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MODERN RUSSIAN ART
John Bowlt
MW, 8:00-9:20The course begins with the 18th century and ends with the Yeltsin period, but concentration is on the later 19th century and the years just before and after the October Revolution. Major paintings, some sculptures, architectural monuments, and applied designs form the visual material essential to this course and they will be examined in chronological sequence. These artifacts will be described and analyzed for their own sake and also as symbols and manifestations of social, political, and philosophical developments in Russian history. The student will gain an insight into the esthetic and cultural concerns of Russia/the Soviet Union that will supplement and enhance his or her knowledge of the more familiar chronologies of modern art history. The texts for the course are Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1663-1992, and John E. Bowlt, The Russian Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism. Students will also be asked to consult relevant publications held in the Art Library on campus, for example, James Billington, The Icon and the Axe; Alan Bird, A History of Russian Painting; John E. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Silver Age; George Heard Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia; Beverley Kean, All the Empty Palaces; Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism; and Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art.
A WORLD OF HEROES
Jerold Frakes
TTh, 8:00-9:20In this course students will explore a variety of social constructions of heroism worldwide from the earliest surviving literary documents up to the modern period. The scope of the material necessitates a selective reading of the relevant documents, but still allows for enough depth to avoid the "whirlwind tour" mode, for the focus is always strictly on the hero and the social function of the hero. Using this point of access, it will be possible to deal seriously with issues of cultural difference, social values cross-culturally, notions of morality and social "evolution." The texts may include: Gilgamesh; David (Samuel I-II); Homer, Iliad; Ramayana; Mahabharata; Apuleius, Metamorphosis; Cilappatikaram; Beowulf; Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shâhnâme; The Song of Roland; Dede Korkut; The Tale of the Heike; Son-Jara; Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote; Popol Vuh; and John Milton, Paradise Lost.
THE ONE ACT PLAY IN WORLD DRAMA
Moshe Lazar
WF, 8:30-9:50The objective of this course is to acquaint the student with a series of short plays, representing a great variety of genres, dramatic styles and techniques, and a broad range of historical periods and cultures. The plays and authors are discussed in their historical and ideological contexts. The analysis of the plays in the classroom will be applied by the students in their essays on a comparative topic. The readings will include Rutebeuf, The Miracle of Theophilus; Anonymous, Everyman; H. Sachs, The Wandering Scholar; Beolco, Ruzzante Returns from Wars; Molière, The Flying Doctor; Strindberg, Miss Julie: The Stronger; O'Neill, Before Breakfast; Ghelderode, Escurial; Hasenclever, Humanity; Goll, Methusalem; Cocteau, Wedding at the Eiffel Tower; O'Casey, Bedtime Story; Thornton Wilder, The Long Christmas Dinner; Brecht, The Jewish Wife; Arrabal, Picnic on the Battlefield; Ionesco, The Bald Soprano; Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Pinter, The Dumb Waiter; and Albee, Zoo Story.
JERUSALEM IN JEWISH, CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM TEXTS
Adam Rubin
MWF, 9:00-9:50This course will introduce the student to the image of Jerusalem as a holy city in Jewish, Christian and Muslim literature. The literature of the three religious communities played a central role in transmitting the image of Jerusalem as birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, and holy city for Islam as well. Goal of pilgrimage and cause of Crusade, themes such as "Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem," and "Jerusalem as the Center of the World" infused many aspects of Western Culture, far beyond the borders of the Land of Israel. Assigned readings from biblical and later non-biblical texts will be examined from a critical perspective to provide the student with humanistic, scholarly, and intellectual tools to understand the background of the tensions between the image and the reality of life in Jerusalem from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Modern Period. The texts for the course will include: Peters, Jerusalem: the Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times; The Oxford Study Bible; Josephus, The Jewish Wars; Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane; Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions during the New Testament Period; Purvis, Jerusalem, the Holy City: a Bibliography; and Rosovsky, City of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present.
GERMAN BAROQUE MUSIC AND SOCIETY
Gilbert Blount
TTh, 9:30-10:50Students will analyze musical monuments of the German Baroque period and learn how these specific pieces of music appear to reflect the larger socio-cultural contexts from which they arise. How do literary trends beginning in the late 16th century impact the kinds of music written then by composers? What are the stile moderno and the stile antico in music, and just exactly how "modern" or "ancient" are these stylistic features? Why is the Baroque the first period of an intense stylistic consciousness in Western art music, and how is this new sensitivity reflected in the writings of theorists of the time? Does the rationalistic questioning of everything lead to a mechanistic conception and codification of the human creative process? How does the gradual democratization of Western European society in the 17th and 18th centuries impact musical institutions? Sound in the physical world is everywhere at all times, but natural, uncultured sound is rarely confused with musical masterpieces. How do composers in Germany during the 17th and 18th centuries solve the age-old problems of pitch selection and organization, and how do these new approaches to composition relate to changes in the philosophical, aesthetic, scientific, and sociological disciplines of their time? For contemporaneous answers to these and other questions, students will consult selections from the writings of Agazzari, Agricola, Artusi, Avison, Burney, C. P. E. Bach, Caccini, Corneille, Couperin, Descartes, Forkel, Hawkins, Heinichen, Hiller, Kant, Leopold Mozart, Mattheson, Mersenne, Monteverdi, North, Praetorius, Quantz, Rameau, Rousseau, Scheibe, Schütz, Türk, Walther, and others. These will then be compared with the kinds of questions we might ask and the kinds of answers we might offer as surrogate musical agents in the 21st century.
