IHUM
Course Descriptions
NB:
Substantial changes in courses offered for more than one year are noted.
Faculty taught course all years offered unless otherwise indicated.
Syllabi for courses currently offered may be reviewed by following indicated
links.
FALL
QUARTER COURSES
The
Art of Living
Faculty
team: Lanier Anderson, Philosophy
Joshua
Landy, French and Italian
Maurice
P. Rehm, Drama
Our lives are not simply given to us, Socrates
used to maintain, but also something that we make. As we examine the
circumstances of our existence, recognizing certain facts as immutable
and others as subject to our control, we all face the challenge of fashioning
out of them a way of living that is both meaningful and justifiable.
The Art of Living explores different ways
to think about the nature of that challenge: how to accommodate conflicting
demands and values, how to make our choices "artfully," how
to use works of imaginative literature to inspire us. Should we socratically
regulate our behavior according to rigorous standards of reason, seek
to conform ourselves to God's wishes, or fashion values for ourselves
through our own artistic activity? To take a stand on these questions,
to decide how to live well and beautifully,
is at the same time to answer why we live at all.
Texts: Plato, The Symposium; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; M. Shelley, Frankenstein; Nietzsche, The Gay Science; Ellison, The Invisible Man
Bodies
in Place: Investigating Selfhood and Location
Faculty
team: Haun Saussy, Asian Languages
Michael
Shanks, Classics
Your sense of self depends upon your particular
experiences, and, of course, the vehicle of those experiences is your
physical body. Embodiment is
central to a sense of self. Experiences are particular because they
are located--in a specific place, a life, a history, a community, a
culture. In this course we will explore this connection between self
and body. Does one need to have a body to have a self? If having a body
and having a self are not exactly the same thing, how are they connected?
How does context affect that connection? How do differing media, changing
social circumstances, and scientific transformations affect our understanding
of the person, as a located and active self and body?
We will trace these questions through some classic
concerns in literary, scientific and cultural works. We will consider
debates about the role of character in history; the problematic relation
of the physical body to the conscious self; and the different senses
of self and body encountered in different cultures. In our readings,
we will map out significant shifts in the answers to these questions
from antiquity through the Heian period of Japan and the English Renaissance
to the modern age. By heightening your awareness of the historical and
philosophical background of ideas about the individual and the body,
we hope to challenge many notions commonly taken for granted.
Multimedia
course materials: Homer, The Odyssey; Shakespeare, Richard II; Sei Shonagon, The
Pillow Book;
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques; Electronic Arts, The
Sims
View
course syllabus
Citizenship
Faculty
team: Gerhard Casper, School of Law
John
Perry, Philosophy
Ramon
Saldivar, English
In this
course we will explore conceptions of citizenship propounded by major
thinkers from different times and places, and examine how citizenship
has actually functioned in a number of different political systems.
What did citizenship mean in the classical Greek polis? in Renaissance
Italy? for the theorists of the French Revolution? for imperial China?
What does citizenship mean in contemporary America and how have ongoing
debates about the nature of citizenship in the United States been informed
by earlier discussions? Is citizenship being transformed by globalization
and other modern developments, which seem to be weakening the hold of
the state? Through the framing of different conceptions of citizenship,
we will address these questions and a larger, normative one: can a democratic
society function effectively with a concept of citizenship increasingly
based on liberal rights and legalization rather than republic obligations
and virtues?
Texts: Mencius, Writings; Aristotle, Politics;
Machiavelli, The Prince;
Rousseau,
The Social Contract; U.S. Supreme Court Cases
View course syllabus [link]
Conversions,
Past and Present
Faculty
team: Robert Harrison, French and Italian
Thomas
Sheehan, Religious Studies
From
Saint Paul's dramatic vision on the road to Damascus, to George W. Bush's
walk on the Kennebunkport beach with Billy Graham, conversion experiences
have been a staple of Western biographical narratives. This is especially
the case in autobiographies, where the moment of conversion--from one
faith to another, from one frame of mind to another, from one understanding
of the self to another--is often the crux around which the retelling
of a life is centered. In this autumn quarter course, you will investigate
the importance of the conversion experience in five autobiographical
works from different periods. These five narratives of the self rely,
each in its own way, on the experience of conversion as the defining
factor in describing in words the events, patterns, and meanings of
a life.
Texts:
Perpetua's Passion; Augustine, Confessions; Dante, Inferno; Sartre, Nausea; Malcolm X, Autobiography
Desire
and Its Discontents
Faculty
team: Robert Harrison, French and Italian
Marjorie
Perloff, English
We will
examine five classic works that treat the subject of desire—whether
passionate, intellectual, or spiritual—and the difficulties it
poses. We will study each text from multiple perspectives—philosophical,
literary, and historical—and ask how it continues to comment on
the human condition and on issues that resonate in our own times. The
overall goal of the course is to develop the capacity to read rigorously
and with a sense of complexity, and to appreciate how inexhaustible
a work of the human spirit can be.
Texts:
Plato, Symposium; Shakespeare, Othello; Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man;
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Finding
Voices, Forging Selves
Faculty
team: Hester Gelber, Religious Studies
Herbert
Lindenberger, English
In this
course we will explore the ways that two concepts, voice and self, manifest themselves in some key literary
and philosophical texts and establish relationships with one another.
As we investigate these concepts, we shall examine how selves are shaped
by their reading of earlier texts and by their experiences in love.
During
the quarter, we shall consider such questions as: How does an author
find his or her own voice in the process of writing? How does the author's
voice help project a self that the reader comes to recognize? And what
happens when a male author speaks through a female character? How does
one's reading of earlier writers influence the ways one comes to view
oneself? How do the relationships we establish with others--whether
in friendship, love, or religious experience--work to shape and reshape
our selves?
The five
texts we will study come from two widely separated ages of history,
late Antiquity and the modern period. Yet each is notable for the way
that its author develops a voice to present him- or herself to the reader
and, by means of this voice, to construct a peopled world of his or
her own. Themes of sexuality and marriage, gender and class, time and
memory, the hidden and revealed, will emerge around the central exploration
of voice and self.
Texts:
Apuleius, The Golden Ass (02-03); Augustine,
Confessions;
The Book of Margery Kempe (01-02);
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (01-02);
Flaubert, Madame
Bovary;Woolf,
To the Lighthouse
(02-03); Eliot, The Waste Land
View course syllabus [link]
Freedom
and Eros in Philosophy and Art
Faculty
team: Lanier Anderson, Philosophy
Paolo Berdini,
Art
Christopher
Bobonich, Philosophy
Texts and
artwork: Plato, Republic;
selections from Nietzsche, including The Gay Science and The Genealogy of Morals; works by Michelangelo, Titian, and Velasquez
We will
investigate the fundamentally opposed philosophical visions of Plato
and Nietzsche. Plato proposes an elaborate metaphysical system that
orders reality around the Good, subordinating the importance of freedom
and of the arts as human values. By contrast, Nietzsche rejects Plato’s
metaphysics claiming that freedom and artistry are fundamental values
for human life. In addition to addressing the place of freedom and of
the arts within these two philosophies via traditional philosophical
techniques, we will also examine the experience of art, asking not only
how philosophers view art, but also how the viewer can experience freedom
by responding to works of art and thereby contributing to the completion
of artistic expression.
