HON 4050-01: A Cultural History of Time (Honors Seminar Course Description for Spring 2004)

(Jeffrey A. Johnson, Department of History)

This Honors seminar is intended primarily to investigate the cultural significance of time in the broadest sense. The instructor’s expertise is in the social and cultural history of science and technology, but the approach of the course will be highly interdisciplinary. Students should derive from this course a better understanding of the changing perceptions and effects of time in various cultural contexts over the course of human history, albeit with a bias toward the more recent past. The chronological focus of the course will be about equally divided between the period from the ancient world to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and the period from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Topically, the course will be balanced between scientific-philosophical-religious aspects, technological-social-economic aspects, and cultural (literary and artistic) aspects. Sessions in the course will primarily entail discussions by students of weekly common readings taken from the list below. Aside from leading discussions, the instructor will also raise questions for analysis by making occasional short introductory presentations [not lectures]. Most meetings will also feature 10-15 minute oral reports on special topics related the common readings by individual students, who will use these readings plus additional outside readings to raise questions for discussion in class; they will later develop their reports into medium-length papers. The course will be writing-enriched, with each student preparing two such papers (approx. 7-10 pages each), an in-class midterm essay examination, and a final take-home essay examination. As is normal with writing-enriched courses, students will submit papers as drafts to be revised after an initial critique by the instructor, who will give a final grade only to the revised paper.

Books for the course (other materials will be available on WebCT, on the web, or on library reserve):

James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Vintage Books, 1999) [see also his website, http://fasterbook.com/]

Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (Random House/Anchor Books, 1989)

Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (expanded ed., Bantam, 1998)

Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918: with a new Preface (Harvard Univ. Press, 2003)

David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev. ed. (Harvard Univ. Press, 2000)

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (orig. published 1895)