INNOCENTS ABROAD
Jerald Frakes
TTh, 9:30-10:50The genre of travelogue —whether conceived as fact or fiction, whether as history, epic, chronicle, fantasy, report, letter or novel —functions in a variety of socially significant ways: to characterize the Self and his/her culture, to represent the Other and his/her culture, to compare and contrast the two, to prepare potential future travelers for the road mentally and emotionally, to prepare for military intervention, colonization, tourism. Surviving travelogues (taken in a broad sense), from the earliest periods of literature up through the "discoveries" and conquests of recent centuries, provide a fascinating window on cultures in contact, not always in conflict. The texts may include: Lucian, A True Story; Homer, The Odyssey; Herodotus, The Histories; "Alexander's Letter to Aristotle"; Adamnan and Arculf, On the Holy Places; Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades; Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, Book 1-2; The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America; Fadlan, "Vikings on the Volga"; Polo, The Travels; Mandeville, The Travels; Colon, The Four Voyages; Cabeza de Vaca, Relation; Swift, Gulliver's Travels; Ibn Battutuh, Rihlah; Verne, Around the World in 80 Days; and Dougherty, Travels in Arabia Deserta. The films will include: "Cabeza de Vaca," "Mountains of the Moon," "Aguirre, Wrath of God," and "Apocalypse Now."
LOVE AND DEATH IN THE RUSSIAN NOVEL
Thomas Seifrid
TTh, 9:30-10:50In this course we will explore the literary and cultural phenomenon of the "Russian novel" during its nineteenth century golden age, when it became a major vehicle of Russian cultural self-expression. This period, from Pushkin to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, was an era of bold artistic and intellectual experimentation and Russia’s discovery of its cultural identity. The course will examine the "Russianness" of the Russian novel, which evolved through a dialogue with and deviation from European forms, to the point of consistently producing specimens of its own "anti-genre." We will see how questions of literary form and genre are themselves basic carriers of meaning and will explore the ways in which Russian novels sought new expressive means to convey new cultural realities and aesthetic values. The focus will be on reading texts in their own cultural terms and examining their social-critical aesthetic, and philosophical stances. The reading list includes: Pushkin, Eugene Onegin; Lermontov, A Hero of Our Times; Gogol, Dead Souls; Goncharov, Oblomov; Turgenev, Fathers and Sons; Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?; Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground or Crime and Punishment; and Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
PRESCRIPTIONS OF FAITH: JEWS AND CHRISTIANS OF THE FIRST CENTURIES
Yaffa Weisman
TTh, 9:30-10:50The two centuries before the birth of Jesus and the two centuries that followed his crucifixion witnessed the evolution of two faiths, their religious practices and institutional paradigms, that significantly influenced Western culture. During these centuries, Jewish and early Christian literatures such as the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Christian Scriptures helped inform and shape people's diverse faiths in a challenging historical context. This course examines, through reading and interpreting the literature of the time, the historical and theological developments in Judaism during the Greco-Roman period, the emergence of Christianity, and the dynamics between the two traditions during those years. The texts read in the class will reflect the competing ideas and responses to the different sects to the particular historical crises, the variety of messianic expectations and other hopes for the future, the circumstances that account for the separation of Judaism and Christianity, and the key concepts and assumptions of these traditions that continue to influence Western culture.
THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERARY LEGACY
Robert Grant
MWF, 10:00-10;50This course will analyze the nature and history of Black American "writerly" strategies, from slavery (Douglass, Jacobs, Washington), through turn-of-the-century and Harlem Renaissance eras (Chesnutt, Dunsbar, DuBois, Hughes, Hurston), to mid-century and contemporary periods (Ellison, Baldwin, Hansberry, Morrison). The course will have a firm "aesthetics" base as well as a politico-cultural orientation.
GENDER AND ANTIQUITY
Catherine Gilhuly
MWF, 10:00-10:50In ancient Greece and Rome, the categories of masculine and feminine were deployed as a master trope for defining oppositions, but the ancients used these categories for significantly different ends at various times and places. In this course, we will explore how gender was constructed in antiquity and how it functioned as an organizational principle. Through close readings of literary, philosophical and historical texts we will consider the extent to which gender is a historically contingent category; we will analyze the ways social, political and economic conditions produced variously gendered subjects. Readings will include the following: Hesiod Theogony, Works and Days; Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; selections from archaic lyric poetry; selections from Herodotus and Thucydides; Aescyhlus, The Oresteia; Sophocles, Oedipus the King and Antigone; Euripides, The Bakkhai and Hippolytos; Plato, Symposium; Xenophon, Oikonomikos; Demosthenes, Against Neaira; Aiskhines, Against Timarkhos; Longus, Daphnis and Chloe; Virgil’s Aeneid; selections from the Roman elegiac poets; and Apuleius, The Metamorphoses.
THE LITERATURE OF DEVIANCE, MONSTROSITY AND FREAKISHNESS
James Kincaid
MWF, 10:00-10:50This course will study how we create what it is we detest and disavow, how and why we make monsters, freaks, and deviants. More centrally, we will study how we construct ourselves by constructing the "outside." We will test the notion that we define ourselves (define what is normal, decent, and reasonable) by constructing and using the abnormal, the indecent, and the unreasonable. Our culture, at its most hysterical and repressive, creates images and stories of excess and repulsion and then enacts those stories through us. The result is that we define our world and our being by way of these presumably outrageous figures on the margins: the inside is there only because it forces an outside. Thus we will study both literary and non-literary texts, great works of literature about the monstrous, along with the daily papers, movies, and television. Much of the latter material will be drawn from whatever is current, whatever comes up during the course. Though we will be concerned about the construction of scapegoats, the course will try to go beyond this into a study of the cultural work done by our monster-making in defining the centers by which we live and view the world. The reading list includes: a short xeroxed packet of literary/cultural theory; Camus, The Stranger; Capote, In Cold Blood; Dickey, Deliverance; Bing, Do or Die (on L.A. gangs); Abbot, In the Belly of the Beast (on prison experience); Buford, Among the Thugs (British soccer thugs); Harris, The Silence of the Lambs; Gillman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Didion, Play It as It Lays; Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted; "Boys Don’t Cry"(film); Ellison, Invisible Man; Nabokov, Lolita; The Trials of Oscar Wilde; and Welsh, Trainspotting.