The
Good Life
Faculty
team: Harry Elam, Drama
Joshua
Landy, French and Italian
Andrea
Nightingale, Classics (98-99, 99-00)
Rush Rehm,
Classics (00-01)
Texts:
Plato, Symposium; Shakespeare, Hamlet; Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
(98-99); Parks, The America Play (98-99); Ellison, The Invisible Man (99-00, 00-01); Beckett, Endgame (99-00, 00-01)
What
does it mean to live the “good life”? What must people do
in order to fulfill their potential as human beings and assert their
difference from other species? What is the highest value, against which
are rated all other human values and activities? Reason? Love? Freedom?
Originality? Explicitly and implicitly, written texts—be they
philosophical or literary in form—reveal prime values and comment
on the nature of the good life. The texts we will read stage a conflict
between competing values, values which although equally desirable turn
out to be fundamentally incompatible. Through analyzing and discussing
these works, we will explore contrasting visions of the good life.
Great
Works I
Faculty:
Guest lecturers throughout quarter
Course
coordinators: Renée Courey and J.B. Shank, Area One Program
Great Works
I offers the opportunity to explore, in a discussion-intensive format,
some of the ideas, beliefs, values, and conflicts in the cultural heritage
of contemporary America. By performing analysis and considering different
approaches or “reading strategies” in the humanities, you
will develop a critical style relevant to current scholarship yet tailored
to your own specific interests. Concentrating on a few classic works
of literature, religion, and philosophy, we will focus on the ways that
these works both contribute to and critique their own immediate contexts
and cultures. You will learn to question the very designation “great
work” as you investigate the different historical, political,
and cultural processes that contribute to and flow from such value judgments.
Texts:
works by Plato and Marx; Hebrew Bible; Milton, Paradise Lost; Morrison, Beloved
Faculty
team: Charlotte Fonrobert, Religious Studies
Thomas
Sheehan, Religious Studies
In
many philosophical and religious traditions, the ultimate site of human
fulfillment lies beyond history and the limits of everyday human life—whether
in the realm of the Good outside Plato’s cave or in the heaven
of certain Jewish and neo-Platonic Christian traditions. In this course, we will explore such models
of eternity but also other, very different models that look for human
fulfillment within history rather than in an eternal Beyond. “Utopia”
is often understood as a no-where, an imagination of a perfected
world or human community that serves as a (finally unachievable) norm
for criticizing the lest perfect reality we live in. We shall explore
“utopic” visions that aim at something different: radical
change in the way we live, aiming at a transformation in the direction
of human history.
Texts:
Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return; Plato, “Allegory of the Cave” and
Augustine, “Vision at Ostia”; Paul, First Epistle to the
Thessalonians and Epistle to the Galatians; Marx, The Paris Manuscripts
of 1844;
Gershom Scholem, “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic”
The
History of Nature / The Nature of History: Humans and the Natural World
Faculty
team: Donald Kennedy, Biological Sciences
Richard
White, History
The
twentieth century closes with fears about the destruction of the ozone
layer, global warming, the rise in human populations, the depletion
of ocean fisheries, and the loss of biological diversity. The scale,
and perhaps the intensity, of these problems are new--but the entanglement
of humans and the natural world is not. Our understanding of environmental
problems is thoroughly embedded in our own human behavior, cultures,
values, and beliefs. Both the development of these problems and the
ways in which we think about them are grounded in our past--sometimes
a very deep past.
Nature,
too, has a history. The purpose of this course is threefold: first,
to get you to think historically about the relations of humans to the
natural world; second, to examine the rather porous boundary between
what we call the natural and the cultural and to understand how humanists
and scientists try to define this boundary; and third, to explore social
solutions to crises in the relations between humans and nature--both
those that have succeeded and those that have failed.
Texts:
Pliny, Natural History; Thoreau, Walden; Marsh, Man and Nature; Darwin, The Voyage
of the Beagle;
Carson, Silent Spring
A
Lie Put Forth by Poets? Love
and Self-Deception
Faculty
team: Robert Harrison, French and Italian
Thomas
Sheehan, Religious Studies
Alphonse Daudet wrote “Ideal love is a lie put
forth by poets.” Intimately intertwined with death and transcendence,
love is the preferred, almost obsessive subject of poets, philosophers,
mystics and artists. In this course we will probe the ambiguities and
complexities of the forms of love celebrated in five very different
kinds of texts. Each text revolves around the concept of love; yet each
presents a distinct kind of representation and understanding of the
phenomenon.
Texts:
Plato, Symposium; Boccaccio,
selected tales from Decameron; Austen,
Pride and Prejudice; James,
The Portrait of a Lady; Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
View course syllabus [link]
Origins:
Contested Identities
Faculty
team: Ian Hodder, Cultural and Social Anthropology
Michael
Shanks, Classics
Origins
are privileged moments in the formation of personal and social identity.
The answer to the question "Who are you?" often begins "I
was born in…" or "We come from…" In
the very attempt to identity oneself, exclusions as well as inclusions
occur: who you say you are implies who you are not. Origins go
with endings and imply ends. In this course, you will engage critically
with origins and originary narratives through a number of texts that
suggest different stakes and different outcomes in the ways that they
address the question, "Where did [blank] come from?"
Our
goals in this course are both methodological--to teach you to read closely
and to analyze texts from different fields and in disparate genres (e.g.,
philosophy, popular science, cultural archeology)--and to lead you to
grapple with questions of personal, social, and human identity. From
this course you will learn that answers to questions dealing with origins
are never stable and are usually contested; you will also be encouraged
to reflect critically on your own personal and cultural answers to questions
of origin.
Texts:
Richard Leakey and David Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of
What Makes Us Human;
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse; Brian Fagan, The Great Journey: the Peopling
of Ancient America; Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will; Foucault, The History of
Sexuality,
Volume 1
Narrative:
Telling It the Way It Is?
Faculty
team: Paulla Ebron, Anthropology
Michael
Shanks, Classics
Storytelling
is one of humankind’s most universal, most ancient, and most meaningful
activities. Humans narrate stories in order to recount events and make
sense of them. In this course we will learn about storytelling, or narrative,
and explore ways of understanding its different forms.
Some
forms of storytelling are familiar: formal narrative genres encompass
ancient epics, classic novels, short stories, and films. Other forms
are more informal: interpersonal media such as gossip and rumor. The
centrality of narrative in some unexpected locations, such as scientific
laboratories, may puzzle and surprise you.
Such
different forms of narrative—ancient and contemporary, western
and non-western—will be the subject matter of this course, enabling
interesting comparisons across time and space. In studying these works,
you will develop a range of interpretive strategies at home in many
different humanities disciplines. You will also be encouraged to develop
skills at the heart of narrative and storytelling.
Texts:
Niane, Sundiata: Epic of Old Mali;
M. Shelley, Frankenstein;
Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible;
Alan Bennett, Talking Heads;
Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology
Faculty
team: Tobias Wolff, English
Lee Yearley,
Religious Studies
The works
we will examine in this course were written across a span of some 2300
years, from very different cultural and historical situations, and in
very different forms and genres. Yet, taken together, they create an
urgent conversation about the ways in which we define our place in this
world, how we attempt to give meaning and dignity to lives subject to
every kind of social and personal evil, bodily affliction, and spiritual
doubt. In the face of such difficulties—and our own mortality--how
do we build systems of value, whether based on personal, sacred, or
social authority? What is the relationship between these ways of making
meaning and establishing standards of virtue and vice? Are they compatible
or antithetical?
The works
we will discuss offer no comforting unanimity of perspective on these
questions. Nor do they all propose to give answers: some even call into
question the wisdom of pursuing an answer too closely. But their very
differences will give creative tension to our examination of these issues,
even as we attempt to discover the unique aesthetic and persuasive achievements
of each text.
