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FIRST-YEAR PROGRAMS (L61)  (Dept. Info)Arts & Sciences  (Policies)FL2021
L61 FYP 150First-Year Seminar: Topics in Interdisciplinary Inquiry3.0 Units
SecDays       TimeBuilding / RoomInstructorFinal ExamSeatsEnrollWaits
01M-W----4:00P-5:20PJanuary Hall / 10 SackNo final15140
Desc:Speculative Worlds & Technological Futures: This seminar will explore how speculative fictions imagine and critique emerging technologies and the possible futures they might beget. And what is "speculative fiction"? Margaret Atwood locates this genre in between escapist science fiction and empirical scholarship that projects the future based on current social, economic, environmental, scientific, and technological trends. We will compare notable works of speculative fiction ranging from Oryx and Crake to Black Mirror with such relevant historical antecedents as Thomas More's Utopia and Emile Zola's manifesto on "The Experimental Novel." In the latter part of the semester, we will examine how speculative fiction and imaginative world-building respond to artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual and augmented reality, synthetic biology, and geo-engineering. This course is for first-year non-transfer students only.
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02M-W----4:00P-5:20PEads / 215 RickardNo final15140
Desc:Fictions of Chance: Probability before Mathematics. Recent history has been shaped by events that may be described, with some understatement, as improbable. As often as not forecasters, pundits, and talking heads have been led astray by the tools of popular statistics. Probability, however, hasn't always been a subject for the sciences. Our point of departure will be Aristotle's Poetics, which introduced the idea that fiction helps people understand such contingencies as love, death, war, or exile. We will then range across the history of literature to see how fiction came to represent and make sense of the merely coincidental. Of particular interest will be those contingencies that outstrip our capacity for scientific explanation and so demand other forms of thought, be they ethical, political, or imaginative. Our topics will be probability and improbability, luck and unluckiness, normality and abnormality, error and correction, freedom and necessity, security and risk, laws and their exceptions. This course is for first-year non-transfer students only.
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