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHERS: REASON AND PASSIONS AROUND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Natania Meeker
MWF, 10:00-10:50This course, focusing on explorations of the relationship between reason and the passions (or, for some, "rationalism" and "antirationalism") in philosophy and literature, will provide students with a general introduction to the Enlightenment period and one of its most central preoccupations. As we examine the ways in which authors and philosophers have attempted to define, delineate, elicit, and curb the rational and sentimental impulses of their readers, we will investigate the place of reason on the one hand and passion on the other in Enlightenment understandings of human nature, sexual difference, social life, and artistic creation. Some of the questions we will ask include: Ahat is the difference between "reason" and "passion" and why is this difference important? how do ideas about rationality and sensibility or sentimentality contribute to an Enlightenment understanding of what a human being is? What is the role of reason and/or the passions in defining a sexed body? How does a distinction between rational thought and sentimental identification get played out in other distinctions-between public and private, mind and body, man and woman? How do rational and/or passionate impulses function differently in literature and in philosophy? In order to discuss possible answers to these and other queries, we will read texts: philosophical essays, treatises, "declarations," encyclopedias- and literary- novels, short stories, dialogues, plays. We will begin the course with a discussion of the deployment of "reason" and "the passions" in the works of earlier writers such as Descartes (The Passions of the Soul), Locke, Pascal (Pensées), and Racine. We will then proceed to a discussion of rationalism and what has been called "the revolt against rationalism" in eighteenth-century texts; our focus here will be on the ways in which the themes of reason and the passions are developed in literature and philosophy in often complementary and sometimes contradictory ways. Our reading list may include: Diderot (The Nun and other texts), the Encyclopedia, Françoise de Graffigny (Letters from a Peruvian Woman), Hume (Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding), Kant, La Mettrie (Man a Machine), Prévost (Manon Lescaut), Richardson (Pamela), Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman). The course will conclude with a brief examination of the influence of Enlightenment notions of reason and the passions on contemporary debates about the body and subjectivity.
CLASSICS IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE
Kevin Robb
MWF, 11:00-11:50This course introduces the student to a selection of the best of Greek literature and philosophy with an emphasis on reading a text as very much a product of a place, time and society, but also one with enduring interest for thoughtful persons for the present time. The intent is to keep to acknowledged "classics," the best works of a literature already selected in antiquity as a canon and the best philosophical writing, but which also have proven interest for modern readers. Readings from Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cleanthes.
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND THE MAKING OF WESTERN CULTURE
Sheila Briggs
MWF, 11:00-11:50This course looks at how the cultural identity and attitudes of modern Westerners have been shaped by a distinctive religious past. We will concentrate on those texts that modern Westerners have designated as religious classics. We will also be looking at religious music and art, especially at the ways in which these have interacted with written traditions. The reading list includes The Epic of Gilgamesh; Euripides, Bacchae; Apuleius, The Golden Ass; Augustine, Confessions; The Rule of Benedict; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love; John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; Friedrich Schleiermacher, Speeches on Religion; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; selections which look at the construction of "minority" religious experiences in modernity (Jewish writers such as Martin Buber, African-American spirituals); and "Fall and Redemption Narratives" (selections from Genesis, Milton’s Paradise Lost, J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the TV series Babylon 5). Music sources will include selections from Gregorian Chant, J.S. Bach and other composers/compositions which illustrate the broader socio-cultural context of musical production. Visual material will include published sources (e.g., the architecture and sculpture of Chartes Cathedral) as well as visits to the Getty and Norton Simon museums. I may also show short video clips beyond the selection from Babylon 5.
TALES OF WITCHES, ROUGES, AND MADMEN IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN
Bruce R. Burningham
MWF, 11:00-11:50Between 1492 and 1681, two crucial events occurred in Spain which helped to define "modern" civilization: 1) the creation of the world’s first modern, bureaucratic state, designed to ensure the smooth functioning of a global empire larger, wealthier and more internationally entangled than had ever before existed; and 2) the rise of the "novel" as the preeminent literary genre of the last four hundred years. Through a close reading of several works of fiction whose main characters are witches, rogues, and madmen--and who thus operate largely on the margins of this imperial society--this course will examine the following issues (among others); the representation of "deviancy" and its role in undermining many of the social, cultural, and religious foundations of the Hapsburg empire; the representation of an "urban" environment in which deviant behavior is often portrayed (not un-problematically) as an asset rather than a detriment to social ascendancy; the development of an abrasive, "picaresque" aesthetic in stark contrast to the more idyllic literary forms of the period; the creation of an anti-heroic protagonist who stands in opposition to the archetypal hero of earlier literary genres; and the playful fabrication of implied "narrators," "documents," and "readers" in the evolution of our "modern" approach to literature. Readings will include Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina (1499); the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554); Francisco de Quevedo’s The Swindler (1626); two of Miguel de Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories, "Rinconete and Cortadillo" and "The Dogs Colloquy"(1613); and Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605;1615).
THE AMERICAN GOTHIC
Judith Jackson Fossett
MWF, 11:00-11:50This course proposes to interrogate the place of the ghost story/supernatural tale in the larger American literary tradition. Beginning with the first gothic text, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, published in 18th-century England, we will return to the American landscape and consider a range of novels and short stories in which issues of haunting, repression, and human transfiguration are central. While set in the purported security of the American home, these gothic texts utterly trouble any simplistic notions readers may have about the "safety" of domestic space and the "stability" of family members. As gothic settings are at once ostensibly sources of protection that also consistently produce threats of chaos, destruction and death, these texts offer a rich opportunity to define, discuss and analyze the "home" and its primacy in our national literary tradition. In concert with our focus on the gothic setting, we will also consider how race, gender, sexuality, and even region--rubrics already structuring domestic space--are at work in the construction of the gothic genre. A list of primary texts for this course may include the following: Horace Walpole, Castle of Otranto; Washington Irving, selected short stories; Edgar Allan Poe, selected short stories; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wall-Paper"; Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Tales; Stephen Crane, "The Monster"; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; and Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides.
MYTHOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Susan McCabe
TTh, 11:00-12:20This course will introduce students to the use and presence of Greco-Roman myth in modern and contemporary poetry. By reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis and excerpts from Homer, the class will foster an understanding of the continuing vitality of myth in literary tradition as well as its relevance to modern issues, such as sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sex-change, suicide, hetero- and homosexual love, torture, war, depression and intoxication. We will read diverse poets of the twentieth century as they reinterpret, reflect upon or reimagine mythological characters. Students will not only study "the ancients" in relation to modern culture, but will also become familiar with the process of explication, the close analysis of a poem. In addition, we will be devoting at least a section of the class to the particular uses women poets have made of myth. Writing for the class will include analytic as well as creative assignments.
LANDSCAPE AND POETRY
Lynn Matteson
TTh, 11:00-12:20This course considers the role of "Nature" in the arts of the West from about 1450 to the middle of the 20th century. The primary vehicle is landscape painting, especially that of England in the 19th century (Constable, Turner) and its relationship with nature poetry (Wordsworth) and the rise of the landscape garden. We will, however, explore other countries and arts, specifically music, where we will listen to the works of Vivaldi, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, and Delius, as well as the art of the Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh and Gaugin).
MANY FAITHS: MANY TRUTHS?
John Crossley
TTh, 11:00-12:20This is a course on religious diversity which looks first at the phenomenon of religious diversity itself, and then explores various proposals for dealing with it, ranging from "true belief" in one’s one religion and disdain for others, on the one extreme, to a universal "identity under the surface," on the other, with various forms of the "pluralist project" in between. The relationship between religion and morality is a close one, historically, and often times (but not always) religious relativism and moral relativism go hand in hand, as do (also not always) religious absolutism and moral absolutism. The range of approaches to the issue of racial/ethnic diversity extends from racial superiority and the balkanization (or ethnic cleansing) that racial superiority entails, on the one extreme, to an egalitarian "melting pot," on the other extreme, with a variety of approaches between the extremes, e.g., "identity politics," in which one pays allegiance to a primary group without threatening others, or that all races exemplify a part of the human race, none of them perfectly, or that each race is perfectly human but not yet fully humanly developed. The required texts include: The Qur’an, The Hebrew Bible, and The New Testament (selected passages expressing the absoluteness of each tradition); and Armstrong, A History of God.
CITY OF MYTH
Kirill Postoutenko
TTh, 11:00-12:20This course will explore St. Petersburg as an extraordinary cultural phenomenon: not just the social and economic phenomenon that is a city, but a "text" in its own right. It served (or one should again say "serves") as a text in two respects. Unlike other Russian cities that had arisen more or less organically in the middle ages, it was the willful creation of Peter I, his "window opening onto Europe" which was also intended in its function and design to mirror that Europe. But the representation of Peter’s city in Russian culture (primarily literature but other arts as well) contributed to the creation of a "myth of St. Petersburg" that was in turn projected onto and influenced the city’s "reality," if it can be called that. As Dostoevsky’s narrator put it in Notes from Underground, this was "the most abstract and premeditated city in the world." In pursuit of St. Petersburg’s cultural identity this course will examine several major works of Russian fiction, but in doing so it will also illustrate those works’ close connection with their urban setting, with Russian political power (the presence of the tsar’s court), and with Russian geopolitics (the city was a window on Europe, but also a paradoxical capital poised at the edge of its empire). St. Petersberg compared with the most fabulous European cities—Rome and Nuremberg. Almost three thousand-year-old Rome, the former capital of the magnificent Roman empire and a birthplace of Catholicism, remains the most powerful symbol of history in the modern world. Nuremberg, a lair of medieval European mystery and horror, becomes in the twentieth century, its real embodiment—first as a projected capital of Fascist state, then as a place of final execution of Fascism—the Nuremberg trial. The reading list includes Petronius, Satyricon, Pushkin, "The Bronze Horseman" and Eugene Onegin; Gogol, "Nevsky Avenue," "The Nose," and "The Overcoat"; Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground and several short stories; Bely, Petersburg; Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, and Brodsky, A Guide to a Renamed City. In addition, selected paintings (Raphael), engravings (Duhrer), as well as movies (Eisenstein, October, Fellini, Rome, Riefenstal, The Triumph of Will) and operas (Wagner, The Nuremberg Meistersingers) will be used.
MODERNITY AND THE CITY
Panivong Norindr
TTh, 11:00-12:20The city occupies a privileged place in the imaginary of writers, poets, philosophers, architects, filmmakers, and urban planners. It is an archetype of the imaginary which manifests itself in different guises (the ancient city, the forbidden city, the city of man/woman, the modern city, and so on). If the city is a test, as many writers and critics have claimed, how are we to read it, to interpret it, to make sense of it? What are the poetic, political and ideological stakes? The city will be seen as the focal point not only for a comparative analysis of the dynamics of technological society and its effects on artistic production, but also as the emblematic site for the production of a modern, postmodern, or postcolonial spatial imaginary from which new metropolitan forms have emerged. Primary readings will include texts by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Andr Breton, Albert Camus, Italo Calvino, Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Marguerite Duras, Thomas Mann, and Toni Morrison.
PLATO AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
Frank Lewis
TTh, 11:00-12:20Plato is one of the towering figures of Greek philosophy and literature. He is also our major source for the life and work of Socrates, who died in 399 B.C., when Plato was in his late twenties. Plato and Socrates alike stood in opposition to the methods and doctrines of the Greek Sophists, Protagoras, Gorgias, and others. The lives and thought of the Sophists are reflected not only in their own writings, but also in a variety of other contemporary documents, including the work of the comic playwright, Aristophanes, and the contemporary historian, Thucydides. Most important of all, the complex relations among Socrates, the Sophists, and Plato, are portrayed in the early dialogues of Plato, where the figure of Socrates is at centre stage (Socrates himself wrote nothing). These various ingredients are only part of the mix that makes up Plato’s mature thinking in the middle and later dialogues. Our chief focus will be the writings of Plato himself, which combine great literature and great philosophy in a single package. Other readings will include: the Sophists, Protagoras, Gorgias, and Antiphon; the comic playwright, Aristophanes; and the historian, Thucydides.
