ID1 is the code name (and, yeah, the course number) for Pomona College’s First-Year Seminar in Critical Inquiry.
Here’s the general language about the program, from the Catalog:
Critical Inquiry (ID1) is a program of seminars for first-year students in their first semester at the College. Seminars are taught by faculty from across the disciplines and engage students in rigorous reading, writing and discussion on varied topics. The goal of ID1 is to prepare students to participate fully and successfully in the intellectual community that is Pomona College. Critical writing is an essential component of that participation, and to that end ID1 is a writing-intensive course. All sections of ID1 focus on writing as a recursive process of drafting and revision.
The seminars all meet at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Here’s the description of this section, in particular (still from the Catalog):
Say “fairy tales†and we immediately think of Disney confections that begin “once upon a time†and end “happily ever after.†We might be surprised to learn that in some versions of “Little Red Riding Hood†the heroine performs a strip-tease for the wolf, or that the Grimm brothers sanitized the folktales they collected. For centuries, these stories have helped us imagine childhood and growing up, gender, identity, class, race, and nationhood. While theorists such as Carl Jung and Bruno Bettelheim use these stories as keys to a transhistorical human unconscious, the often surprisingly different forms a single tale can take reveal much about the societies that produce and consume them. In this seminar, we will analyze these narratives as cultural texts that not only reveal but also help to shape the ideals and nightmares of their particular cultural moments.
Professor Dara Regaignon (English)
Intern Bennett Sims (Pomona ‘08; English major)