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FALL 2004 COURSE GUIDE
Category V: Arts and Letters
ARLT 100gThese courses aim at depth of knowledge and development of students' interpretive skills through intellectual engagement with major works of philosophy, literature, art, film, or music. Classes are writing-intensive and limited to thirty students to promote direct interaction between students and faculty. For additional enrollment information, see the Fall 2004 Schedule of Classes. You may also download the course descriptions in pdf version.
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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The African American Literary Legacy
Professor Young
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50
Section: 47464
What is the African American literary legacy and how has it changed from its origins in the 19th century up until the present day? How have slavery, regional migration, racism, segregation, racialized violence and political mobilization shaped the themes and style of African American literature? How have these experiences helped constitute black individual and collective identity? How are cooperation and conflict between generations, genders, races and sexual identities depicted in African American texts? Given the multiple positions from which black writers speak as mothers or fathers, as slaves or free people, as political conservatives or radicals, as gay or straight, etc. does it even make sense to talk about a coherent African American literary canon? And if not, then how can we make sense of this rich tradition? In seeking the answers to these and other questions, we will consider essays, novels, short stories, plays, and science fiction including W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks, August Wilson’s Jitney, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred.
Top of PageARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The American Gothic
Professor Jackson-Fossett
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Section: 47468
This 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Art and Society in Ancient Greece
Professor Pollini
MW, 12:00 - 1:50
Section: 47476
This course will examine select artistic and architectural monuments of ancient Greece in a cultural and historical context. This is not a course about art appreciation or connoisseurship. Instead, the focus will be on those monuments and related primary sources that help us to understand better the historical, philosophical, and religious beliefs and interests of ancient Greek society. In addition, the materials and techniques employed by Greek artists and architects will be examined to understand how materials and techniques might have imposed limitations on what the artist/architect created. Besides a detailed course manual and readings in primary sources, the main texts for this course will be J.G. Pedley, Greek Art and Archaeology (pb.) and J.J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (pb.).
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Asian American Performance
Professor Kondo
MW 3:30 - 4:50
Section: 47511
Two of the most generative theoretical concepts of the last fifteen years, “performance” and “performativity” have enabled us to think in new ways about meaning, identity, and power. From the performances of gender and race in everyday life to the formation of political identities and to the stage itself, theorists from a wide range of disciplines -- philosophy, linguistics, literature, anthropology, sociology, among others -- have engaged the ways we perform identities, from the level of the individual to the level of the nation and the global. This course uses these ideas about "performance" to examine the multiple meanings and conflicts of interpretation that animate the term "Asian American." Who and what count now as “Asian American”? How has this changed in the wake of post-1965 immigration, the increasing number of persons of mixed race, racial profiling since 9/11, and the “whitening” of Asian Americans via the “model minority” stereotype? What does the case of “Asian Americans" tell us about larger processes of racialization and structures of power?
During the semester, we will read plays and theoretical works on performance from philosophy and drama criticism, view films and music videos, and analyze music that thematizes issues relevant to the consideration of “Asian America.” The course emphasizes the critical importance of locating these questions in a multiracial, transnational world. Our inquiry will include at least one trip to East West Players, the oldest Asian American theatre troupe in the country, and perhaps depending on schedules to a concert. Readings will include plays by David Henry Hwang and Sandra Tsing Loh, philosophical texts by J.L. Austin and David Eng, as well as music and film.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics of Greek Philosophy and Literature
Professor Robb
MWF, 11-11:50
Section 47463
This 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 will be from such authors as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cleanthes.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Conflict and Culture in Korean History
Professor Hwang
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section: 47510
This course asks how we should interpret accounts of conflicts in Korean history in order to trace the development of core value and perceptual orientations among Koreans from the 1590s to the 1980s. These accounts, which deal with everything from family strife to wars, compel us to carefully evaluate how the narrative and rhetorical styles offer judgments on important issues surrounding the events in question.