READING AND WRITING NATURE
Ronald Gottesman
TTh, 11:00-12:20The primary concern of this course is to enhance your ability to read critically. To that end we will read several books by some of America’s best-known "nature writers." As author of Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America, Don Scheese observes: the "typical form of nature writing is a first-person, nonfiction account of an exploration, both physical (outward) and mental (inward) of a predominantly non-human environment. . . " Thus, our texts will be autobiographical as well and each will tell us a good deal about a self responding to a particular place (a pond, the desert Southwest, the Sierras, the rural Midwest, the environment, the Ozarks, etc.) It should be said, however, that not all of the events detailed in these explorations are pleasurable any more than all of your experiences in the thinly populated out-of-doors have been. It is likely that for each of you literally or figuratively a misjudged wave may have turned potential exhilaration into a near-death experience. The deliciousness of isolation in the back country may suddenly turn into what Emily Dickinson calls "zero at the bone." Each of the books we will read has directly and indirectly a good deal to say about environmental issues and their political implications. This aspect of nature and nature writing will also generate thought, discussion and writing. The readings will include texts by Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Sue Hubbell, and Leslie Marmon Silko.
WOMEN IN LITERATURE AND ART
Gloria Orenstein
TTh, 11:00-12:20This course is intended to present and examine the issues and feminist analyses surrounding discussions about women and creativity, both in literature and the visual arts in the western tradition. It should serve as an introduction to the feminist paradigms and problematics involved in a gendered analysis of creation in other arts, as well. In order to enlarge the scope of our understanding of the patriarchal and feminist diversities, we will also consider an alternative creative system -- that of the pre-patriarchal era and of the Goddess civilization. The readings will include books from the following list: Simone de Beauvior, The Second Sex; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women; Grandmothers of the Light, Ed. by Paula Gunn Allen; Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet; Judy Chicago, Through the Flower; Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess; The Power of Feminist Art, Ed. by Broude and Garrard; The Guerilla Girls Bedside Companion of Art History; Alice Walker, The Color Purple; Art and Sexual Politics, Ed. T. Hess, essay by Linda Nochlin; and Les Guerillères by Monique Wittig.
DECODING MEDIEVAL VISUAL CULTURE
Carolyn Malone
TTh, 12:30-1:50This introductory course investigates the meaning and use of art, architecture, and other products of visual culture during the Middle Ages. Each work will be interpreted within its specific historical context to discover not only how it reflects its culture but how it interacted with that culture at the moment of production. For example, comparison of the Bayeux Tapestry with other original documents reveals that it represents the point of view of its producers, a position different from some written accounts of the Norman Conquest in 1066. In other cases, such as the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, we can decipher in the narrative of the mosaics several layers of hidden meanings, theological and political. A limited number of significant works, such as these, will be studied chronologically and in depth to allow critical discussion and to provide an overview of the Middle Ages for the beginning student. Within the continuity of the medieval tradition, works of art that reveal changing social attitudes and political strategies will be emphasized. Initial discussions will include questions such as: How can the meaning of the work of art as an historical artifact be decoded, and how is historical investigation different from scientific method? Various theories and methods, including psychoanalytic theory, will be used to interpret the work of art. Specific works to be examined will include: the paintings of the Priscilla Catacomb; the architecture of Hagia Sophia; the Ruthwell Cross, the Plan of St. Gall, Beatus Apocalypse, the sculpture of Beaulieu and Vezelay, the sculpture, stained glass, and architecture of Saint Denis and Chartes.
WOMEN IN ANCIENT LITERATURE
Tamara Eskenazi
TTh, 12:30-1:50As heroes or helpmates, prophets or sages, victims or warriors, women make striking appearances in the Bible and other ancient Jewish literature. This course will examine these female representations, as well as their interpretations in later traditions. In addition to discovering the wide variety of women in the Bible and other ancient writings, our purpose will be to cultivate critical skills in assessing meanings derived from such texts. We will ask: What can we learn about beliefs concerning women? What do these reveal about the lives of actual women? What influence did these stories have on subsequent perceptions of gender issues? How do these stories find expression in today’s world? We will concentrate on several critical approaches, including literary and historical. The books for the course include The Oxford Study Bible; Bellis, Helpmates, Harlots, Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible; Darr, Far More Precious than Jewels: Pespectives on Biblical Women; Meyer, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Woman in Context; Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality; and Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.
LANGUAGE, RATIONALITY AND CULTURE
Robin Jeshion
TTh, 12:30-1:50Language is alternatively said to be that which binds and that which divides humanity. On the one hand, language is said to be the mark of human rationality. Our linguistic ability is the hallmark of the particular sort of rationality that distinguishes us from other animals. It is what makes us capable of engaging in objective inquiry about the world and capable of acting morally. The rationality inherent in human linguistic ability enables us to understand one another and, consequently, unites humanity. On the other hand, language is said to be a fundamental cause of insurmountable and inevitable barriers between human beings. All thought is essentially linguistic, and so all thought is tied to the specific language that one speaks. Since specific languages structure facts about the natural and moral world in different ways, speakers of different languages necessarily have different worldviews. Because the differences are so deeply embedded in language, many think these worldviews are incommensurable, and that consequently, relativism about reality reigns: there are no culture-neutral facts about the world; and there are no objective moral rights and wrongs. The philosophical question at issue is whether, and in what way, language entails relativism about the natural world and about morality. In this course, we will engage in an historical and interdisciplinary study of this question and associated questions about the relationship between language, rationality and culture. Our readings will be primarily from linguistics, anthropology, and, (the bulk) philosophy, and will include writings of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Noam Chomsky, Nelson Goodman, Paul Grice, Ruth Benedict, John Bennett, W. V. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn.
