READING: A rough syllabus sketch for a Methods Course at the 21st Century College

Week 1: The nature and origins of reading
Week 2: Peoples of the book? Reading, viewing, orality before Gutenberg
Week 3: The Gutenberg revolution and early modern print culture
Week 4: Democracy, liberalism, literacy and mass publishing
Week 5: Literacy, colonialism, globalization
Week 6: Hypertext, visual culture and the future of reading
Week 7: Literacy and pedagogy; literacy as social policy
Week 8: Reading, vision and cognition
Week 9: How to read a book
Week 10: Close reading, scanning, annotating
Week 11: Everyday contexts and practices of reading
Week 12: Reading cultures: science and technical writing, official documents, legal briefs and other contexts and techniques of literacy
Week 13: The pleasure and power of the text: the meaning of reading, the authority of literacy, the culture of bookloving
Week 14: To read or not to read: an active debate about what is to come and what ought to be

Possible texts:

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Robert Darnton, “History of Reading”
Albert Manguel, A History of Reading
Gugliemo Cavallo, ed., A History of Reading in the West
Jonathan Boyarin, ed., The Ethnography of Reading
Joanne Rappaport, “Object and Alphabet: Andean Indians and Documents in the Colonial Period”
J.A. Appleyard, Becoming a Reader
Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress
Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Bruno Bettelheim, On Learning to Read
Frank Smith, Reading Without Nonsense
Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write
Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading
Nicolas Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books
Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance
Michael Dirda, An Open Book

THE CAR: A rough syllabus sketch for an Integration Course at the 21st Century College

Week 1-3: Class disassembly and reassembly of major portions of an actual car, with hands-on overview of functionality of parts and overall design
Week 4: Physics and engineering of the internal combustion engine and fuels
Week 5-6: The social and cultural history of the automobile in the United States
Week 7: Cars, culture and representation
Week 8: The aesthetics and marketing of automobile design
Week 9-10 Traffic, pollution, safety: policymaking, politics and automobiles
Week 11-12 The economics of car manufacture and the automobile industry
Week 13 Integrative case studies of automobile aesthetics, policy, history, design and engineering
Week 14: Practical maintenance and ownership of cars

Possible texts:

Martin Stockel, Auto Fundamentals
Jane Kay, Asphalt Nation
Michael Witzel, Crusin’: Car Culture in America
Mikita Brockman, ed., Car Crash Culture
Mark S. Foster, A Nation On Wheels
Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed
Christopher Finch, Highways to Heaven
James Flink, The Automobile Age
Richard Stone, Introduction to Internal Combustion Engines
Randall Noon, Engineering Analysis of Vehicular Accidents
Jack Doyle, Taken for a Ride: Detroit’s Big Three and the Politics of Air Pollution
Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World
Henry Ford, Today and Tomorrow
Stanley Hart, The Elephant in the Bedroom
Richard Escalambre, A Technician’s Guide to Advanced Automotive Emissions Systems
Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty
Jim Wright, Fixin’ to Git: One Fan’s Love Affair with NASCAR’s Winston Cup
Craig McDean, I Love Fast Cars
Taiichi Ono, Toyota Production System
Matthias Holweg, The Second Century
Relevant repair manuals and technical literature on car model to be disassembled