Texts: Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings; Dante, Inferno; Tolstoy, selected stories; Melville, Billy
Budd; Dinesen,
selected stories
Self-Reflections: The
Examined Life
Faculty
team: Lanier Anderson, Philosophy
Chris
Bobonich, Philosophy
Hester
Gelber, Religious Studies
Socrates
famously insisted that the unexamined life is worthless. Having
a good life, he thought, involves knowing who you are, having well thought-out
views about what you should do, and living your life in accordance with
those principles. If Socrates was right, then nothing is more important
for us than to reflect seriously on our selves and on our proper place
in the world, in the effort to discover how we might make our lives
better.
In
this course you will explore philosophical, religious, and literary
texts which, in many different ways, hold up a mirror before the self,
and show us something about this practice of self-understanding. These
texts take very different approaches to serious reflection, and come
to very different conclusions about the nature of a worthwhile life.
Still, in all of them, the path of reflective self-examination opens
our way forward in a journey or pilgrimage toward the good. We
will read these texts not only with a view toward learning something
about the kind of self-examination depicted within them, but also as
a set of tools for helping us start that journey ourselves.
Texts:
Plato, Republic;
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; Montaigne, Essays; Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Themes
and Variations
Faculty
team: Monika Greenleaf, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Stephen
Hinton, Music
Susan Stephens,
Classics
We will
study three themes or narratives that, in various incarnations and in
different media, serve as myths of Western culture. Each centers on
a male figure—Oedipus, Othello, Don Juan—who by his existence
or behavior challenges or subverts social norms and calls into question
cultural boundaries. Viewing these figures through the lens of gender,
among other categories, we will consider them as characters in written
texts and as they are transformed in a variety of different media: film, opera, gospel. Our emphasis will be on viewing and hearing
as well as reading; we will study how the artistic medium itself affects
our experience and poses interpretative challenges.
No formal
musical training is required to take Themes and Variations. You should be prepared to listen to and
learn about music in this course.
Multimedia
course materials: operas and oratorios by Brewer, Mozart, Verdi, and
Stravinsky; plays by Sophocles and Shakespeare; additional writings
by Pushkin and Freud
Things
of Beauty
Faculty
team: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Comparative Literature, French and Italian
Tobias
Plebuch, Music
This course
will prepare you to participate in and enjoy actively different forms
of arts--from opera to painting and architecture to literature and film.
We hope to sharpen your sensitivity to aesthetic experience, and to
provide you with the competence and knowledge necessary to enjoy “things
of beauty.”
This course
will encourage you to see that many forms of communication with which
you are familiar actually belong to the field of aesthetic experience.
The course will also increase your understanding of how aesthetic experience
has changed in time--and show you how, very often, historical knowledge
can enhance your appreciation of things of beauty. Finally, this course
will ground its approaches to things of beauty in both philosophical
reflection about aesthetic experience as well as in consideration of
the individual and social functions that things of beauty serve.
Multimedia
course materials: Mozart, Don Giovanni; the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; Lorca, Poet in New York; Riefenstahl, Olympia; paintings by Edward Hopper and Jackson
Pollock
Thinking
with Nature
Faculty
team: Andrea Nightingale, Classics and Comparative Literature
Richard
White, History
"Thinking with nature" involves the construction
of a set of conceptual relations between human beings and a natural
world that may--or may not--include human beings.
This habit of mind allows certain human actions and practices
to be read as "natural" or "unnatural," as inevitable
or deviant. "Thinking with nature" can see nature as positive
or negative, and does not necessarily assume that humans should conform
to "natural" processes or limits. Our thinking about the place
of human beings in the natural world is profoundly influenced by our
values, beliefs, and cultures, all of which change over time. In this
course we will examine the ways five writers in the modern period represent
and conceptualize the natural world.
When human beings argue about their relation to the natural
world, they are also arguing about their relations to one another. The
broad concept of "thinking with nature" allows us to explore
the ways that human beings include themselves as part of the natural
world or define themselves against it. It also allows us to discuss
what counts as nature in different regions and historical
periods. "Thinking with nature," then, involves a long and
complicated debate with profound implications for our own understanding
of the natural world and our relation to it.
Texts:
M. Shelley, Frankenstein; Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle; Thoreau, Walden; Walcott, Omeros; Tournier, Friday
View
course syllabus
Tradition
and Revolution: Rewriting the Classics
Faculty
team: Martin Evans, English
Marsh
McCall, Classics
In
this course you will examine the complex interactions between philosophy,
history, and literature within three distinct generic traditions: drama,
political fiction, and epic. In each segment of the course, we will
pair a major classical text with a Renaissance work that imitates and
adapts it to answer the needs of a radically different intellectual,
historical, and aesthetic environment. By means of these juxtapositions
we hope to illuminate the way in which the relationship between the
three major disciplines in the humanities changed over time and the
accompanying transformations in our understanding of what it means to
be human.
Texts:
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Shakespeare, Hamlet; Plato, Republic; More, Utopia; Vergil, Aeneid; Milton, Paradise Lost
View
course syllabus
Transformations:
The Intersection of High Art and Popular Culture
Faculty
team: Stephen Hinton, Music
Susan
Stephens, Classics
Humanities
courses usually concentrate on written texts. In this course, taking
a different approach, we will encounter characters and themes not simply
in a written form, but as each appears in and is transformed by a variety
of different media (film, opera, symphonic music). The emphasis of the
course will be not only on reading, but on viewing and hearing as well,
and on consideration of how the artistic medium itself affects experience.
We will aim to introduce you to a variety of aesthetic experiences and
to the differing interpretive challenges that each presents.
The course
is organized around three characters or ideas that have figured prominently
in the western imagination in the 20th century. In each case
we trace this character/idea from its initial occurrence through its
various media transformations in order to see how each, in multiple
ways, contributes to the modern construction of the self and our understanding
of the human condition. Each unit is constructed to move from texts
that today fall into the category of high culture or art (Shakespeare,
Nietzsche, Wagner) to works of today’s popular culture (in each
case, a modern film), in order to allow you to see the ways in which
this material is transformed in the process.
Multimedia
course materials: Shakespeare, Othello; Verdi, Otello; Wagner, Das Rheingold;
Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra; Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey
View
course syllabus
Visions
of Mortality
Faculty
team: Lanier Anderson, Philosophy (02-03)
Christopher
Bobonich, Philosophy
Barbara
Koenig, Center for Biomedical Ethics and Department of Medicine
Krista
Lawlor, Philosophy (01-02)
If
you are reading this sentence, you are now alive. If so, someday you
will die. In this course we will examine some of the basic issues arising
from these facts. We begin with several of the most fundamental questions
arising from the first-person confrontation with thoughts of our own
mortality. Is death bad for me, and if so, why? What can the badness
or the indifference of death tell us about what makes my life good?
If death and suffering are inevitable features of our lives, about how
much value we can attach to human existence How does our awareness
of death structure the rest of our mental lives? Taking an anthropological
view, we will ask how the cultural boundaries between life and death
are constructed and negotiated. We will consider some non-Western cultural
practices concerning death and dying, and we will ask what these very
different practices suggest about how these cultures view the self and
its relation to society. We end by examining some of our own cultural
practices concerning mortality, in particular, the management of death
within a globalized biomedicine.
Texts:
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura); Tolstoy, The Death
of Ivan Ilyich;
Montaigne, essays (02-03); Schopenhauer, essays; Freud, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle
(01-02); Margaret Edson,
W;t
View
course syllabus
Why
Read It?