SHAKESPEARE AND OUR CONTEMPORARIES
Rebecca Lemon
MWF, 1:00-1:50We will explore some of Shakespeare’s major plays both as literary texts and as stage productions. Our critical perspective will be that of a director searching for meaning and fashioning staging in support of that meaning. In juxtaposition with each Shakespearean text we will study a contemporary play and film influenced by or adapted from it that attempts the bold act of cultural transference, making Shakespeare meaningful to our own times.
POETIC MEANING AND POETIC FORM
Margaret Russett
TTh, 9:30-10:50What distinguishes poetry from other uses of language? How does the form of a poetic utterance affect our experience of its meaning? This is a course in how to read (and enjoy) poetry, from song lyrics to sonnets. Its primary assumption is that what a poem means cannot be separated from how it means. Thus, we will begin by noticing some of the ways poetic language exploits properties of rhythm and rhyme, and then go on to explore questions of "genre": how do we recognize inherited forms, and how do poets alter those forms over time? Our exploration of these questions will combine analytical exercises with a number of technical experiments: over the semester, students will be asked to compose verses in such forms as ballad meter, rhymed couplets, the sonnet, etc. As we gain familiarity with methods of scansion and versification, we will also attend to manipulations of syntax and figures of speech. We will consider the relation between mood, message and image; see how forms become vehicles of expression; and study an array of rhetorical figures to understand how they complicate themes and shape the experience of reading. These are questions that pertain to all kinds of poetry, both "high" and "low," so our syllabus will include examples from the Renaissance to the present. There will be units on particular forms, such as the sonnet and the ballad, as well as more extended study of a few major nineteenth-and twentieth-century British and American poets such as Wordsworth, Dickinson, Stevens, and Plath. In addition to short weekly exercises, students will be asked to write several analytical-interpretative essays, for a total of about twenty pages over the term. Text will include The Norton Anthology of Poetry; volumes by individual authors, including Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and Plath's Ariel; M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms; John Hollander, Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse; and photocopied or audio material supplied by the students and instructor.
ANCIENT DRAMA
William Thalmann
MWF, 1:00-1:50Imitation, said Aristotle in his theorizing about the origin of tragedy, is natural to human beings from childhood; and in fact ritual and dramatic imitation are nearly universal in human cultures. In the western tradition, however, comedy and tragedy originated in a particular time and place: in Athens of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., where they were closely identified with the democratic city-state. Later on, the Romans took over these literary forms and made them their own just as Rome was transforming itself from a local city-state to a world empire. Through the Romans, ancient drama profoundly influenced European and Americal culture and thought. This course will introduce you to some of the most important comic and tragic texts of the western tradition, and through them to two richly formative periods of western culture: the fifth century B.C.E. in Athens, and the third and second centuries B.C.E. in republican Rome. Then at the end of the course we shall look at examples of the development of the Greco-Roman tradition in plays by Molière and Shakespeare. Some sample readings: Aeschylus, Oresteia; Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Antigone; Euripides, Medea, Hippolytus, Bacchae; Aristophanes, Birds, Lysistrata; Plautus, Pseudolus, The Braggart Soldier, The Pot of Gold; Molière, The Misanthrope; Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
CROSS-CULTURAL RHETORIC
Lawrence Green
MWF, 1:00-1:50Rhetoric is a seemingly universal phenomenon, both as a set of communicative practices and as a self-conscious effort to regularize a society's modes of effective expression. We will look first at the prevalence of rhetoric in our own western tradition, and then expand our inquiry into the pervasiveness of rhetoric in ancient literate societies (Near Eastern, Chinese, and Indian), in non-literate traditional societies, in the psychology of animal societies, and in the dynamics of human language development. The texts include: Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition; Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric; and Bizzell and Hertzberg, Rhetoric Reader.
MASTERPIECES OF THE SHORT STORY
Alexander Zholkovsky
MW, 2:00-3:20This course is intended to be an introduction to Russian literature by way of its best short fiction, during which students will also be introduced to the basic principles of textual interpretation. Students will read, mostly in chronological order, and analyze some of the best short stories written by Russian authors over the two-hundred year existence of modern Russian prose, from Karamzin to the present day. Key emphases will fall on historical background (the reading list provides a cross-section of an entire culture and the changes it has undergone in the modern era); narrative structure (of which students are usually ignorant, but a critical awareness of which will prepare them for more advanced literary, and other kinds of, analysis); and intertextuality (the lively dialog that turns out to be taking place among these texts and often enough between them and non-Russian works). Among other topics that will be addressed are, on the historical side, the civic tenor of Russian literature and its role as surrogate opposition in Russian society, including the peculiar pressures of the Soviet era; and on the literary side, the ways in which these texts often simultaneously adopt and subvert the exemplars that precede them. The reading list includes the following: Karamzin, "Poor Liza"; Pushkin, "Station Master", "The Shot"; Gogol, "The Overcoat", "The Nose"; Lermontov, "Taman"; Dostoevsky, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", "The Gentle Spirit"; Leskov, "The Sentry"; Tolstoy, "After the Ball"; Chekhov, "The Darling", "Anna on the Neck"; Bunin, "Light Breathing"; Kuprin, "The Garnet Bracelet"; Gorky, "Twenty Six and a Girl"; Babel, "Guy de Maupassant", "Answer to Inquiry"; Romanov, "Without Cherry Blossom"; Zoshchenko, "Aristocrat", "Receipt", "An Evening of Culture"; Nabokov, "Spring in Fialta"; Platonov, "Fro"; Iskander, "On a Summer Day"; Aksenov, "Victory"; Solzhenitsyn, "An Incident at Krechetovka"; and Siniavsky, "Pkhentz."
