Cool New Classes
More than four dozen new courses are being offered at Dartmouth this academic year. Here are a few we'd like to take.
Narratives of Business and Business as a Narrative, team-taught by Tuck School communications prof Paul Argenti and the English department's Barbara Will. The class is billed as "an exploration of representations of American literature, and capitalism in modern American literature, film, and advertising.
Rhetoric and the Art of Declamation in Ancient Rome. After an absence of some 20 years, rhetorical" theory is making a comeback at Dartmouth. Classics professor James
Tatum is teaching the course as a general introduction to the theory and practice of the ancient art of persuasion. Readings sample Cicero, Tacitus, Augustine, Abraham Lincoln, Edward Everett, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Jordan, and Sonia Sanchez.
Primate Ecology and Conservation. Prominent primatologists will augment Michele Goldsmith's anthropology class, which compares the behavior and ecology of living lemurs, monkeys, and apes. Why study non-human primates in a discipline about humans? So "we can better reconstruct relationships early fossil humans had with their envirdnment," says professor Goldsmith, who spent two years studying gorillas in Africa. This winter she will give one lueky undergraduate a chance to accompany her to Uganda to study chimpanzees and mountain gorillas.
Offensive Art. Annabelle Melzer's seminar will examine such provocative contemporary works as photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe; performance art by Karen Finley, Rachel Rosenthal and Alarina Abramovic; and dance by Pina Bausach and Mark Morris. The class will also -take a retrospective look at the classics of the Avant-Garde—Dada, surrealist, and futurist performance from the turn of the century. Professor Melzer says the class will ask: "How does art offend?" and "Who is being offended, and why?"