Faculty
team: Keith Baker, History
Harry
Elam, Drama
Robert
Harrison, French and Italian
Every
great book, be it an epic, a play, a novel, or a philosophical treatise,
offers its own justification. Thus the question "Why read it?"
can only be answered by reading the book with careful attention to its
claims and context, its philosophical reach, and its literary art. In
this course, we will read in depth four books that differ in their literary
genre and the historical era from which they come. We will analyze these
works from multiple perspectives--historical, philosophical and literary
-- and ask how they continue to comment on the human condition and on
issues that resonate in our own times. The overall goal of the course
is to develop students' capacity to read rigorously and with a sense
of complexity, and to appreciate just how inexhaustible a work of the
human spirit can be.
Texts:
Plato, Symposium;
Shakespeare, King Lear;
Montesquieu, Persian Letters;
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
The
Word and the World: Conversations across Time and Space
Faculty
team: Larry Friedlander, English
Timothy
Lenoir, History
Haun
Saussy, Asian Languages
The texts
we will read are foundational: they produce social worlds, political
worlds, religious worlds, imaginative worlds. They constitute identities;
they imply selves. They define relationships—between selves and
others, parents and children, women and men, subjects and objects, rulers
and ruled, slaves and masters.
These texts
produce words as well as worlds. They are sites of commentary and analysis,
interpretation and critique. Historically, they have been read and re-read.
In this course we will read and re-read them, both on their own terms,
and in juxtaposition with each other. Our goal will be to help you develop
a rich sense of the texts themselves, as well as the critical and interpretive
approaches you will learn to apply to them.
This course
is partially web-based. No previous experience with computers or programming
skill is required. You should be prepared to use a computer to complete
work in the course.
Texts:
The Book of Genesis; Shang shu
[The Book of Documents]; Shakespeare, Hamlet; Descartes, Meditations; Blade Runner (The Director’s Cut)
WINTER/SPRING
SEQUENCES
American
Genesis: Indigenous Texts and Their Resonance
Faculty:
Winter Quarter: Gordon Brotherston, Spanish and Portuguese
Spring
Quarter: Lúcia de Sá, Spanish and Portuguese
The New
World’s original inhabitants told stories about how the world
began, creating a body of texts remarkable in their scope and vitality.
These Native American creation stories worked together in important
ways, corroborating each other in terms of cultural experiences extending
back far beyond contact with Europe. From the first moments of contact,
too, native mythic texts radically affected European beliefs. Subsequently,
this tradition prompted whole clusters of writers, painters, and other
artists working in what have become the nation-states of the American
continent. Today, this legacy lives on among those peoples who, despite
the ever-near menace of harm and extermination, have survived since
Columbus, celebrating the fact in art and literature written in their
own languages.
In this
course sequence we will become familiar with these ancient texts, the
cultural traditions they communicate and preserve, and their legacies
today. We will compare these stories with other, perhaps more familiar,
traditions from the European tradition, and we will consider them within
broader literary and philosophical frames to discover their shared paradigms
and the ethics that derive from them.
Course
Overview:
Winter
Quarter: Beginning with the 16th-century Maya text, Popol
Vuh, we examine a series of comparable
classic statements from various parts of the continent. We investigate
the frame of plural Suns or world-ages, from which our present time
derives, and in which the relationship between humans and other species
differs categorically from that proposed in the Biblical and Greco-Roman
tradition of the West. We pay attention to pre-Columbian precedent and
to the role these “classics” continue to play in native
culture.
Spring
Quarter: We turn to native American impact on Europe and notions of
American “self-discovery.” We trace European responses to
native American ideas of genesis. We look at the major impact of the
native tradition in the Americas starting in the late 1920s, reflecting
the Revolution in Mexico and the modernista movement in Brazil. We end with consideration of modern and contemporary
writers and artists in the native tradition, who share a common project
of reinserting the problematic of our time into the world of native
cosmogony.
Selected
works: Popol Vuh (Maya); Legend of the Suns (Nahuatl); Watunna (Carib); Dine Bahane (Navajo); Guaman Poma’s
Chronicle; trickster narratives from North and South America; essays by Montaigne
and Rousseau; 20th-century works by Asturias, Andrade, Silko,
Mench’u, and Diego Rivera
View
course syllabus
Ancient
Empires
Faculty:
Winter Quarter: Ian Morris, Classics
Spring
Quarter: Jennifer Trimble, Classics
Why
are wealth and power so unevenly distributed around the world today,
with so much in the hands of Europeans and their descendants in other
countries? In this course sequence you will investigate one of the decisive
places and periods in the world's history: the Mediterranean basin between
about 800 BCE and 400 CE. Great empires--Assyria, Persia, Macedonia,
and Rome--were carved out in bloody wars and permanently changed the
course of human development. We will ask why these empires arose when
and where they did, how they worked, and what their legacy is. We will
balance their economic, religious, and artistic achievements against
their record of genocide, enslavement, and brutal warfare. We will ask
what these empires meant, not only for the people who created and ruled
them, but also for those who lived within their power or struggled to
resist them. What drove some people to conquer, others to submit, and
others still to fight back? How do we set the turbulent details of their
histories against the deeper currents of economic and environmental
changes across a thousand years? In this course you will examine the
rich evidence surviving from ancient literature and archaeology, tracing
the roles of religion, property, and freedom across these centuries,
and what they meant for the shape of the world today.
Course
Overview:
Winter
Quarter: We begin with a general discussion of what empires are, and
different ways to look at them. Turning to the Assyrian empire, we examine
the roles of religious belief, climatic change, population growth, and
the pursuit of wealth in Assyrian imperialism, and the responses of
the people the Assyrians conquered. We look in particular at Israelite
religious reactions to Assyria, focusing on ideas about social equality
and the origins of monotheism. We analyze the dynamics of the Assyrian
empire and its rapid replacement by a Persian empire. We will look at
Greek resistance to Persia, Greek ideas about political equality, gender,
and slavery, and end with Alexander the Great's destruction of Persia
and creation of a Macedonian empire.
Spring
Quarter: We turn to Rome's violent unification of the entire Mediterranean.
We examine the role of religion in Roman imperialism and its drastic
consequences for Roman society and for conquered peoples. We look at
the cultural achievements of the long "Roman peace" (pax
romana) and at the massive economic
and social disparities on which it was based. We explore different responses
to Roman rule, from outright revolt in Britain and Judaea to more peaceful
developments elsewhere, and the culture of violence which supported
continual warfare and large-scale slavery. The profound changes of the
third and fourth centuries CE--the movements of Germanic peoples, the
changing role of the military, the social and economic impact of Christianity,
the increasing fragmentation of the western empire--transformed the
ancient world forever. Finally, we discuss the significance of the ancient
empires for the present, asking how and why ancient ideas about freedom,
power and property continue to shape the world we live in.
Selected
texts: Assyrian and Persian inscriptions; the Hebrew Bible; histories
of Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius and Tacitus; epic poetry of Vergil;
letters of Cicero and Pliny; the writings of early Christian martyrs
View
course syllabus
The
Ancient Mediterranean World
Faculty:
Winter and Spring quarters: Ian Morris, Classics
This
two-quarter sequence examines the history of the ancient Mediterranean
world, from the origins of complex societies around 3000 B.C. to the
Arab conquests of the seventh century A.D. The Mediterranean was the
site of some of the most important social experiments in human history,
which profoundly shaped the subsequent development of the whole world.
It also has given us one of the longest continuous historical records
on the planet. This is history on a grand scale.
The
course focuses on social history and, above all, on ideas of equality
in terms of class, gender, and race. It stresses the tremendous variety
of ways in which people in the Mediterranean have drawn ideological
boundaries around and within their communities, and why such apparently
permanent social structures changed through time. It also involves cross-cultural
comparisons and discussion of geographical contrasts. The course examines
the origins of modern distinctions between Europe, Asia, and Africa,
and the extent to which they had a basis in ancient realities.
