In the 20th century a great deal of literary scholarship was organized around national literary traditions, but in the 21st century cultural forms increasingly flow through transnational circuits of production and meaning. How can we, as readers, critics, and writers, approach literary history today? How can we leverage comparative studies to provide needed national contexts while questioning nationalism?

We will address these questions by reading key works of fiction from Brazil and the United States, by exploring appropriate methods for comparing the two largest societies in the Americas, and by revisiting the classic phases of literary history in those societies. Students will emerge with a strong foundation in critical studies of the novel through Romanticism, Naturalism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Possible authors may include Alencar, Azevedo, Machado de Assis, Rheda, and Santiago from Brazil and Hawthorne, James, Faulkner, Morrison, and Danticat from the United States.

Local Knowledge is a program focused on the theory and practice of community-based work, using video, oral history, participatory research, and other forms of activist learning. Our goal is to develop frameworks, methodologies, strategies and skills for collaborating with local communities. We hope to work closely with people in the region and support their efforts to sustain and empower their communities. We believe local knowledge is a valuable base from which to construct responses to new challenges, one which we, as collaborators, need to understand and incorporate into our work.

The history and identity of a community are inscribed in stories, documents, images, places, forms of knowing and social practice. The ways communities define problems, envision solutions and plan for the future are both enabled and limited by this collectively held sense of history and identity. But communities are also shaped by institutions—government, mass media, globalized corporations, and academic and policy expertise—that are far removed from local values and experience. As centers of power and decision-making move out of local reach, community knowledge and experience are marginalized.

What is at stake here is the capacity of local people to be informed and empowered citizens, creatively identifying, confronting and resolving the social, economic, political, cultural and environmental challenges they face. We will learn from locally initiated efforts and participate in ongoing projects that tackle problems local citizens have identified and begun to address.

Through reading, field trips, film screenings, meetings with community mentors and archival research we will develop our knowledge of four local communities: Tacoma, Shelton, Centralia and Olympia. As we shape these case studies, we will ask: What sense of history, identity and common experience guides these communities? What challenges do community members confront, and how are these being defined and evaluated? How does a community's ability to define and represent itself affect its relationship to regional or national policies, issues and debates? How does "expert" information and input affect how communities identify and solve problems? What regional, national, or international networks can offer information or support to local struggles?

Our studies will draw from the literature of popular education, community-based research, environmental studies, public health, political economy and media analysis. We will learn how to conduct research and analyze locally held knowledge, support community initiatives and implement projects for sustainable community development. We will familiarize ourselves with community resources and develop relationships with community members and organizations. We will learn skills in documentary video, media literacy, historical research, oral history and the use of government documents. We will develop a strong sense of local place, story, history and culture. Through these studies we will build a base for collaborative community work.

In fall everyone will learn the basic skills involved in doing library and archival research, document analysis, oral histories and documentary video. In winter students can choose one or two areas in which to deepen the skills most relevant to their project work. We will develop collaborative projects in winter and spring in response to what we have learned about community needs and interests. The faculty encourage students to focus on one of the following project areas: public health, the environment, labor, immigrant rights and education, food systems, public art and media.

This program introduces the logical, historical, and mathematical foundations of problem solving and computing in the sciences. Students in the program will study the evolution of rational thought and mathematical abstraction in the history of science along with the systems of logic and programming that we use today for problem solving in science, mathematics, and computing.

Early Greek philosophers dared to assume that humanity could comprehend the true nature of the universe and the material world through rational thought. Using historical readings we will investigate key conceptual developments in the evolution of scientific and mathematical thought from those early intellectual explorations to the twentieth century. At the same time we will learn the powerful formal systems of logic and computing into which those early ideas have evolved today. We will study first order mathematical logic and its relationship to early Greek rational thought, contemporary critical reasoning, and scientific theories. We also will study how logic is used to build modern digital computers and how mathematical abstraction and logic combine in the creative act of constructing computer programs to solve problems. Class activities will include hands-on laboratory work in programming and logic along with lectures, weekly readings, seminar discussions, written essays and weekly homework problems.

The United States began the 20th century as a second-rate military and naval power, and a debtor country. The nation ended the century as the last superpower with an economy and military that sparked responses across the globe. In between, the United States invented flying, created atomic weapons, sent men to the moon and began to explore the physical underpinnings of our place in the universe. Many observers have characterized the 20th century as "America's Century" because, in addition to developing as the mightiest military machine on the face of the earth, the United States also spawned the central phenomenon of "the mass." Mass culture, mass media, mass action, massive destruction, massive fortunes—all are significant elements of life in the United States.

Looking Backward will be a retrospective, close study of the origins, development, expansion and elaboration of "the mass" phenomena and will place those aspects of national life against our heritage to determine if the political, social and economic growth of the nation in the last century was a new thing or the logical continuation of long-standing, familiar impulses and forces in American life. While exploring these issues, we will use history, economics, sociology, literature, popular culture and the tools of statistics to help us understand the nation and its place in the century. At the same time, students will be challenged to understand their place in the scope of national affairs, read closely, write with effective insight and develop appropriate research projects to refine their skills and contribute to the collective enrichment of the program. There will be workshops on economic thought, student panel discussions of assigned topics as well as program-wide symposia. Each end-of-quarter symposium will provide a culmination of the quarter's work. Students will gain valuable experience in public speaking and presentation.