SPRING 2012 INFORMATION SESSION

Wednesday, February 8th in the Honors College Library (Chapman 301) at 4:00.

Applications must be turned in by 5:00 on Friday, February 10th. Applications must be turned in hard copy to the Center for Intercultural Dialogue at 110 Gerlinger hall.

Spring 2012 Classes:

Honors College Colloquium 421H/Inside-Out, Spring 2012 :Literature and Ethics: Levinas and Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate”

We will read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, perhaps the greatest Russian novel written during the Soviet era, and Is it Righteous to Be?, a series of interviews with perhaps the 20th – century’s greatest philosopher of ethics, Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995). Life and Fate, a huge, panoramic novel modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was a work of literature that Levinas almost obsessively referred to – and returned to – in his writings of the last fifteen years of his life. Grossman (1905-1964) passionately asks if, even in the wake the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, goodness is still possible.

Grossman was a reporter during the Second World War. He covered a number of famous battles, including the Battle of Stalingrad, which is the backdrop of /Life and Fate. /Grossman was also one of the earliest witnesses of the Shoah. As a journalist, he movingly described the conditions he found in Treblinka, a Nazi concentration camp, soon after it was liberated. In collaboration with Professor Peter Laufer, the Wallace Chair of Journalism at the University of Oregon, our class will be the site of the launching of a UNESCO-sponsored conference on “Conflict-Sensitive Reporting,” May 9 – 12, 2013, which will be held at OSCI (May 9) and at the University of Oregon in Eugene (May 10 – 12).

The class will meet Wednesday evenings from 6 – 8:50 at the Oregon State Correctional Institution (OSCI) in Salem. Transportation will be provided.

HC 421 H: Films, Feelings, and Human Nature