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Today is Friday, May 25, 2012 at 01:35 AM.


Changes in the syllabus from year to year result from many causes--availability of new works, perception of new issues, desire of the faculty for variety--but there is almost always some carry-over from one year to the next. My own approach to selection of the final syllabus has been to solicit suggestions from course instructors and other faculty members, to review suggestions made by students on an end-of-course questionnaire, and to read as much of the recommended works for which I can find time. Absent an over-arching theme--which almost all participating faculty members have thought to be counter-productive--I think it is up to the person in charge of the course to create a syllabus with resonances among the readings; I have found the challenge of doing so to be particularly stimulating.

For the coming year we expect to keep An Artist of the Floating World, Arcadia, The Business of Fancydancing, Dreams of a Final Theory, and possibly Labyrinths; if Cities on a Hill were not out of print, it would be retained as well. Following are the additions currently planned for the coming term.

  • The Gold Cell--an earlier (1987) collection of poems by Sharon Olds, whose powerful work, closer to the surface than Oliver's, may prove to be a less subtle pairing with Alexie (Knopf Poetry Series).
  • Full House--Stephen Jay Gould's consideration of evolutionary trends and study of variation in complete systems (Harmony Books).
  • The Good Society--Robert N. Bellah and the other authors of Habits of the Heart ask how we can take responsibility for our economic and political institutions (Alfred A. Knopf).
  • Biology as Ideology--Richard Lewontin documents his "opportunity to struggle against the view that science consists of simple objective truths and that if only we will listen to biologists we will know everything worth knowing about human existence" (HarperPerennial: HarperCollins).
  • Transgressing the Boundaries--Toward a Transformational Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity by Alan Sokol, with response articles by many. Sokol published this essay in Social Text last year and immediately exposed it as a hoax, much to the chagrin of the editors; the aftershocks are still being felt. n
Robert E. Reynolds, professor of physics, has been teaching at Reed since 1963.
Readers interested in checking final syllabus details may consult the course web site at http://web.reed.edu/academic/departments/Humanities/Hum411/fall97syllabus.html when it becomes available in the fall.