CAT 1

CAT 1 courses (four units, fall quarter) teach critical reading and drafting by examining how culture, art, and technology have intersected in the past. Students must have completed the Entry Level Writing Requirement in order to enroll in CAT 1.

Fall 2024 Courses

A Hollywood History: Filming America from "Boxing Cats" to Jaws

Phoebe Bronstein

Associate Teaching Professor, CAT

Tuesday/Thursday 11:00 a.m.-12:20 p.m.

This writing and communication course will focus on the history of American film from early one-shot shorts like Edison's Boxing Cats to the first summer blockbuster, Jaws. As film became a mass medium in the early part of the twentieth century, so too did Hollywood shape and react to social and political forces. Understanding the history of Hollywood will help us better understand, critique, and appreciate today's popular culture landscape. Thus, as we learn to read film and read about film history, we will use a close analysis of Hollywood productions to consider topics in American culture from racism to sex (and Hollywood scandals!), violence, and humor. Potential films we will watch include (but are not limited to) Modern Times (1936), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Shaft (1971). As we read across a variety of genres—from films to academic articles and popular press pieces—we will develop critical reading and writing skills that will prepare you for the writing-intensive CAT 2 and to read college-level material across your other courses.

Origins

Guillermo Algaze

Professor, Anthropology

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 9:00-9:50 a.m.

This CAT 1 course focuses on a key question: "How did human beings come to have culture, art, and technology in the first place?" The course is centered on the human capacity for technological innovation and symbolic representation. It presents a global historical overview of the general principles and patterns of past human development, and focuses particular attention on the interrelationships between demographic, cultural, and technological changes in the last 50,000 or so years of the human career.

Other Places, Other People, Other Pasts: The Culture, Art, and Technology of Tourism from Then to Now

Patrick Patterson

Associate Professor, History

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.

Tourism means Big Fun. It also means Big Business, Big Impacts, and Big Transformations (and sometimes, Big Controversies and Big Trouble as well). A phenomenon with enormous consequences for the world we live in today, tourism, along with the tourists and tourist-industry providers, big and small, who make it all happen, will no doubt continue to shape the human experience in powerful ways in the future. But how did we get here? Travel across distances great and small is really nothing new: journeys have been part of the way people live for many centuries. Yet what we call "tourism" actually is rather new, something that emerged in the relatively recent past. In this course we will examine that critical Big Question—"How did we get here?"—through our readings and viewings of, and conversations about, a wide range of major issues and hot topics relating to the impact of tourism and tourists in the contemporary world: environmental impacts and sustainability, economic development and underdevelopment, growth and inequality, sex tourism, "dark tourism" centering on circumstances that are by no means fun and happy, the evolving styles and ethics of tourism, and cultural exchanges, cultural transformations, and "cultural imperialism." By looking at the history of tourism from early developments up through the present day, we will attempt to gain deeper understandings not just about how contemporary patterns have developed—"How did we get here?"—but also about a couple of other Big Questions with big implications for the world and its peoples, both now and in the future: "Where are we going?" and "Why are we going there?"

Twice Upon a Time: Lore, Adaptation, and Identity

Jennifer Marchisotto

Lecturer, CAT

Tuesday/Thursday 9:30-10:50 a.m.

From myths to monsters, fairytales to fables, we tell stories to help make sense of the world around us. Shared lore helps create (and divide) communities, defining identity at both individual and national levels. From ancient civilizations to the Irish Revival movement in the early 1900s to contemporary retellings of African folklore in the work of Marlon James, Tomi Adeyemi, and Ayana Gray, mythology can simultaneously speak to the past, present, and future. In this CAT 1 course, we will embrace a broad definition of lore that encompasses diverse forms of storytelling to look at the ways narrative helps us understand the past and how adaptations of classic myths and tales can shift that understanding, revising and reinventing them for the current moment. We will look at texts from literary criticism as well as a variety of forms of popular culture including film, music, and television to hone our critical thinking and writing skills. We will also engage theories of critical race studies, critical gender studies, and disability studies to inform and enhance our engagement with the texts. Overall, we will consider how storytelling has helped to create history, but also how we can use those same stories to actively reinvent and shift our present moment through adaptation.