Honors Seminars Spring 2018

Segregated Cities

Dr. Amy Clukey

This course will take a comparative approach to the history, literature, and culture of segregation. Americans tend to think of segregation as essentially regional—a product of an exceptionally aberrant South—but, in fact, it is a global phenomenon. The class will begin by looking at Jim Crow segregation in the United States, before shifting focus to late twentieth- and twenty-first century segregation in cities as varied as Belfast, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, speculative cities, and, most importantly, contemporary Louisville. Topics of discussion will likely include: redlining, gentrification, apartheid, the so-called "9th street divide," busing, identity, inequality, and social justice.

We will read Carl Nightingale's Segregation: a Global History of Divided Cities, and we'll also read widely in sociology and urban studies, alongside literary and cinematic texts. Texts may include: the television series Atlanta, the film District 9, China Mieville's The City and The City, Ciaran Carson's Belfast Confetti, Catherine Fosl's Subversive Southerner, Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Ta-Nehesi Coates's Between the World and Me, among others. We'll also take a Civil Rights tour of Louisville and visit historical sites within the city, such as the Western Branch Library.

  • Course code: 8101 ENGL 402-01 HON (cross-listed with HON 436-01/HON 446-01)
  • Meetings: MW 2-3:15pm (restricted to students enrolled in HONORS program)

Poetics of Time and Memory

Professor Deborah Lutz

In this course we consider the ways that time can work magically: loop, repeat, fall away in sublimity. Our memories carve out time and seem also to link to spaces in the past. What does it mean for memories to be revised or erased? Do our memories constitute who we are? Is it worth dwelling in the past, living an examined life? In this class we will muse about what it means to live, as we all must, embedded in time. Our "texts" will include Proust's In Search of Lost Time (volume one), Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, La Jetee, Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and many other films, essays, and literary works.

  • Course code: 8102 ENGL 402-02 HON (Cross-listed with HON 436-02/HON446-02)
  • Meetings: T/Th 2:30-3:45