Course description

Instructor: Karl Hall

Number of credits: 2 

Course level: Undergraduate

Time: Tuesday and Thursday, 15:20-16:20

Location: D212 (Tuesday) and D108 (Thursday)

Instructor's office hours: Tuesday 14-15, Wednesday 13:30-15:30; Thursday 14-15; and by appointment

Zoom option: If you require Zoom access for visa reasons or other extenuating circumstances, use this link. Please alert the instructor beforehand if you cannot attend in person; online access is not available without prior permission. 

Prerequisites: None 

Course aims: "Bees are the most excellent of all Insects whatsoever, and express both worth and wonder in all their ways... They are the most excellent Creatures for Prudence, and profit, except man." When Samuel Purchas constructed "a theatre of political flying insects" in the seventeenth century, it was not by chance that he began with "the excellency of bees." Projecting human virtues onto the behavior of the beehive and extracting normative politics from apian interactions indeed goes back to ancient times. The honeybee has long embodied the lawfulness of non-human Nature while also serving an indispensable role in our political economy. As budding social scientists, cultural critics, and humanists, CPS students will examine bee-related texts as convenient proxies for the larger historical problem of how we have looked to Nature when identifying the regularities of the human-built world. This is not a survey course ("Plato to NATO"), though it does range across a broad swathe of history. It is an introductory course, however, in the sense that students with no prior training in history will have the opportunity to sample from a diverse corpus of texts and learn how to subject them to historical analysis. 

Learning outcomes: In this course we will drink the sweet, sweet nectar of metaphor in history. Students will do more than analyze the literary qualities of historical texts, however. Our task will be to grasp the functions of metaphor, simile, and analogy in the creation of historical narrative. More than that, we will look at how the supposed modern denigration of metaphor in scientific discourse has shaped the historical search for disciplinary rigor of the social sciences. 

Assessment: Quizzes: 20%; one presentation in class: 20%; review essay: 50%; class participation: 10%.

Quizzes: Four short in-class quizzes (<10 minutes); lowest score among the four will be tossed out in the final accounting. 

Presentation: 12-15 minutes. As far as possible the presentation should have some connection to a given week's topic. (Since the distribution of student interests is not known beforehand, this will necessarily be a flexible process.) Pragmatically speaking, students may use the presentation to explore ideas which they hope to expound more systematically in the review essay, but the connection is not obligatory. 

Review essay: 8-9 double-spaced pages (12-point font; Chicago Manual of Style, full notes). Topics are chosen in consultation with the instructor. The first rule of Bee Club is that you don't have to write about bees. Ants, anyone? Or the "seeds of civilization"? Or "crime wave"? More generally, students should feel free to identify a promiscuous concept or practice from the social sciences that lends itself to similar modes of historical analysis. Working from a small corpus of secondary sources and, where possible, a relevant primary source, students will write a brief synthetic analysis of the state of debate. Although the course readings are broadly European in origin, essay topics need not be. 

Deadline: Wednesday, December 20