Firstbridge courses are offered to degree seeking freshmen and registration is done via webform in pre-arrival checklist.
Professor(s)
Notes
The world of literature is often opposed to the world of economics, stressing imagination rather than reality, beauty rather than cost, subjective rather than objective realities. In this course, we will consider why it might be useful to challenge this opposition. Literary texts in our world are commodities, they have value. Many great works of literature address the same themes and topics as economics – the place of money in our world, the experience of debt, the forces that organize our desires and constrain our freedoms. Economic texts – even when they are full of mathematics – tell stories and use images and metaphors. We will read key texts of economics (including work by Adam Smith and Karl Marx) alongside key literary texts (novels and poems) from the past and the present in order to enrich and expand our understanding of historical and contemporary individual and social experience.
Learning Outcomes
- Information Literacy: Students will comprehend how information is produced and valued in order to discover, evaluate, use, and create information and knowledge effectively and ethically. In FirstBridge, students will demonstrate the conversational nature of scholarship, and recognize their potential role and responsibilities as contributors to that conversation. For each discipline taught in FirstBridge, students will identify reference works, journals, databases and/or major works in history, in order to start effective research in the field (FB LO1)
- Life at University: Students will acquire the study skills, time management, and interpersonal skills needed to meet the demands of university-level academic work at a Liberal Arts College individually or as a team. Students will value the multiple meanings of place through experiential learning at AUP and beyond in the Parisian or global context (FB LO2)
- Students will show the capacity to read literary texts closely and with imagination, and to consider the relation between literary texts and economic contexts
- Students will consider the relation between critical and creative practices
- Aesthetic Inquiry and Creative Expression: Students will engage with artistic or creative objects (e.g., visual art, theatrical works, film) in different media and from a range of cultural traditions (CCI LO2)
- Civic and Ethical Engagement: Students will demonstrate awareness of ethical considerations relating to specific societal problems, values, or practices (historical or contemporary; global or local) and learn to articulate possible solutions to prominent challenges facing societies and institutions today so as to become engaged actors at various levels in our interconnected world (CCI LO4)
Syllabus
Book List
| Title | Author | Publisher | ISBN Number |
|---|---|---|---|
l'Assommoir | Zola | OUP | 9780198828563 |
Capital: An Abridged Edition | Marx | OUP | 9780199535705 |
The Wealth of Nations | Smith | OUP | 9780199535927 |
The Kill | Zola | OUP | 9780199536924 |
Medea and other plays | Euripides | OUP | 9780199537969 |
The Gift | Mauss | Routledge | 9780415267496 |
Schedule
| Day | Start Time | End Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
Monday | 12:10 | 13:30 | G-002 |
Thursday | 12:10 | 13:30 | G-002 |