The first reading, The Record of Reprimands, details the Koreans' struggle against invading Japanese forces in the 1590s from the perspective of a high minister, who blames himself for having failed to foresee the invasion but in the process also criticizes the political system that had allowed it. Next is The Memoirs of Lady Hyeyong, an extended account by an 18th century Korean princess of the execution of her husband, the crown prince, by his father, the Korean king. We must decide, first, how this account allows us to judge the circumstances behind this tragedy. We must also interpret, ultimately, to whom the author assigns blame--a paranoid but powerful king, a mentally disturbed prince, or the culture of political strife in the Korean government?
Coming to the twentieth century, we will then read the True Stories of the Comfort Women, first-hand accounts of girls taken into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during World War II. These harrowing descriptions provoke a range of emotions from the reader, from digust and anger to sympathy and sorrow. They also ask us to interpret how the process of ìmemorizingî by these victims illuminates the conditions of a Korean society being pulled apart by various forces, including imperialism. Finally, we will read Kwangju Diary, a memoir from one of the leaders of the Kwangju Uprising of 1980 against the military dictatorship of South Korea. We will need to judge, among other things, how this narrative conveys the ideals driving these citizens of Kwangju, and how they viewed the role of the United States in this conflict.
Each of the four books will be accompanied by secondary readings that provide historical context. The course's assignments will include four interpretive essays, each 5-6 pages long, as well as active participation in class discussion.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
A Cultural History of 20th Century American Popular Music
Professor Echols
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Section: 47509
This class takes seriously the idea that popular music is the result of an ongoing historical conversation in which nobody has the first or last word. When Missy Elliott, for example, raps about women's sexual autonomy she is entering a conversation in which Bessie Smith and Etta James have already weighed in. Of course, artists are shaped by their times, as well, and this class also situates the music under discussion--broadly speaking, blues, jazz, R&B, rock 'n' roll, and rap--within history. Students will learn, for instance, the ways in which WW2 and the urban over-crowding it caused helped to create a multi-racial, urban working class, which, in turn, encouraged the sorts of cultural exchanges that led to the development of rock 'n' roll. Throughout we will pay special attention to the ways in which musicians both reflected and resisted dominant cultural assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality. We will explore how ideas about rebellion, authenticity, and pop artifice are embedded in gender and racial conventions. We will focus on well-known artists such as Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Bessie Smith, Sly Stone, Madonna, Bob Dylan, and Billie Holiday as well as lesser-known ones, including Josh White, Janis Martin, Yoko Ono, Sylvester, Leadbelly, Kathleen Hannah, and LibbyHolman. Books include W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter, Alice Walker, The Color Purple, Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Students will be required to purchase a course reader that includes primary texts (poems, political manifestos, short stories) and theoretical essays. We will also view clips from the following films, Without You, I'm Nothing, Hairspray, Don't Look Back, Superfly, Eight Mile, Monterey Pop, Lady Sings the Blues, A Mighty Wind, and American Roots Music.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Culture and Identity in Pre-Modern East Asia
Professor Brindley
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
Section: 47493
This course provides an introduction to the civilizations of pre-modern China, Korea, and Japan through the lens of the cultural production of identity. We examine philosophical treatises, religious works and sutras, plays, films, and novels in an attempt to see how identities are simultaneously created and expressed through such varied mediums and genres. We also look to these works for insights into areas of mutual influence and distinctiveness among the three regions of East Asia. Heavy readings and in-depth discussions of the materials will help students come to terms with the meaning of identity as a cultural construction, along with how identity is ascribed, assumed, expressed, and reified through society's cultural relics. In our discussion of China, we look at how early Confucianism attempts to define a "Chinese" cultural tradition; how medieval elites reread ancient texts so as to define a "Daoism" of the aesthetic elite; how playwrights under Mongol rule use drama as a means of expressing their identity as Han Chinese; and how historical fiction plays a role in creating a common identity through shared history. For Korea, we study how the creation of an indigenous written language serves in the creation of Korean identity; how Neo-Confucianism informs and maintains the positions of the literati class; and how a certain dramatic art form called p'ansori serves as a symbol of cultural identity. Our discussion of Japan focuses on three main areas: the construction and preservation of elite status in Heian Japan; the relationship between Zen Buddhism and samurai values and ideals; and the creation of a sense of distinctive history through literature and film. The required texts include: Confucius, The Analects; Laozi, Dao De Jing; Six Yuan Plays; The Plum in the Golden Vase, vol. 1; The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a CrownPrincess of 18th Century Korea; The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon; Hagakure: the book of the samurai; and a course Reader (containing works from Sources of Korean Tradition and Anthology of Japanese Literature).
