from their country of origin, together with four American remakes, in an attempt to determine what it is about this genre that has made it so internationally successful, despite the fact that the films themselves often have low production values and (literally) distasteful subjects. / David
Cook
FMS
131-02 / WI / T,R
11:00-12:15 / History and Art of Animation. Animation is an art form that brings fanciful imaginings to vivid realization. As a popular form of entertainment for children and adults, animation captivates our imagination and influences our way of perceiving the world. In this class we will look at the historical progression of animation techniques, the social characterizations presented in popular cartoons, and the artistic brilliance of animators from around the world. / Eleanor
Cowen

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: Modern GEC/CAR category: GHP/GMO

Course / Days/Time/Place / Course Title/Description / Instructor
FMS
160-01 / WI / M,W,F
9:00-9:50 / The Cold War in Fact and Film. The Cold War, from the end of WWII in 1945 to the early 1990s, was the most dangerous period in recorded history. Few who lived through the Cold War would dispute this, yet the majority now living with no conscious memories of the Cold War can barely fathom its seriousness. The very real possibility of an all-out military conflict between east and west, between the forces of Capitalism and Communism, and the looming threat of a global nuclear holocaust affected virtually every facet of geopolitics for more than four decades. The fact that we endured and survived the Cold War without destroying ourselves should serve as a wakeup call. Our collective experiences from the Cold War demand that we search for answers that may help us avoid a similar situation in the future. This course represents a small step toward achieving that goal. Together we will search for answers and a better understanding of our recent global past as we examine the major events of the Cold War from three very different perspectives: primary source documents, scholarly secondary sources, and finally, feature films containing Cold War themes. Major topics discussed will include, but not be limited to, the origins of the Cold War, Soviet and American ideology, the nuclear arms race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and numerous proxy wars fought around the globe. The primary objective of the course will be to have students separate historical fact from historical fiction regarding this major period in world history—and in doing so, responding to that wakeup call. / Mark
Moser
FMS 160-02 / WI / T,R
9:30-10:45 / The Contemporary South. The South has always stood as a region apart in popular imagination. Southerners, so they say, have one speed—slow. We have our own language, sprinkled abundantly with y’alls, and we call everyone darlin’, hon, or sweetie. We drive pickup trucks, listen to country music, go to church on Sunday morning, and gather for pig pickin’s. We may be poor, but we know how to enjoy life. But the South of the twenty-first century is surprisingly modern and complex, with vibrant eclectic cities. In many ways, the stereotypes of the past no longer apply. This class challenges students to explore the Contemporary South with its new culture, new economy, new politics, and even new people. Welcome to today’s South! / Susan
Thomas
FMS 160-03 / WI / T,R
11:00-12:15 / The Contemporary South.
See FMS 160-02 for course description / Susan
Thomas

SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL STUDIES GEC category: GSB

Course / Days/Time/Place / Course Title/Description / Instructor
FMS
170-01 / WI / M,W,F
10:00-10:50 / War and Conflict. It has been estimated that there has been a war somewhere in the world 94% of the time
since the dawn of civilization. Why does mankind periodically organize himself for armed conflict and
warfare? This course will begin by asking these questions and try to answer them through an examination of
the United States’ involvement in war and conflict over the last hundred years. / A. Leigh
Sink
FMS 170-02 / WI / M,W,F
11:00-11:50 / God and the Constitution. Have you ever heard the adage "one should never discuss religion or politics"? I have heard it most of my life and I think it's crazy. Two of the most powerful forces in the history of man are religion and government. So, we will look at their relationship in America, beginning with the writing of the Constitution in 1787 and moving all the way forward to 2015. / M. Jeff Colbert
FMS 170-03 / WI / M,W,F
12:00-12:50 / Fans, Athletes, and Sports in Modern Society. This course investigates the place of sport in society with a special emphasis on identity. Social identities are clearly an important factor in how a person understands his or her sense of self and place in society—and identities formed in and around the issue of sport are becoming increasingly important in late modern societies globally. As such we’ll be looking at how these identities are achieved and disengaged for both athletes and fans. Central to this discussion will be issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation / Steve
O’Boyle
FMS 170-04 / WI / M,W,F
1:00-1:50 / Fans, Athletes, and Sports in Modern Society.
See FMS 170-03 for course description / Steve
O’Boyle