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: We begin with the origins of civilization and social hierarchy,
emphasizing the role of religion in justifying social inequality. We
compare the presence of empires in the Near East with the absence of
any Western Mediterranean counterparts, and we examine the smaller states—such
as the Israelite kingdom and the Greek city-states—which appeared
in the spaces between imperial powers and which experimented with new
forms of egalitarianism. We investigate the long-term shift in the center
of military/political gravity to the west.
Spring
quarter: We explore the Romans' violent political unification of the
Mediterranean and its consequences, culminating in the long "Roman
peace" (pax romana).
We study the dissolution of this stable hierarchy in the third century
A.D. through the movement of Germanic peoples into the Mediterranean
and through the rise of Christianity, which challenged traditional notions
of hierarchy, but which simultaneously transferred massive wealth to
the organized Church. We end with the Arab invasions of the seventh
century, which divided the Mediterranean between Christianity and Islam,
sweeping away the last significant elements of ancient civilization.
Selected
texts: Hammurabi’s laws; the Egyptian Book of the Dead; the Hebrew
Bible; epics of Homer and Vergil; histories of Herodotus, Sallust and
Tacitus; letters of Pliny; writings of early Christian martyrs and Egyptian
desert hermits; the Koran.
Democratic
Society in Europe and America: Origins, Crises, Dilemmas
Faculty:
David Kennedy, History; James Sheehan, History (99-00, 01-02 ); Carolyn
Lougee Chapell (00-01); Mary Lou Roberts (00-01)
We will
analyze the development of the theory and practice of democracy in Europe
and the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Our
technique throughout will be comparative: by studying both European
and American materials in parallel, we will develop perspectives on
both the universal and the particular elements that have shaped the
histories of Europe and North America in the last two centuries. Where
appropriate, we will draw comparisons with developments in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America as well.
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: We begin with an examination of the intellectual foundations
of democratic thought from antiquity to the Enlightenment. We proceed
to an extensive comparison of the sources and consequences of the two
great 18th century revolutions (the French and the
American). We conclude the quarter with a study of nationalism and imperialism
in the late 19th century,
when several of the great democracies consolidated into powerful nation-states
and projected their influence around the world.
Spring
quarter: We focus on events that convulsed the democratic states, indeed
re-shaped much of planetary society in the 20th
century: the two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and
decolonization. We end by scrutinizing the modern versions of issues
that have long agitated all the democratic societies: liberty versus
equality (in the debate over the welfare state and the role of government);
individual rights and the claims of community (in the debates over race,
ethnicity, and gender); and the role of the democracies in the world
order (in the debates over globalization, national security, and immigration).
Selected
texts: works by Aristotle, Cicero, Hume, Rousseau, Jefferson, Burke,
Paine, De Tocqueville, Mill, Marx, Conrad, Remarque, Lenin, Wilson,
De Beauvoir
Encounters
and Identities
Faculty:
Winter quarter: Akhil Gupta,
Cultural and Social Anthropology (99-00; 01-02; 02-03); George Collier,
Cultural and Social Anthropology (00-01)
Spring
quarter: Sylvia Yanagisako,
Social and Cultural Anthropology (99-00; 00-01); Renato Rosaldo, Social
and Cultural Anthropology (01-02; 02-03)
How have
some of our most cherished ideas about our identities emerged through
a history of encounters between people from different areas of the globe
over the past five hundred years? This two-quarter sequence will introduce
you to the formation of ideas about individual and collective identities
in South Asia, Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States.
We will trace contemporary ideas about identity, including nationalism
and national identity, to the historical encounters and social transformations
linking these areas of the globe. In emphasizing both the similarities
and differences among ideas of individual and collective identity found
in different regions of the world, we will challenge popular assumptions
about the origins of our identity. The course will equip you with critical
concepts and methods of analysis from cultural anthropology to help
you face the challenges of your own social encounters and changing identities.
Course
Overview:
Winter
Quarter: We focus on forms of identity and collectivity in South Asia
and Latin America from the age of exploration to the present. We begin
by asking what this region of the world looked like before the "age
of exploration." We then examine the relationship between the age
of exploration and the rise of nationalism, which came to be the dominant
form of expressing sentiments of the collective. We end the quarter
by considering the changes in the current world that are challenging
the nation and asking what new ideas of identities and collectivities
are emerging.
Spring
Quarter: We focus on ideas and questions of identity that emerged as
the social and cultural universe of Europe and the U.S. was transformed
by expansion, colonialism and industrial capitalism in the 16th to 20th centuries. We concentrate on three key
themes in our ideas about individual and collective identity today:
labor, citizenship, and reproduction. By locating the formation of these
ideas in the cultural encounters and transformations of the past five
centuries, we will understand their historical and cultural specificity.
Our examination of a variety of expressions of self and community articulated
by people of different race, ethnicity, gender, and social class will
generate discussion about both the shared and divergent ideas and social
practices through which the members of our society agree and disagree
about their identities.
Selected
texts: works by Ghosh, Abu-Lughod, Boxer, Tarlo, Hasan, Nehru, Locke,
Marx, Rousseau, Arendt, Malinowski
View
course syllabus
Gender
and Genre (00-01)/Power
and Passion (01-02;
02-03)
Faculty:
Winter quarter: Marsh McCall, Classics
Spring
quarter: Helen Brooks, English and Interdisciplinary Studies in the
Humanities
Many of
the most influential texts in literary history revolve around fundamental
issues of power and passion, played out by both literary and historical
men and women in remarkably gripping and unpredictable ways. In this
winter/spring sequence we will focus on a series of great texts from
the ancient to the modern worlds in which these issues are instrumental
in driving the texts. The sequence consciously arranges the texts not
only chronologically but also by genre—epic, lyric, drama, philosophy,
the short story—in order to explore how different genres may construct
differently the complex and shifting issues of power and passion. And,
in virtually every text that we treat in the sequence, gender roles
and gender conflicts, both human and divine, will receive close attention.
How do power and passion stand in relation to authority and specifically
to male and female authorities? Are established views of the exercise
of power and passion challenged? What connections exist between particular
forms of thought and experience and the historical milieus in which
they appear?
Course
Overview:
Winter
Quarter: We begin with
Genesis and its originating presentation of issues
of power and passion, followed by epic treatments in the Babylonian
Gilgamesh and Homer’s Odyssey.
We then turn to lyric texts, especially Sappho. A central section of the course focuses
on Greek drama, both tragedy and comedy. We conclude with an exploration
of philosophical texts by Plato and Aristotle.
Spring
Quarter: We focus on the role of passion and power in the late medieval
appropriation of the epic by Dante, followed by Christine de Pizan’s
revisionary history of women. We consider the short poem authored by
male and female poets, focusing on issues of power and authority. We
next study related issues in Shakespeare’s comedy and tragedy
and the historical milieus that situates them on the threshold of the
modern world.
Selected
texts: The Bible, philosophical texts of Plato and Aristotle; dramatic
works by Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Beckett; poems by Sappho,
Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, Adrienne Rich; epics by Homer and Dante
View
course syllabus
Great
Works II-III
Faculty:
Guest lecturers throughout quarter
Course
coordinators: Renée Courey and J.B. Shank, Area One Program
As
a two-quarter follow-up to any one of the fall IHUM courses, Great Works
II-III offers the opportunity to explore in small discussion sections
some of the ideas, beliefs, values, and conflicts in the cultural heritage
of contemporary America. Concentrating on classic works of Western literature,
religion, and philosophy, we discover the ways that these works both
contribute to and critique their own immediate contexts and cultures.