WAR AND MEMORY IN KOREAN LITERATURE
Jinhee Kim
MW, 2:00-3:20This course will examine autobiographical and fictional accounts depicting wars in the twentieth century, with special reference to Korea. We will examine works written during and after the Second World War and the Korean War. We will explore the special links between collective and individual experiences, and the centrality of memories as a means to reconstruct the past. Students will also investigate the historical and political realities at the root of imperialism and aggression. Works by Korean authors (Ahn, Cho, and Pak) will be closely examined along with recent publications by Korean-American writers (Nora Okja Keller, Richard E. Kim, and Therese Park). Students will be encouraged to think about the complex interactions between human lives and the social, political, and economic conditions in which they emerge, especially during times of conflict and war. The required texts include: Ahn, Silver Stallion; Cho, Playing With Fire; Pak, "Winter Outing"; Keller, Comfort Woman; Kim, Lost Names; and Park, A Gift of the Emperor. All readings are in English. No knowledge of Korean language, literature, or culture is required.
GIRLHOOD: TWENTIETH CENTURY PERSPECTIVES
Alice Gambrell
TTh, 2:00-3:20When the word "girl"disappeared from polite usage nearly twenty-five years ago, widespread cultural interest in the vicissitudes of girlhood seemed to disappear along with it. Since the early 1990’s, however, a range of literary writers, sociologists, filmmakers, psychologists, and cultural critics have once again turned their attention, this time with some urgency, toward the phases of female childhood and adolescence. In this course, we will examine this contemporary resurgence of interest in the figure of the "girl" emphasizing the difficulty of locating suitable literary forms through which to articulate the complexities of girlhood. We will begin by examining a series of well-known older depictions of female children, ranging from the classic (Alcott’s Little Women) to the highly controversial (Freud’s Dora). We will then turn to the contemporary moment, paying special attention to the narrative innovations of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a text that served as inspiration and as point of departure for dozens of depictions of girlhood published in the years since. Finally, after reading a range of contemporary novels (by Sandra Cisneros, Jeffrey Eugenides, etc.), we will look at writings by young feminists who are currently working to reclaim the importance and to redefine the significance of the "girl."
LITERATURE AND THE CHOOSING SELF
Susan Laemmle
TTh, 2:00-3:20This course explores the ways in which great literature enlarges the boundaries of our moral imagination and helps us refine a personal identity. Its focus on close reading of great literary texts develops connections between life choices made by the texts' characters, aesthetic choices made by the texts' authors, and personal choices made by us and others. Works chosen for the course feature characters at clearly perceived turning points in their lives, struggling to be themselves and do the right thing. In the class, we will ask: what alternatives do they confront? What resources do they draw upon? What is the relationship between who they are, what they do, and how they feel about their lives as a whole? How are they affected by the larger environment in which they live their lives? This course is based on the assumption that posing such questions to great literary works contributes to human reflectiveness and broadens the range of possibilities available to us as we go about conducting our own lives. The course also aims to strengthen students' capacity to read carefully, grasp how literary works are put together, and convey their understanding both orally and in writing. The course pays careful attention to the ways in which great authors craft their work, as well as the vocabulary and modes of analysis that experienced readers use to think and talk about literature. While not a course on different literary forms per se, "Literature and the Choosing Self" does cover three major literary genres--poetry, drama, and fiction. The course reading list includes the following works: Adam and Eve and The Book of Jonah from the Bible, Shakespeare’s Othello, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Jane Austen’s Emma, Ernest Hemingway’s "Hills Like White Elephants," Robert Frost’s "The Road Less Traveled," T.S. Elliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"and Theodore Roethke’s "The Waking."
NO-PLACE? NO-TIME? SOCIETY AND UTOPIAN FICTION
Dagmar Barnouw
TTh, 2:00-3:20Utopia means "no place," but utopian fictions projecting alternate cultures have always been comments on their own. We will read them in their historical contexts, spanning two and a half millennia. The topics to be discussed are the books; lectures will provide the historical contexts; the discussion depends, in part, on the students, guided in each class by a leader who has prepared a short list of questions and suggestions (e.g., imagination and moral power in the Republic; social power and economic structure in Utopia; the power of science in New Atlantis; the perception of the other in Gulliver’s Travels; curiosity in Rasselas; nature vs. culture in the Discourse and the Supplement; anti-industrialism in News from Nowhere; scientific optimism in A Modern Utopia; critique of technocracy, rather than science, in We and Brave New World, and of totalitarianism in 1984; better or different worlds in The Dispossessed; imagination and amoral power in Solaris.)
SHAKESPEARE OUR CONTEMPORARY
Steve Moore
TTh, 2:00-3:20This course attempts to account for the continued popularity of Shakespeare in academic courses, theatrical performance, and (in particular) recent films. Close reading and analysis of at least eight plays (Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest) and screenings of selected films will be required.
WOMEN IN FILM AND LITERATURE
Tania Modleski
TTh, 2:00-3:20This course will look at how women have been portrayed in poems, stories, novels and films. After a general survey of images of women in literature and film, we will focus on the question of how women have functioned in the culture's most popular kind of stories (such as love stories, war stories, and Westerns) and how they have modified and transformed these stories by putting themselves at the center. The course will address fundamental issues in the study of film and literary criticism and interpretation. These include: What are the mechanisms used in literature and film that shape interpretation? Are there specifically feminine modes of storytelling? Does interpretation have anything to do with the gender of the reader or viewer? To what extent do other variables besides gender such as age, ethnicity, race, and sexuality inform the practices of writing and reading? What is the relation of film and literature? Readings include short works by such authors as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan Glaspell, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, May Sarton, Tillie Olsen, Bharati Mukherjee, Doris Lessing, Gloria E. Anzaldua, Max Apple, George Lefferts, Heinrich Heine, Nicholasa Mohr, Jade Snow Wong, and many others. Novels include: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country; Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire. Selections will be made from the following list of films: Born on the Fourth of July; Dogfight; Ride the High Country; The Ballad of Little Jo; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Thelma and Louise.
