New First Year Program “Six Pretty Good Ideas” Launches
Following the success of two pilot seminars taught in 2019 and 2020, the Humanities Department and the First-Year Seminar program are proud to launch a new suite of fall courses for incoming first-years. Intentionally irreverent in name, “Six Pretty Good X” deconstructs canonicity and reconceives the “great books” rubric as open, dialogic, and vital. It invites students to think about what we value—what makes something “good” – and why we once valued and might still continue to value it. At the same time, this set of courses will allow students to explore the wealth of Yale’s resources, including special collections, archives, libraries, and museums, with whose help they can pursue the questions that interest them.
6PGX courses are organized thematically with an emphasis on transhistorical and cross-cultural connections. Linked by some framing readings held in common, the seminars’ framework speaks to our commitment to a broad, open-ended canon and a mode of teaching driven by curiosity and exploration rather than by a fixed set of principles and hierarchies of value. In the process, we hope to foster a community of undergraduate writers and readers who understand the humanities as an interdisciplinary, multicultural, multi-media project to which they can all contribute and from which they can learn in ways that build on, but also cut across, their personal identifications and belongings. While each course’s seminar meetings are held separately, all classes come together on Fridays for three-hour lab sessions that introduce students to the principles of academic writing and teach them how to access and work with institutional collections. All 6PGX courses count for 1.5 credits and fulfill the WR requirement.
This year, the four 6PGX courses on offer are “Six Pretty Good Journeys,” taught by Professor Shawkat Toorawa; “Six Pretty Good Poems,” taught by Professor Lucas Bender; “Six Pretty Good Buildings,” taught by Dr. Michael Faciejew; and “Six Pretty Good Selves,” co-taught by Professor Marta Figlerowicz and Professor Ayesha Ramachandran. The last two faculty members will also be serving as this year’s course directors. Interested students should reach out to them at: marta.figlerowicz@yale.edu and Ayesha.ramachandran@yale.edu.