We also include works from outside the traditional Western canon, which
give voice to the pluralistic strands in our contemporary society and
help us to see the non-essential nature of many of the assumptions on
which we ground our beliefs. In this course you will learn to question
the very designation “great work” as you investigate the
different historical, political, and cultural processes that contribute
to and flow from such value judgments.
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: We consider works of some major writers—from antiquity
through the Enlightenment—who contributed to the European high
textual tradition by creating paradigmatic texts or by elaborating and
reformulating the textual tradition they inherited. In counterpoint,
we read selected Islamic works that both collided with and profoundly
altered the developing European cultural tradition.
Spring
quarter: Focusing on works of the last 200 years, we continue our investigation
of appropriations of and responses to the European textual tradition.
We conclude by reflecting on the status of the text in the Information
Age.
Selected
readings: the Bible and the Koran; epics of Homer and Dante; works by
Rousseau, M. Shelley, Douglass, Woolf
Great
Works: The Hereafter, the Here and Now
(99-00; 00-01; 01-02); The Hereafter, the Here and Now (02-03)
Faculty:
Winter quarter: Robert Harrison, French and Italian; Jeffrey Schnapp,
French and Italian
Spring
quarter: Josh Landy, French and Italian
At the
core of questions about human identity and the meaning of human life
lie beliefs about the hereafter and how it relates to the here-and-now.
In this course we will explore some of the great texts—religious,
philosophical, and literary—that have addressed this set of issues.
We will compare different conceptions of the afterlife and investigate
the ways that traditions about the afterlife are created and appropriated.
We will also look at how the imagined involvement of the underworld
in everyday life is modified, tracing the ways that the presence (or
absence) or spirits takes on different meanings and makes different
claims on the behavior of the living.
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: We examine a range of ancient and medieval conceptions of a
life after death, whether in the form of continual reincarnation, a
lingering shadow-life in the underworld, or a precisely assigned place
in a system of punishments and rewards. In addition to exploring the
themes, forms and features specific to each work, we focus on its place
in a tradition of reflection on the nature of the afterlife, and of
the dead’s relevance to the world of the living.
Spring
quarter: We explore various ways in which an examination of human existence
from the point of view of the beyond (including and especially the world
beyond) gives way to one that makes man, the living individual, the
“measure of all things.” We look at the movement from the
timeless to the time-bound, from the university to the specific, and
from the social persona to the inner human core, a core that reveals
itself to be more and more unstable and inscrutable. We conclude by
taking a non-western perspective on this twisted story of western subjectivity.
Selected
texts: The Epic of Gilgamesh;
the Book of Revelation; works by Homer, Ovid, Vergil, Dante, Machiavelli,
Montaigne, Descartes, M. Shelley, Beckett
View
course syllabus
The
Humanities: Breaking Boundaries
Faculty:
Winter quarter: Helen Brooks, English and Humanities Special Programs
Spring
quarter: Alice Rayner, Drama
We will
focus on the impact of unprecedented and profound change though the
study of a wide range of texts, including the visual arts. We will emphasize
how historical pressures have produced conditions which have broken
through established boundaries of literary and artistic forms as well
as notions of the self, the divine, and the physical universe. In the
wake of these changes, modes of interpretation have given way to what
has become the heightened interdisciplinarity of “the humanities.”
We will explore how our texts themselves provide the terms for interdisciplinary
methods of interpretation. Our consistent aim will be to develop skills
in reading and interpretation that are crucial to the critical assessment
of ideas in the humanities and beyond.
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: We span the period from African oral folk epic through the
early modern era, a period marked by such influential events as the
advent of printing and explorations in new territories of self and other,
in gender roles, in artistic form, and in religion, politics and science.
We will study how the accompanying crisis of knowledge and authority
expresses itself through diverse and dynamic texts.
Spring
quarter: We focus on the redefinitions of self, society and world in
the late 19th and 20th centuries, when new forms of writing correlate
with technological expansion, massive social change, de-centering of
the individual, and crossing of national boundaries. The variety of
narrative forms in the texts that we read demonstrates the challenges
to certainty that mark the interdisciplinary nature of the humanities.
Selected
texts: works by Rumi, Dante, de Pizan, Montaigne, Wroth, Donne, M. Shelley,
Woolf, Beckett, Rich, Soyinka, and Morrison
Literature
into Life: Alternative Worlds
Faculty:
Winter Quarter: David Riggs, English
Spring
Quarter: John Felstiner, English
This two-quarter
sequence will introduce you to the literary genres of poetry, drama,
and fiction from the Renaissance to the present day. The course will
focus on the relationship between art and life. We will explore such
questions as these: How does literature come alive on the page? What
is the relationship between literary forms and lived social experience?
How do writers create alternative worlds that enlarge our horizons?
How do writers respond to historical crises? We will also consider parallel
cases from art and music.
Course
Overview:
Winter
Quarter: Thomas More’s Utopia
establishes the framework for exploring early modern dialogues about
the real world and utopia, civilization and nature, public and private
life. We will explore these topics through in-depth study of 16th-
and 17th-century essays, poetry, drama, and fiction. The
quarter concludes with the Enlightenment and the rise of the novel during
the 18th century.
Spring
Quarter: Continuing with 18th-century poets who deplored
the effects of nascent industrialism on traditional countryside existence,
we inquire how British Romanticism promoted the individual imagination,
wedding human to physical nature in revolutionary ways. The question
of poetry and the environment, stemming from Genesis and Psalms along
with Asian and Native American sources, leads into a surprising variety
of modern poets. We end by investigating literature touching on
the Holocaust and the Vietnam war.
Selected
texts: works by More, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Swift,
Wordsworth, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Williams, Levertov, Kafka, Ellison
View course syllabus [link]
Living
through the Changes (98-99);
The Literature of Transformation
(99-00; 00-01)
Faculty:
Winter quarter: J. Martin Evans, English
Spring
quarter: Diane Middlebrook, English
We will
explore the ways in which writers from Ovid to Maxine Hong Kingston
have dealt with and described the phenomenon of change, both in their
own lives and in the world around them. We will explore the theme of
change on three different levels:
the personal, the cultural, and the literary. Our foundational
text is the great compendium of classical myths of transformation, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, which surfaces throughout the course both in the original
version (read in translation) and in its own various transformations
from the medieval through modern periods.
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: We begin with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, considered in the context of Roman imperialism and cultural
wealth, followed by the responses of Augustine and Boethius to late
classical challenges to the Roman Empire. Moving to England, we study
narrative and dramatic poetry and prose from the Anglo-Saxon, Medieval
and Renaissance periods, focusing on responses to cross-cultural invasions
and infiltrations.
Spring
quarter: Focusing on works from the eighteenth century to the contemporary
period, and paying particular attention to the category of gender, we
consider the ways writers use the representation of intimate relationships
to explore the dynamics of social inequality and the struggle for change.
We also study the transformation of literary forms by writers’
efforts to express subject matter liberated in the post-Romantic democratization
of culture.