NARRATIVE FORMS IN LITERATURE AND FILM
William H. Brown
TTh, 2:00-4:30This course will be an introductory study of narrative strategies in film and literature. Our emphasis will be on interpreting structural and thematic conventions--those that help define the tragedy of classical Greece, the tragedy and romance of Renaissance England, and the social realism of the late nineteenth century on the one hand, the western and detective genres of modern film on the other. Our juxtaposing of literary works with films will enable us to analyze recurring principles of narrative development in these two forms, even though the forms come from distinctly different historical and aesthetic contexts. We will examine broad issues like parallel plots and the development of character, as well as more narrow concerns such as the establishment of self image and of one’s role within society, the bonding within groups, the quest for justice, the failure of communication between the sexes, and the limitations of idealism. Literary texts will include Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone, Euripides’ Medea and Orestes, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, and An Enemy of the People. Films will include The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, High Noon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Chinatown, Witness for the Prosecution, and Vertigo.
PHILOSOPHY IN FICTION: CONRAD, KANT AND KAFKA
Arnold Heidsieck
TTh, 2:30-3:20This course offers discussions of selected early twentieth-century novels--and how philosophical theories from the German tradition might help to interpret them. Topics include: a young person's struggle between political propriety and his conscience; satirical-ironic perversions of natural law and criminal justice; the proposition of a morally right or wrong rule for action as right or wrong for each and every person in like cases alike; values and conscience as expressions of people's resentment and "will to power"; the sexual or aggressive origin of consciousness, culture, and neurosis. Readings from Conrad, Kafka, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud.
THE CHINESE IMAGINATION: CULTURE AND FICTION
George Hayden
TTh, 3:30-4:50This course will introduce examples and problems of Chinese moral culture through sixty-one short stories and one novel. These works of traditional fiction are the original versions as translated into English, with the exception of the novel Three Kingdoms, the translation of which is abridged. No prior knowledge of Chinese culture or language is assumed. The course will examine the actions of fictional characters in the context of the three ethical systems of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. What are the norms and how are they followed or violated? Topics include human and celestial justice and the role of individual ambition in the cycle of history. The texts will include Traditional Chinese Stories, Themes and Variations and Three Kingdoms, China’s Epic Drama.
ASIAN CLASSICS
Lan-Ying Tseng
TTh, 3:30-4:50This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to the Chinese classics from the Zhou to the Han periods (c. 800 B.C.- A.D. 220), focusing on the notions of Heaven in the context of cosmology, astrology, mythology, political thought and literary fantasy. Among the works to be studies are Book of Changes, Book of Odes, Book of Documents, Analects of Confucius and Songs of the South. The class will also introduce contemporary archaeological finds, such as inscriptions on bronzes or objects with visual representation, as supplements to texts. All readings are in translation.
THE JEW IN AMERICAN FICTION
Stanley Chyet
TTh, 3:30-4:50Through fiction, Jews have tried to explain themselves to other Jews and to a wider audience. Non-Jews have employed Jews as characters in their fiction. This course will draw on American Jewish and non-Jewish writers to achieve an understanding of the American Jewish experience from the late 19th century to our own time. The reading list includes Abraham Cahan's novel, The Rise of David Levinsky and shorter works by Anzia Yezierska, Grace Paley, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, John Updike, Jon Robin Baitz, and others. Films related to some of these stories will be shown and discussed as well.
Note: courses are only open to sophomores, juniors and seniors Shakespeare and His Rivals Death and Immortality
SHAKESPEARE AND HIS RIVALS
Heather James
MWF, 11:00-11:50How and why did Shakespeare come to sum up an entire era, Elizabethan England, whose cultural promise and romance still seem necessary today to authorize and energize any number of artistic, political, and economic enterprises? What cultural conditions gave us a Shakespeare who must paradoxically embody and transcend his historical moment? And what would Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights make of the phenomenon he has come to be? This course places Shakespeare’s art in the cultural ferment which produced the beginnings of modern ideas about the theatrical or performative self, the nature of social relations, and nationhood. Shakespeare wrote and performed in a collaborative spirit, and we may better understand how the Renaissance relates to modern ideas about identity, politics and society, nationhood and colonialism when we place the period and its most famous author in their contexts, beginning with the London theatrical scene. The class will intensively read and discuss plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd and will touch on a wide range of cultural and historical writings. Questions will include the pragmatic and the speculative: who were the actors? What did the playhouses look like? How were scripts produced? Why was the theater so popular in Renaissance London? How did the popular stage help raise questions about subjective and cultural identities? Required texts include Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy; Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus and Tamburlaine; William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Signet), Henry IV, pt. 1 (Signet), Henry V, The Tempest (Signet), and Twelfth Night (Signet); Russ Macdonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare.
DEATH AND IMMORTALITY
Dallas Willard
TTh, 11:00-12:20This course is designed to introduce the student into the philosophical literature and standard analyses of issues relating to death and the possibility or impossibility of the continuation of personal existence after the body stops functioning. Basic issues of the nature of human personality and what sustains and unites it will be discussed. Perspectives of world religions on immortality and survival will be briefly studied. Special attention will be paid to current assumptions about the inseparability of the person from her brain and the relevance or irrelevance of "near death" experiences. The course will terminate with readings and reflections on the kind of universe that seems implicated in human existence with and without immortality. Reading materials will include Plato, Phaedo, a few pages from Meno; Augustine, The City of God, Books XXI and XXII and selections from Immortality of the Soul and Magnitude of the Soul; Descartes, selection from The Meditations; Joseph Butler, "On Personal Identity" and "On a Future Life"; Hume, "On the Immortality of the Soul" and "On Personal Identity"; William James, selections from "Human Immortality"; U.T. Place, " Consciousness is Just Brain-Processes"; Richard Warner and Tadeusz Szubka, ed., The Mind-Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Life After Death; Raymond Moody, Life After Life; Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences; Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper; H.D. Lewis, The Self and Immortality.