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Culture, Conformity, Revolt
Professor Rollo
MWF, 1:00 - 1:50
Section: 47487
The course will consider the themes of revolt and conformity in literary works written between the Middle Ages and the present and in late twentieth-century popular culture. We shall ask certain fundamental questions: what social or political forces lead people to rebel? When is rebellion simply a type of conformism or a pretext for personal gain, glory and glamour? During which particular periods of history have significant social changes taken place? What rebellious role is played by clothes, accessories, cosmetics and shoes? The ambiguous revolutions under analysis may be sensual (Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Mme. de LaFayette, The Princess of Cleves), sexual (Honoré de Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, André Gide, The Immoralist), political (Marguerite de Navarre, excerpts from The Heptameron, Geoffrey Chaucer, excerpts from The Canterbury Tales), educational (The Quest of the Holy Grail) or philosophic (Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head, Albert Camus, The Stranger). Some attention will also be devoted to the manipulation of revolt in the pursuit of money and self-glorification (products by Madonna, music and film featuring The Sex Pistols and Doris Day).
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Dictators: Consent and Coercion
Professor Moore
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
Section 47491
Why do people not only consent to dictators, but indeed worship them and render outright cults to them, while others sacrifice their lives to resist them? This course examines various texts that expound the virtues and evils of dictatorship, especially in the Hispanic American world as it reflects its Mediterranean heritage. We start with Aristotle’s The Constitution of Athens, in which tyrants -- the “one” -- vie with the “few” or the “many” to rule the city-state. A similar situation has occurred historically in Latin America since independence from Spain, and we shall ask in what ways its dictators resemble Greek tyrants. We next read Machiavelli’s The Prince, to look at one set of morals associated with dictators, “reason of state.” An ethnography of a Spanish village, Julian Pitt-Rivers’ The People of the Sierra, explains how proud Spaniards submit to rich patrons in an idiom of personal contract and friendship. Other texts include Miguel Angel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente, a novel portraying Guatemala’s Manuel Estrada Cabrera; it won the author the Nobel Prize for Literature. Graham Green’s Conversations with the General comprises a memoir of his friendship with Panama’s Omar Torrijos, as does another memoir by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Mario Vargas-Llosa’s recently translated novel, Feast of the Billygoat portrays the last day in the life Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and is an intimate portrait of his regime as well as of the men who killed him. Early in the course we view Camila, Norma Alejandro’s historical film about an upper-class woman put to death by Rosas, Argentina’s bloody 19th century caudillo. Later we read anthropologist Ann Taylor’s Eva Peron: Myths of a Woman, and contrast that with Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s musical Evita, by viewing the Madonna film version. Paul Friedrich’s ethnography of a Mexican agrarian cacique, boss, The Princes of Naranja, deals with the psychodynamics of a dictatorship on the local level. We shall end with memoirs, pro and con, that attest to the grip today’s only surviving caudillo, Fidel Castro, continues to hold on Cubans both in Havana and -- in opposition -- in Miami.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Ethics for Earthlings and Others
Professor Lloyd
MW, 8:30 - 9:50
Section 47451
Maybe some people live their whole lives never questioning how they are living. Maybe their lives are so hard that they cannot afford to ask questions, or maybe they are too shallow to think at all. But the major ethical question for all of us who have the interest and comparative luxury of seeing ourselves as thoughtful rational agents is the question of how we ought to live our lives. What should we value? What ends should we pursue? How should we treat others? These perennial questions of moral philosophy assail us every day in small ways, and sometimes loudly in times of crisis. But the answers of philosophers are often too highly abstract and difficult to apply to daily life with all of its complexities. Moreover, we find that despite our best efforts to be fair and impartial, we turn out to have surprisingly parochial prejudices -- based on nationality, race, sex, perceived talent, economic class, religious affirmation, even species -- that may seem sometimes to interfere with our ability correctly to apply the best moral theories we have to our own situations. How can we get beyond our