Selected
texts: Beowulf; works by Ovid, Augustine, Chaucer, Milton,
Keats, Hardy, Eliot, Woolf, Hurston, Greene, Plath, Kingston
Myth
and Modernity
Faculty:
Winter quarter: Arthur Strum, German Studies (97-98; 98-99; 99-00; 01-02);
Russell Berman (00-01; 02-03)
Spring
quarter: Karen Kenkel, German Studies (97-98; 98-99); Amir Eshel, German
Studies (99-00; 00-01; 01-02; 02-03)
We
explore the contrasts and interplays between traditional and modern
cultures, raising questions about history, progress, and change. What
defines a cultural tradition? How do values change? When does a national
past sustain or impinge on the present? We pose these questions with
special reference to German literary and philosophical writings, visual
arts, films, and music. Within this rich cultural field, the course
focuses on the impact of modernization on values, expressivity, and
community. This orientation also encourages us to assume a critical
perspective on our own cultures, via close examination of the constellation
of ideas and values that contributed to the German legacy, with its
proximity of intellectual achievement and political disaster. How does
an obsession with "race" overtake Germany? Do all cultures
require such myths, or can mythic thinking be overcome?
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: The course begins with an examination of the Enlightenment
legacy, stressing rationality, education, and progress—values
which are central as well to the project of the university. We then
trace the 19th-century afterlife of this Enlightenment legacy, from
Romanticism, to revolution, to Nietzsche's critique of modern society.
Spring
quarter: We turn to modern Germany to inquire into the relationship
between modernization and myth. Do new myths—of identity, of community,
of race—arise in response to 20th-century rationalization and
the discontent many feel with the Enlightenment legacy? We examine film,
expressionist painting, political theater, the modernist novel, and
various literary and philosophical treatments of World War II and the
Holocaust, in order to pose the question of individual identity and
responsibility in the modern age.
Selected
authors/artists: Kant, Goethe, Rousseau, G.E. Lessing, Marx, Wagner,
Du Bois, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Mann, Brecht, Arendt
View
course syllabus
Performing
the Past: Transformations, Revisions, and Subversions
Faculty:
Camille Howard, Drama (98-99); Ehren Fordyce, Drama (00-01)
The theater
often dramatizes the past in order to confront significant issues of
the present. Since 5th century Athens, communities—usually significant
urban centers—have taken material from their historical and mythical
past and reshaped it into a theatrical form that articulates significant
issues for their immediate situation. In this winter-spring sequence,
we will address such cultural remappings by examining a series of plays
and related documents in which different societies revise their past
and address their present simultaneously.
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: Beginning with Homeric epic, we look at the ways that playwrights
from ancient Athens to Medieval and Renaissance England and Italy addressed
current political and cultural concerns through the representation of
the cultural past or tradition. We consider Shakespeare’s uses
and revisions of both English historical chronicles and the ideas of
Machiavelli in Henry IV, parts 1 and 2.
The quarter culminates in our examination of new kinds of theatrical
architecture, embodied by Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico.
Spring
quarter: We move from the “realistic” plays of Ibsen, reworking
the conventions of popular French theater to explore the social reconfiguration
of Europe, to the didactic drama of Brecht, combining classic and Asian
models to develop a Marxian social theater. We study the use of western
dramatic conventions in Asian and African plays. We end with postmodern
drama from Germany and the United States.
Selected
texts: plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Ibsen,
Soyinka, and Muller; theoretical works by Hegel, Marx,
and Freud
Poetic
Justice: Order and Imagination in Russia
Faculty:
Winter quarter: Gabriella Safran, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Spring
quarter: Gregory Freidin, Slavic Languages and Literatures; Oksana Bulgakowa,
Slavic Languages and Literatures
What is the difference between justice and law? And what does literature have to do with
this question? The great Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries wrestled with these issues as they imagined
and then parodied various utopias, some religious, others socialist.
As we study a selection of their works, we focus on the notion
of “poetic justice”: the artistic representation of order,
whether divine, natural, or human. The course aims to heighten awareness
of familiar narratives, mythologies, ideas, and images—and at
the same time to convey a sense of a long-established national culture
with its own dynamic and vision.
Course Overview:
Winter quarter: We consider the Biblical tension between
the formal rules of society and the state—the Law—and more
consecrated, intuitive, and mystical understandings of order in the
world—Grace. We examine this dichotomy in specifically Russian
terms: jurisprudence (zakon, law) and justice (pravda, truth of the divine order). We juxtapose old and new
notions of earthly and divine authority, tracing their interplay—as
zakon and pravda, reaction and revolution, reason and revelation—in major works
of 19th-century
Russian literature.
Spring
quarter: We begin by examining The Communist Manifesto and its reception in Russia. While considering
literary and cinematic critiques of communist rationality and violence
and mass terror in the name of social justice, we move into a focus
on the historical unfolding of the Russian Revolution and an exploration
of the voice of its ostensible beneficiary, the working class. We conclude
by studying poets who rejected communism before it fell apart and who
celebrate a more personal, more complex order of “poetic justice”
as a refuge from victimization and self-righteousness.
Selected
texts: Genesis, the Gospel of John, Russian folktales; works by Pushkin,
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Marx, Babel, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Tolstaya
Reason,
Passion, and Reality
(Philosophy)
Faculty:
Winter quarter: Christopher Bobonich, Philosophy; Julius Moravcsik,
Philosophy
Spring
quarter: Lanier Anderson, Philosophy (98-99; 99-00; 02-03); John Perry,
Philosophy (98-99); Kenneth Taylor, Philosophy (00-01); Nadeem Hussain,
Philosophy (00-01; 01-02; 02-03); Tamar Schapiro, Philosophy (01-02)
What roles
should passion and reason play in human life? Answers to this question
cross various boundaries of human difference: gender, race, age, culture,
and epoch. In this winter-spring sequence, we will trace contrasting
roles for passion and reason in the context of three traditional philosophical
concerns: value and obligation; knowledge, emotion and understanding;
God and reality. We will explore these problems through classics of
philosophy as well as drama, poetry, novels, and wisdom literature.
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: We explore the relation between reason and emotion in dramatic
and philosophical texts of classical Greece, and then consider the Stoic
view of emotion’s role in a good life. We conclude the quarter
by focusing on Judeo-Christian conceptions of law and obligation.
Spring
quarter: We trace the influence of distinctively modern conceptions
of reason and of the passions through the work of Descartes and Hume
to literary creations of the 18th and 19th centuries. We study American
pragmatism’s efforts to harmonize reason and the passions, and
conclude with a consideration of the American perfectionism advocated
by W.E.B. DuBois.
Selected
texts: philosophical works of
Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Rousseau, James; the Gospel of John;
literary works of Homer, Sophocles, Austen
View
course syllabus
The
Rise and Fall of Europe
Faculty:
Winter Quarter: Paula Findlen, History
Spring
Quarter: Mary Louise Roberts, History (01-02); James Sheehan (02-03)
In his
study The Civilizing Process,
German sociologist Norbert Elias connected the idea of power with the
practices of civility. He argued that an object as simple as a fork
shed light on the long process by which western European elites came
to see themselves as bearers of civilization, both within their own
society and ultimately to the world. In Elias’ view, the transition
from the medieval to the modern world was effected not only by profound
changes in politics and culture, but also by the growing desire for
distinction and self-control whose traces could be found in etiquette
books read by literate Europeans.
By the
modern era, belief in civility had grown into full-blown faith in the
majesty and power of European civilization: an unprecedented force in
the history of the world, encompassing scientific and technological
prowess, industrial economic power and liberal cultural hegemony. In
the name of the “civilizing mission,” Europeans conquered
the four ends of the earth, building massive empires to mirror their
own culture—and leading to some very “uncivilized”
results. It is no coincidence that Elias wrote his study of civility
while in exile from Hitler’s Germany.
This
course sequence examines the evolution of western European society from
the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries. It traces Europe’s
rise to global dominance, its transformation from a largely agricultural
to an industrial society, and its legacy of Enlightenment liberal ideals.
