Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

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	Email	mals@wfu.edu
	Phone:	(336) 758-5232
	Fax:	(336) 758-4669
	Mail:	MALS, PO 6103 Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC 27109

Fall 2010 Courses

MLS 704   Science, Values, & Culture

This is a course designed to allow non-scientists to better understand the impact of science on society and of society on the scientific process.  In this course we will examine what distinguishes science from other ways of knowing, what is or is not science, who are the great scientists, and what made their discoveries great.  We will also look at the relationship between science and religion,  the differences between scientific creativity and other forms of creativity or imagination, the future of science, and what scientists really do and how they do it. Finally, we will discuss the ethical issues surrounding some of the important scientific controversies of today, including cloning, stem cell research, gene therapy and genetic engineering. Readings will include selections from well known scientists such as Richard Dawkins, James Watson, Louis Wolpert, and Carl Sagan.

                        MONDAY, 6:30 – 9:00 p.m.   Winston Hall 221
                        August 30 – December 6
                        Carole Browne, Ph.D.                      browne@wfu.edu

Carole Browne is a Professor in the Department of Biology. She received a Ph.D. in Biology at Syracuse University, and completed postdoctoral research fellowships at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Cancer Research Center at UNC Chapel Hill before coming to Wake Forest. Her research area is cell and developmental biology, and in the summers she has a lab at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. Dr. Browne has a long standing interest in making the wonders of science accessible to non-scientists, and to this end she has taught “Science as a Way of Knowing” as a seminar in the English Department, the “Process of Discovery” as a first year seminar, and the “History and Philosophy of Science” as an interdisciplinary course at the Wake Forest House in Venice, Italy.

 MLS 843  Happiness

Probably all of us wake up every morning and go to bed each night with one question somewhere in the back of our minds: am I happy?  Implied in this question are, of course, all sorts of other inquiries.  What is happiness?  How do I achieve happiness?  Is happiness the true goal of life?  Or is there a kind of joy in sorrow?  Is it in fact true that melancholy is just as important for the good life as is happiness? These are huge and perhaps ultimately unanswerable questions, but it's possible that they’re the only ones really worth asking.   In this course, we’ll explore these and other related questions from a number of angles.  Through studying philosophers, psychologists, theologians, poets, novelists, and artists, we’ll try to discover the nature of joy and of sorrow, and how these states relate to ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge.  In the end, we’re after an understanding of the good life: what it is and how to get it.

Readings will include Plato, Aristotle, Luther, Marsilio Ficino, Shakespeare, Kant, Jane Austen, John Keats, John Stuart Mill, Emily Dickinson, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Julia Kristeva, and others.  Requirements will include a 15-20 page research essay and an oral report. 

                        TUESDAY, 6:30 – 9:00 p.m.  Tribble Hall A201
                        August 24 – November 30
                        Eric G. Wilson, Ph.D. wilsoneg@wfu.edu
                                                                          

Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest.  He is the author of nine books, including his most recent, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, an entry on the LA Times bestseller list and featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and NBC’s The Today Show. 

This course is full and has a waiting list. Please contact the MALS office if you are interested in being added to the wait list.

MLS 841   Nightmare Cinema

The horror genre is a perennial favorite among movie audiences, and has been since the medium’s infancy. Moreover, the cinema of fear draws on a rich narrative tradition reaching back centuries. The viability of the genre continues to be reaffirmed, most recently with a spate of new vampire movies. This course seeks to trace the development of horror cinema while situating it within the larger tradition of the literature of fear. The genre will be considered in the context of the broader topics of genre studies, cinema studies, and popular culture. Special emphasis will be placed on the commercial nature of the art of cinema and how commercial considerations influence the content and style of motion pictures that capitalize on a popular genre.

THURSDAY 6:30 – 9:00 p.m.  Carswell Hall Room 5
August 26 – December 2
Steve Jarrett                          jarretes@wfu.edu

Steve Jarrett (M.A., UNC-Greensboro) has taught cinema studies at Wake Forest University, North Carolina School of the Arts School of Filmmaking, UNC-Greensboro, High Point University, and the Piedmont Community College Film and Video Program. His publications include articles in “Creative Screenwriting” and a series of newspaper columns on classic films available on video. His primary area of interest is film history, especially the history of the American film industry. In particular, he is interested in exploring the relationship between the cinema as an art form and the movies as a business.

This course is full and has a waiting list. Please contact the MALS office if you are interested in being added to the wait list.

MLS 842   Bloomsbury Group

Bloomsbury, a small fashionable area in central London, was home to some of the most influential writers, intellectuals, and artists of the early twentieth century.  Famed novelists lived in walking distance of England’s most important economic theorists, historians, and painters.  While enduring World War I and other radical cultural and social upheavals, this collective of relatives and friends profoundly influenced and supported one another.  What was the nature of this intellectual community, and what were the circumstances that enabled its formation?  In this course, we will explore the works of writers (Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot), economists (Maynard Keynes), artists (Dora Carrington, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant), historians (Lytton Strachey), as well as publishers, interior designers, and journalists associated with the Bloomsbury group.  The spirit of Bloomsbury will inspire our own inquiry.  That is, members of this class will draw upon their diverse life experiences and passions to understand the period’s larger cultural issues that still resonate in our own era.  In the end, we will create our own unique intellectual community

  WEDNESDAY,  6:30 – 9:00 p.m  Tribble Hall A201
   August 25 – December 1
   Patrick Moran, Ph.D.                        moranpw@wfu.edu

Patrick Moran is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English. He received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Boston College. His fields of research include twentieth-century literature, theories of the novel, the social construction of illness, and material and visual culture. At Wake Forest, he has taught writers ranging from Chaucer to Toni Morrison. Dr. Moran's courses, like "Object Lessons" and "Modernisms and Modernities," feature a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary texts. His students are often called upon to make connections between canonical poems and Cubist paintings, medical case histories and recent films, interior design manuals and graphic novels.