prejudices, to think “outside of the box” about morality? This course taps the imagination of Science Fiction to make more vivid the perspectives of others with whom we could or did not antecedently identify, to help us see more clearly what the various classical moral theories available to us require. The best science fiction allows us imaginatively to identify with beings quite different from ourselves, and so may serve to mitigate some of the morally important affective and cognitive deficiencies -- moral “blind spots” -- of our daily life. Our critical thinking about morality may be enhanced by expanding the scope of our moral inquiry. Readings will include Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, John Stuart Mill's essays, “Utilitarianism” and “On Liberty,” Judith Barad's The Ethics of Star Trek, excerpts from Aristotle's Politics and Nichomachean Ethics, from Jeremy Bentham's, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, from John Rawls', A Theory of Justice, and papers on moral status and animal rights by Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Videos of films and television episodes will include The Handmaid’s Tale, Aliens, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, “The Measure of a Man,” “The City on the Edge of Forever,” and “The Cloud Minders.”
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Families and Phantoms, Witches and Warlords: The Human Condition in the Literature of the Ancient Near East
Professor Porter
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
Section 47486
This course will examine the role of story-telling in the negotiation of daily life through some of the earliest literature in history. Conflict, pain, suffering and death are endemic to the human condition since the beginning of time, while family, friendship and community have been understood as its bulwark for just as long. In works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Story of Adapa, Nergal and Ereshkigal and the Enuma Elish, ancient story-tellers construct intricate relationships between life, death, this world and the otherworld as they confront their place in the universe. But while we call these works literature, was this how they were viewed in antiquity? How did their audience conceive of text? Are the poetic techniques often employed aesthetic or functional? In order to understand the nature of literature in the ancient world however we must understand both the nature of writing and the nature of literacy.
We will range far in time, place and approach in this course, considering texts as diverse as Myth of Atrahasis, a collective explanation for the existence of suffering, and Madumo: a Man Bewitched, one South African’s account of his own condition and his interlocutor’s interpretation of it. We also read a selection of hymns and prayers, while a comparison with some ritual and prescriptive texts on witchcraft, magic, funerals and even adoption helps place these stories in their complex cultural context. Reading these texts raise critical questions about reality and reason and about one culture’s encounter with another. As well they reveal how contingent understanding of any body of literature is on larger socio-cultural and intellectual traditions. The class will therefore involve a basic introduction to significant trends in literary criticism and their impact on Ancient Near Eastern Studies.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Girlhood: Twentieth Century Perspectives
Professor Gambrell
MWF, 2:00 - 2:50
Section 47496
When the word "girl" faded from polite usage thirty years ago, widespread cultural interest in the vicissitudes of girlhood seemed to disappear along with it. Since the early nineties, 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 the 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 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 innovations of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, a book that served as inspiration and point of departure for dozens of depictions of girlhood published in the years since. After observing work by artists and scholars from a range of disciplines and media, we will conclude by examining recent writings by young feminists who are currently working to reclaim the importance and to redefine the significance of the "girl." Requirements include extensive reading and analytical writing, daily written responses, a midterm, a final, and in-class presentation.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Globalization of the English Novel
Professor Joseph
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
Section 47502