It examines the decline of Europe in the twentieth century as a result
of two catastrophic world wars. Throughout, we will focus on a few related
questions: what were the contributions of western European civilization
to the modern world? What dangers did it pose? How has western Europe
been displaced by other parts of the contemporary world? Is it reinventing
itself once again?
Course
Overview:
Winter
Quarter: Taking “birth and rebirth” as our central theme,
we investigate the ways that western Europe between the fourteenth and
eighteenth centuries used the past as a basis for multiple reinventions
of society, politics, and culture.
Spring
Quarter: Focusing on the themes of domination and decline, we focus
on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Europeans choose science
over the Gods, triumph in liberal politics and values, and experience
crises of modernity.
Selected
Authors: Boccaccio, Machiavelli, More, de las Casas, Montaigne, Davis,
Voltaire, Mill, Conrad, Freud, Remarque, Woolf, Levi, Rushdie, Havel
View
course syllabus
Serious
Laughter: Fantasy and Invective in Greece, Rome, and Beyond
Faculty:
Winter Quarter: Richard Martin, Classics
Spring
Quarter: Joy Connolly, Classics
Few
things are as good at revealing fault-lines, tensions, and taboos in
culture as what makes people laugh. The "serious" productions
of ancient Greece and Rome—epic, tragedy, philosophy, monumental
art—tend to dominate modern presentations of these cultures. But
Greeks and Romans also laughed. Why, when, and at what? Such basic questions
of historical cultural analysis are at the core of this course sequence.
We
will examine the full range of comic, satiric, and invective discourse
in both cultures, from graffiti to oratorical insults, vase paintings
to novels, over a millennium (8th c. BCE-2nd c.
BCE) to discover how laughter and related responses functioned in ancient
social life. We will also pay attention to the relationship between
ancient modes and modern cultural productions (from drama to political
rhetoric). Film, visual art, and performance will provide objects of
study as well as literary texts.
Course
Overview:
Winter
Quarter: We focus on laughter-provoking works of ancient Greece, particularly
satire with its provocative treatment of political and religious themes.
In the context of Greek comedy, we will explore the construction of
social categories such as gender and class. After an interlude in which
we test the application of modern theories of comedy and play to our
ancient course materials, we conclude the quarter with attention to
the development of prose and verse satires in ancient Athens, Alexandria,
and the Greek East.
Spring
Quarter: We explore ancient Roman laughter, starting with comedy and
social parody. We investigate the uses of the comic in political rhetoric,
as well as in its importance in the self-understanding of a literary
and aristocratic audience. We consider the closeness of laughter to
aggression, along with the place of jokes in larger, non-comic cultural
productions.
Selected
texts: plays of Euripides, Aristophanes, Plautus; poetry of Archilochus,
Sappho, Catullus, Horace, Juvenal; philosophical works of Plato and
Aristotle; rhetorical works of Lysias, Demosthenes, Cicero; satires
of Lucian, Petronius and Apuleius
View
course syllabus
Ten
Days that Shook the World
(History)
Faculty:
Timothy Brook, History (98-99); Philippe Buc, History (99-00; 00-01);
Aron Rodrigue, History (99-00; 00-01)
We will
focus on ten events that “shook the world,” whether in their
own times or in the long term, or because of the ways that they represent
historical processes at work. The leading themes of the course are ideologies
of imperialism, universalism and globalism (religious, political, and
economic), and processes of empire-building and globalization (as well
as resistance to them).
Through
comparing primary documents with historical accounts of our selected
events, students learn about the constructed character of historical
knowledge and develop the critical reading strategies that historians
use to approach the past.
Course
Overview:
Selected
events studied in winter quarter: the destruction of the second Temple
of Jerusalem; the conversion of Emperor Constantine; the arrival of
Islam in India; the plague of 1347; the battle of Kosovo in 1389
Selected
events studied in spring quarter: the French Revolution; the Luddite
revolt; the “opening” of Japan by Commodore Perry; Ataturk’s
giving women the vote in Turkey and discouraging the Islamic veil; the
extermination of Jews during World War II
Selected
texts: historical and literary works by Flavius Josephus, Eusebius,
Boccaccio, Columbus, Robespierre, Ataturk, Primo Levi, Shapin, Hunt
Transculturations
(Comparative
Literature/History)
Faculty:
Haun Saussy, Asian Languages
Robert
Batchelor, History
This course
sequence presents literary and other works testifying to the intermingling
of flows of population, resources, stories and social institutions across
the world, with analytic discussion and historical contextualization.
Such an intermingling is hardly controversial for the modern period,
where we know it as globalization. One aim of this course is to demonstrate
that globalization is new mainly in degree, and to question the tacit
implication that the earlier history of cultures is one of mutual isolation.
Through reading texts familiar and unfamiliar, ranging in time from
Homer to Soyinka, and through asking questions ranging from the simple
(what is travel? what is translation?) to the imponderable (what are
the relations among culture, technology, labor and social organization?),
we will fashion connections among the arts and their near neighbors
(history, anthropology, economics).
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: We begin our investigations with travelling stories, such as
the Biblical Book of Esther and Homer’s Odyssey,
which both thematise and demonstrate one of our central concerns in
this course. We move on to study forms of ancient narrative (such as
the story-within-a-story) and consider the epistemological consequences
of such forms in different cultures. We conclude the quarter with a
focus on European Enlightenment readings of the stories of other cultures.
Spring
quarter: Through an examination of primary texts associated with new
forms of knowledge developed in the European Enlightenment (e.g., economy,
sociology, political science), we investigate the emergence of modern
globalization. We consider the ways that technology replaces travel
in the modern world, and the effects of this replacement upon national
cultures of storytelling and self-identification. We conclude by studying
the appropriation of storytelling as a mode of national liberation in
a novel by Rushdie.
Selected
texts: Homer, Odyssey;
French, German, Italian, Tibetan, and Chinese versions of “Cinderella”;
Kurosawa, Rashomon; Montesquieu, Persian Letters; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Mauss, The Gift; Havel, “The Power of the Powerless”;
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat; Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Understanding
Being Chinese
(Asian Languages/History)
Faculty:
Timothy Brook, History
Haun Saussy,
Asian Languages
Getting
to the heart of understanding Chinese identity means understanding the
Chinese conception of history. The Chinese historical experience involves
not only different events and a different cultural background from those
of European history; it has also been interpreted in different ways.
Not history itself, but the story history tells to Chinese minds—and
the ways that this history issues in understandings of Chinese identity—are
the subjects of this course. Through investigating high canonical texts
of traditional Chinese humanistic culture as well as popular writings,
satires, fantasies, historical works and writings by women, you will
gain a working knowledge of several aspects of Chinese culture, along
with a sense of the intellectual issues surrounding the contact and
comparison of distinct histories and cultures. Selected materials concerning
European history will provide a comparative reference-point.
Course
Overview:
Winter
quarter: We focus on the formation of Chinese identities through the
telling of history from the Shang to the Tang dynasties. We study how
the philosophical and literary masters of early China told history and
thought about its imperatives. We consider the formation of imperial
dynasties and their efforts to gain a footing in historical tradition,
and the disruptions that invasion and Buddhism brought.
Spring
quarter: Beginning with the reformulation of Chinese order in the 10th
century, we consider the pressure and possibilities for shaping Chinese
identity through the 20th century.
Selected
texts: works by Confucius, Lao Tzu, Sima Qian, Han Yu, Hegel, Marx,
Mao Zedong; Shang shu
[The Book of Documents], Shi jing
[The Book of Poetry], Li ji
[Records of Ritual], Buddhist sutras
