Spring 2008 Schedule

In this course we'll devote the first third of the quarter to a close reading of a Shakespeare play. During the latter two thirds of the course students will work on producing the play. During the final week of the quarter we will put on two performances of the play in Wyatt Pavilion Theatre. The performances will be open to the rest of the university community. In the production part of the course you will have a number of options open to you. Many of you will, no doubt, wish to act in the production, and there will be ample opportunity to do this. In addition to the main roles in the play, there are scenes for musicians and various attendants. We may also have understudies for some roles. For those of you who do not wish to act, however, there will be lots of other ways to be involved with the production. We will need people willing to work on the various aspects of staging (such as costumes, props, etc.) as well as on the front office business of staging a play (such as publicity, finances, etc.). Two adjunct IST-9 seminars (IST 9-001 & 9-002) will be required of all students who register for this course.

This course will introduce students to basic concepts in drawing, supplemented by the study of works of art in reproduction and in area museums and galleries. Students will be expected to keep journals of drawings and writings in response to the class' activities. A list of supplies and trip dates will be announced the first day of class. Attendance at two lectures by visiting artists will be required. These typically take place at 4:30 on Thursdays. The field trips will be scheduled during class/seminar time (1-4:00 p.m.), but they may require additional time commitments, as we will go to San Francisco and Sacramento locations. Expect to spend $75-100 for course materials and fieldtrip travel. A one-unit IST 9 seminar will be required of all students who register for this course.

This course will study various aspects of music composed in California. We will study rock, jazz, country, and classical musics. For years, critics have identified certain rock and jazz groups as representative of a California style (or styles), and in recent years awareness has grown that this is also true of some classical music composed by Californians (native or transplanted). Among the issues to be discussed is how music reflects specific cultures and microcultures. Why is music by the Grateful Dead different from folk-rock songs by Bob Dylan and other musicians from other parts of the US? How is West Coast jazz different from that written in Kansas City or New York? And can we say anything about why this is so? What is it about the specific cultural mix of California that results in artistic styles that in one way or another represent our state?

This course is about 1968, a very particular year in History. It deals with music and revolutions all over the world, through feature films, documentaries, music, and talk about the era. In 1968, a number of events coincided to mark the passage from one reality into another: The Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the riots in Paris and New York, and the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City right before the Olympic Games, just to name a few.

Most people today learn about the past through moving images. Hollywood and the international film world have produced films set in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance so memorable that it is nearly impossible to imagine life in the medieval period without reference to the movies we've seen. When we think of kings, we imagine men wearing robes and crowns sitting on thrones. When we think of armies, we visualize warriors on horseback and wearing plate armor with a lance tucked under their arms. More recently, filmmakers have tried to dispel misconceptions about what people wore, ate, looked and acted like through a greater attention to detail and the minutiae of material life.

Greater attention to the historical detail, however, does not mean that film has become a clear, uncolored lens through which to observe the past. Filmmakers continue to interpret history for their own purposes even as they create a past in images they claim are more "authentic." The films we will watch this quarter all strive to be authentic. Our task is to detect the director's underlying agenda that the gorgeous detail distracts us from noticing. In the process, we will address such questions as: Does greater accuracy in clothing and technology add to a movie's credibility as a historical document or is it a distraction? To what extent can we ignore a film's underlying agenda? May we enjoy a film while at the same time rejecting its message? Is the point of making films historically authentic an obligation, pointless, educational, manipulative, or all of the above? Do films tell us more about the present than the past, or vice versa? We'll watch the films and discuss these and other questions.

Only open to students registered in IST 8B-001, "Playing Shakespeare." These two seminars allow the time necessary for auditions, rehearsals, etc.

This one unit seminar will be built around a trip to the California Storytelling festival in Orinda - typically the 3rd weekend in May. We will meet early in the quarter to figure out logistics (e.g. transportation), go to the festival (all day Sunday), and meet afterward to discuss the event and to collect the students' written reviews of the festival.

We will be planning and preparing a banquet for the whole ISHP program - students, tutors, and faculty - at the end of the spring quarter. It will involve designing a menu, coordinating all of the food preparation and cooking, and putting on the event itself. Students will learn valuable life skills from this course - how to chop onions, wash dishes, and dodge catastrophe when feeding one-hundred-plus hungry people.

Only open to students registered in IST 8B-002, "Drawing and the Study of Art." This seminar allows for the extra time needed to accommodate fieldtrips to surrounding artists' studios and/or museums.

Enrollment limited to ten students. This seminar averages one hour of participation a week over the quarter. After an introductory lecture, students will sign up for weekly time slots during which they will be involved in learning and using techniques of computer-based brain image analysis. The focus will be to collect data in two areas: brain analysis (to investigate issues of change during aging) and evaluation of a particular technique for monitoring single subject brain change over time. Students will work on one or both of these projects depending on time and preference. The introductory lecture at the lab will focus on basic issues of brain imaging, analysis, and the aging brain.

Students will see the opera "Puccini's Tosca" in Sacramento on Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 2:00 p.m.

Spring quarter will find us in the midst of a dramatic competition for the American presidency. Our reading will be All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winning novel about the rise and fall of a Southern governor and political "boss" who has become an icon of the modern American politician. Warren's novel subsequently became an Oscar winning film and a classic in its own right.

Students in the Integrated Studies Honors Program are in a broad spectrum of majors, and our theme relates to all of them. We will have a wide range of speakers bring their expertise to our seminar series. Each will give us the opportunity to hear from him or her, to discuss the talk, and then to write about the presentations in the larger context of our reading the New York Times (the "text" for this course).