What one has traditionally meant by the “English novel” is the form as it was generated within the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales) and Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. In our own time and under the expansive pressures of globalization, that definition has come to include fiction that has come out of South Asia, Nigeria, the Carribean, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere. That is, as Great Britain’s political and economic importance in the world has shrunk since the height of its imperial power in the nineteenth century, the English language, and literature written all over the globe in that language, has become increasingly pervasive, a “lingua franca” by which a global economy and culture communicate most readily these days. After a brief consideration of the European base (Defoe, the Brontes, Dickens, E. M. Forster), we will examine the globalization of English by looking at Anglophone novels and poems written in various parts of the globe by such writers as J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipal, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kincaid, D. W. Walcott, Jean Rhys, Peter Carey, Oscar Hijuleos and, conceivably, others.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Great Cynics
Professor Szabari
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
Section 47495
Cynics provoke both our fascination and our contempt, and the term “cynicism” has various meanings: a provocative tone in art and literature, a philosophical school originating in Greek antiquity, a philosophical “cheekiness” expressed by a lifestyle rather than ideas and teachings, and a general attitude of resignation and political disillusionment. This course explores this array of meanings in works of literature, philosophy, and art. Reflections on “fearless speech” and truth-saying by Michel Foucault will form the backbone of our analytical project. We will begin by examining the exemplary figure of Diogenes of Sinope, the Athenian philosopher-bum who lived in a tub, in order to analyze the essential features of the cynic: his renunciation of wealth and material comfort, indifference to death, moral rigor, withdrawal from society, free-expression, and ostentatious, scandalous public behavior. Focusing on these features, we will review the history of cynicism in different historical periods from classical antiquity to the present. The cynic’s lack of respect for authority, his relentless efforts to interrupt master narratives requires a special rhetoric that consists both of words and of gestures. In our readings we will pay special attention to the language of cynicism as characterized by improvisation, citations, aphorisms, brevity, jokes, and anecdotes. The figure of Diogenes enjoys high esteem in the Renaissance, both supporting and subverting Christian humanist values. During the Enlightenment, he returns as an especially powerful source of social critique. In readings of texts by modern writers, we will ask whether the writer’s position is similar to that of the cynic. How, for example, do Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Céline account for the considerable distance they willfully take from social norms? How does the cynic challenge authority in times of war? The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk distinguishes between “bad” cynicism (resignation) and “good” kynicism (engagement). Does cynicism fall out along these lines today? Is there a specific political or artistic value to being capable of “speaking fearlessly”? Is there any need for shocking and provocative (for example, obscene or injurious) statements in art, literature, science, or in any form of public discourse? The cynic uses the (abject or obscene) body to challenge what is considered to be civilized or polite. To investigate this body and its power we will look at forms of cynicism in contemporary art: offensive works of art, the use of obscenity and of the body to shock, and the “alternative lifestyles” of hippies and bums, etc. Materials for the course will include works by Diogenes Laertius, Lucian, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Diderot, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Céline, Hasek, Foucault, Sloterdijk, Mapplethorpe, and Lars von Tier.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
How to Be a Medieval Philosopher
Professor Van Bladel
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
Section 47485
In this course we will go through a large part of the curriculum used for training philosophers in Alexandria, Egypt, in 6th century, a curriculum that was the basis for philosophical education in Arabic and Latin during the subsequent thousand years of the Middle Ages. Reading extensive sections of Aristotle and his followers in the order established by medieval philosophers and adopting their interpretive approaches to the texts, we will learn how medieval philosophers saw and described the world, how they established a tradition that is a cornerstone of learned culture for Europe and Western Asia, and how to “do” philosophy the way they did. Students will write several short papers modeled on methods of students in this tradition as if they were medieval scholars, developing the capacity for rigorous and systematic logical analysis while learning to view the world as educated people saw it before modern times.
