Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description
Changing Our Minds
Instructor(s): Jamie Parra, English
An introduction to the many ways scientists, scholars, and artists working within and across a number of disciplines investigate the changing human mind. Students will examine how, from the nineteenth century to the present, work in the fields of philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, literary fiction, visual art, cognitive neuroscience, and popular self-help literature has fixated on our ability to change our own minds—as well as our capacity to change the minds of others. Readings will include attempts to represent or explain concepts such as decision-making; the relationship between the physical brain and the experience of having a mind; and scientific and non-scientific explorations of perception, memory, and trauma. Students will also consider writers and visual artists interested in putting the phenomenon of consciousness on the page or canvas in addition to playwrights seeking to politically reorient their audiences.
Course Offered: