n.b. This program is being discontinued. Only students who have enrolled in this program as of September 2011 will be able to complete it.
The Paradigms and Archetypes program provides opportunities for students in discipline-based programs to access, through a comparative analysis of primary sources, the structure and dynamics of “paradigms”: archetypal narratives, assumptions, myths, fantasies, analytical protocols and methodologies which govern the conduct of disciplines in every field and all cultures.
This program attracts a mix of students from the humanities, sciences and social sciences who share common interests in cross-disciplinary enquiry, and provides an opportunity for students to identify, analyze and critically examine patterns in human discourse that are often taken for granted. Students engage primary texts directly from whatever disciplinary perspective they bring, unmediated by any privileged interpretive theory. This deconstruction of each text’s conventional context makes explicit some unrecognized, implicit presuppositions embedded in various disciplines, and allows students to find a measure of common focus and an opportunity to explore diversities in assumptions, construction or problems, and analytical protocols at the core of paradigms. Models for organizing thought and experience into stories, dilemmas and analogies (as suggested in the titles of courses), and models for understanding consciousness and the archetypal dimensions of human experience (as posited by analytical psychology) are brought together to show the power of such organizing principles and to enable students to develop critical distance that they can carry with them into all their academic work and beyond.
The program cultivates a distinctive learning experience formed in small, seminar-style courses and enhanced by the diversity of student participants. The texts for each course may vary from year to year; a sampling of texts is included in the brief course descriptions provided below. The courses aim to equip students with the tools of critique out of which new knowledge can emerge.
For Paradigms and Archetypes program requirements see New College Programs in the Faculty of Arts and Science Calendar.