We will read a large portion of Aristotle's surviving works, together with texts translated from Greek, Arabic, and Latin by the philosophers Porphyry, Ptolemy, Proclus, Plotinus, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and a few others.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Human Reason: Its Scope and Limits
Professor Levin
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section 47456
Human beings have often conceived themselves as unique among animals in exhibiting rationality. But what is it to be rational, and just how rational do we turn out to be? This course explores the development of the Western conception of rationality in thought and action, and attempts to determine, by examining classical and modern philosophical texts, whether we are primarily creatures of reason or rather of instinct and passion. Books for the course include: Plato, The Protagoras; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy; Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Nietszche, The Genealogy of Morals.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Literature
Professor Rubin
TTh, 3:30-4:50
Section 47506
What does it mean for a city to be "holy"? What happens when that holiness is contested by different peoples and religions? This course will explore the histories, roles, and meanings of Jerusalem as "Holy City" through the ages. As a city sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the image and meaning of Jerusalem has had an impact on world politics and history and on the consciousness of millions of people far beyond that of most cities at any period or any location on earth. Goal of pilgramage, cause of crusade, image of spiritual perfection, and gateway to other worlds, Jerusalem has influenced Western and Middle Eastern consciousness in ways that are too profound to catalogue. We shall nevertheless take up the challenge of understanding what Jerusalem has meant and continues to mean to Jews, Christians, and Muslims through the ages. Our exploration of various and often conflicting interpretations of the city will make use of ancient religious texts, poetry, novels, short stories, memoirs, art, architecture, film, the memoirs and diaries of pilgrims, historical scholarship, and contemporary political debates.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Knowledge and Imagination in Science Fiction
Professor Shugarman
MWF, 9:00 - 9:50
Section 47453
Science Fiction is sometimes called "speculative fiction" because it extends beyond the boundaries of what is known to what it might be in the future. Some of what we consider commonplace today would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago, and we view with concern today some scientific techniques that might become commonplace in the future. Science fiction has mediated between imagination and current knowledge. Some scientists have used fiction to extend their world view beyond the often narrow confines of the laboratory; and the ideas behind some current technologies such as rockets to the Moon and beyond were envisioned by science fiction writers before they were realized by scientists. The same imaginative process occurs in both science fiction and real science, presented in sometimes narrower, sometimes broader strokes. In this class we will consider and discuss works of science fiction by authors such as Gregory Benford, Connie Willis, Greg Bear, David Brin, Isaac Asimov and Ursula LeGuin who have the ability to see beyond the limits of what is known to craft their stories. We will also consider the acclaimed writing of scientists, the likes of Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley, Oliver Sacks and Jacob Bronowski and ask how science and science fiction each inform the other.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Korean Painting
Professor Cho
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section 47455
Even though Korean is located between China and Japan and has interacted closely with its neighbors, it has developed its own distinct cultural and artistic tradition. Focusing on Korean painting in the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910), this course will consider art as a cultural expression of social expectations, politics, material cultures, belief system, and wider filed of culture. Placing equal emphasis on stylistic analysis, social context, and cultural values, it will examine major issues in Korean painting history: establishment of indigenous tradition, foreign influences and intercultural relations, religious and political function, social status of painters, institutional structure of Royal Academy, patrons and audience, aesthetic theory and practice of collecting.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Language and Literature of Love in Islam
Professor Reid
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50
Section: 47465
This course offers an introduction to the literary traditions of Islamic mysticism. Through extensive readings in poetry and prose, it provides a survey of classical and medieval Sufism (the main form of Islamic mysticism). Sufi literature remains very much alive today: the poetry of Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi, is sung by pop stars in Tajikistan and stocked on the shelves of New Age bookstores in Los Angeles. What is unique about the mystical path in Islam? What are its main themes and metaphors? Do you have to be a Muslim to be a Sufi?
The course will address these questions by reading Sufi texts along with others written by Muslim authors outside the Sufi tradition in order to develop an appreciation of classical Islamic sensibilities about the human relationship to the divine. Readings will include selections from non-literary genres as well: biographies of the female mystics and ascetics of early Islam, letters of advice written by spiritual masters and classic formulations of the principles of Sufism. Special emphasis will be placed on developing the ability to read and write about these texts critically. How did tenth-century Muslim men describe contemporary women? What does a hermit’s rejection of society tell us about social problems in the fourteenth century? Why do poets employ daring or even erotic language to describe mystical experiences? The course will discuss the issue of what makes Sufi literature Islamic and why some Muslims have seen it as antithetical to Islam. Classical Sufi literature continues to leave its imprint upon modern writers, and we will also be reading some selections from the modern Islamic world in order to gain a wider perspective on what the path to God means in Islam. Readings may include: poetry from Rumi and Ibn al-Arabi to Khomeini; Attar’s The Conference of the Birds; and al-Sulami’s Book of Sufi Women.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Lenses on Society: Literature and Sociology
Professor Phillips
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
Section 47489
Literature is art, and yet there are novels that have changed the way we understand our society. Sociology sees itself as a science, but there have been sociological works so compelling argued that they had a readership well beyond the discipline. This course pairs novels of social commentary with excerpts from contemporary works of sociology on the same or similar theme. For each novel, students will consider three questions: (1) How do literature and sociology approach the same topic? (2) What insights are unique to each and to what extent to the two genres compliment or contradict each other? (3) Are these works dated by their social criticism, or do they manage to transcend their social context? The works include: Lynd and Lynch, Middletown; Thornstein Veblin, The Theory of the Leisure Class; Sinclair Lewis, Babbit; David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd; Howard Becker, The Outsiders; Jack Kerouac, On the Road; Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart; Brett Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique; Kate Milet, Sexual Politics; and Janice Galloway, The Trick to Keep Breathing.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Liars! Unreliable Narrators and Their Fictions
Professor Burningham
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Section 47474
When Plato imagined his ideal republic nearly 2500 years ago, he insisted that “poets” (by which he meant all storytellers) must be subject to strict censorship precisely because what they essentially do is tell lies. Still, while it is true that all fiction is fundamentally based on the notion of narrative falsehood, some storytellers are bigger liars than others. Some storytellers weave webs of deceit that are not just coincidentally false, but deliberately so. Other storytellers recount what they think is the truth only to find out that they, themselves, have been deceived. Still others tell us what they think are patent lies only to discover later that they have been telling the truth all along. Through a close reading of several novels, short stories, and films this course will examine the dubious fictions created by what Wayne Booth called “unreliable narrators.” Within our discussions we will explore the carefully constructed relationship that exists between narrators and narratees (not to mention authors and readers) and the act of faith upon which this relationship ultimately rests. We will also examine the function of imaginative literature in the world at large —as opposed to history, biography, and several other narrative genres— in order to test Plato’s theory that “truth” is better “fiction.” Finally, we will consider the act of lying itself, and will examine what motivates people to construct such elaborate falsehoods. Literary readings will include Miguel de Cervantes’s short stories “The Deceitful Marriage” and “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” as well as selections from his masterpiece Don Quixote de la Mancha; Juan Carlos Onetti’s Farewells; Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo; Julio Cortázar’s “The Night Face Up”; John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure; Johnny Payne’s Kentuckiana; and Chuck Palahnuik’s Fight Club. Films will include Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; Christopher Nolan’s Memento; Byran Singer’s The Usual Suspects; David Fincher’s Fight Club; and David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Los Angeles: The Fiction
Professor Gustafson
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
Section 47498
Any study of Los Angeles must include Hollywood, and this course will give attention to the Hollywood novel, a genre of literature that was, in the words of one critic, "the great literary invention of the Thirties." But along with using fiction to draw aside the curtain for an inside look at Hollywood, the course hopes to provide students, whether they be natives or newcomers to L.A., with a deeper, richer sense of place. Authors to be read include Joan Didion, Budd Schulberg, Nathanael West, James Cain, Yxta Maya Murray, Luis Valdez, Anna Deavere Smith, Sandra Loh, Karen Yamashita, and Chester Himes.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Many Faiths: Many Truths?
