Core in Review: Contemporary Civilizations
De jure: A two-semester course on the most referenced texts of Western philosophy. A popular (optional) choice for SEAS students to take, this class is two hours long, twice a week, with a 5 minute break in between, just like Lit Hum. Seminar style, so no more than 22 people, just like Lit Hum. So much of this class depends on your fucking instructor. Just like Lit Hum. CC is basically a continuation of Lit Hum.
De facto: It’s a hell of a lot more interesting. First of all, you start with Plato, and end up at Malcolm X and Fanon and Crenshaw, and every single text directly builds off the last text. It’s really cool. If you read the books, which I don’t recommend because CC is even more Shmoopable than Lit Hum, you’ll be an active participant in class. You’ll read texts by some people you studied in high school, and you’re gonna see it in a whole new light. I feel like it caters better to all sorts of majors than Lit Hum did, because there were texts like Darwin for the STEM kids, a whole bunch of religious texts for those types of majors, lots of black people, lots of women, yeah it was really good.
You write the same amount of papers, and the number of quizzes is still a crapshoot depending on your prof. But this class is so much easier than Lit Hum in the sense that you actually know what you need to study: you should know the main arguments of each text and then maybe how they relate to a few other texts’ arguments. Know what each author stood for. Know what kind of examples and defenses they used. And that kinda compartmentalization is so much easier to memorize than random plotlines.
My personal experience? I liked the texts but hated the class mostly because of the people: there’s always one or two people who sit in the corner and act like they’re better than everyone else by trying to refute what someone else says. The prof also matters. I hated my prof first semester because he would cold call (call on ppl to answer questions even if their hand was not raised) so I switched second semester to a prof that was even worse: they had horrible grading policies and made us hold class by ourselves when they decided to strike with the grad student union instead of just canceling class like the other grad professors did.
But as long as you make friends, which is easy to do in a small class like CC where all you have to do is literally arrive early, talk to people during break, and linger when class ends, it’s a bearable class.
Tips to survive:
buy or rent all the books at the beginning of the semester. its super hard to get your hands on a book a few days before you need to bring it to class. the bookstore runs out at the worst times.
who am i kidding definitely rent bc you’re probably not gonna touch those books, just shmoop it.
take incredible notes. notes are really important because it’s so easy to confuse authors. i don’t say this for most classes but in CC it’s really important to take good notes.
study with friends study with friends study with friends
and all of the tips I said for Lit Hum also apply