Professor Crossley
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Section: 47470
This 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 own religious tradition and dismissal of 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 course explores the meaning of "religion" itself, and how it relates to personal faith, on the one hand, and the cumulative, ever-changing traditions we associate with the great religious traditions of the world, both Western and Eastern, on the other hand. Religious traditions are a part of the cultures they serve. To ask the question, which is the true religion is comparable to asking the question, which is the true culture? In this course, the question is rather, How do we relate the religious tradition or traditions of one culture to those of another? What are the significant differences? Are there major commonalities? Can they live together in tolerance and peace? Can they go beyond tolerance to cooperation? The required texts include The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament, and The Qur'an (selected passages expressing the "absoluteness" of each tradition); W.C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion; J. Hick, An Interpretation of Religion; A. Sharma and K.M. Dugan (eds.), A Dome of Many Colors; K. Armstrong, A History of God; and J. Hick and P. Knitter (eds.), The Myth of Christian Uniqueness.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Meaning of Life Through the Modern Japanese Short Story
Professor Sokolsky
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section: 47459
The modern short story is usually a concise means by which an author tries to convey important messages about the meaning of life, the purpose of an individual in society, and the various problems that people must grapple with in their daily existences. In a good short story, every word, image, object, and character counts. Each is loaded with meaning. The job of the reader is to decode these clues to discern what the author is trying to say. In this class, we will look at the short stories produced by modern Japanese writers. While modern Japanese literature has been highly influenced by western literature, it also has its own tradition of literary expression. Not only will we compare how the genre of the short story in Japanese literature varies over time, but we will also compare how Japanese writers of the modern short story vary with some famous western counterparts in expressing ideas about the individual in modern society. By learning how to read these highly symbolic texts, we will think about the questions raised about the individual in modern society and then learn to write analytic essays in response to the topics considered in these texts. The class will begin with a reading and discussion of the theory underlying the short story genre. Then we will examine how Japanese writers have incorporated this theory into their own works, and discuss how these works convey meaning to us on the other side of the globe in the 21st century. In some cases, we will look at filmic versions of the texts and compare the two genres, short story and film, to see how the impact of a work can vary depending on the genre used. Class time will be spent analyzing these texts and discussing the relevance of the texts to our own lives. The required reading includes The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, edited by Theodore Goossen and Narrative/Theory edited by David H. Richter. Also, a course reader that includes Guy Du Maupassant's "The Necklace," Kate Chopin's "The Awakening," Anton Chekhov's "The Lady With the Dog," and Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet."
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Memory, History and Identity in Postmodern Literature and Film
Professor Halberstam
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section: 47457
In this course we will read some novels and watch some films that direct their attention to the problem of memory in an “information age.” In some of the texts, the will to remember reveals the unreliability of official histories; and in others, memory and its failures will symbolize the loss of discrete notions of identity. In the novels we look at, plagiarism, repetition and recall are the textual strategies for bringing the past into the present and disorganization, dislocation and disturbance are the methods by which postmodern writers allow their present to infect the future. In the films we are watching, cinematic form itself proposes new modes of remembering and ordering information. Throughout our readings and viewings, we will pay careful attention to the changing dynamics of race, class, gender and sexuality in relation to emergent modes of world-making. Readings will include the following texts: Toni Morrison, Beloved; Chang Rae Lee, A Gesture Life; Michael Cunningham, The Hours; and Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. Films will include: Memento; Run Lola Run; Dude, Where's My Car; and Finding Nemo.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Modern Russian Art
Professor Bowlt
MW, 8:30 - 9:50
Section: 47452
The course begins with the 18th century and ends with the Putin 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/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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Modernity and the City
Professor Norindr
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
The 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Music and Science in the Renaissance, 1440 - 1610
Professor Ongaro
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
Section: 47492
The period between 1440 and 1610 is a time of exciting changes in the intellectual, social, political, scientific and religious life of Western Europe. Music had a prominent place in this society, not only as entertainment, but also as a religious and political statement. In this course we will explore how musicians of the period--the contemporaries, among others, of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Martin Luther, Christopher Columbus, Queen Elizabeth I--reacted to their environment in producing and marketing their music. No prior knowledge of music is required; important musical concepts and musical examples will be studied and illustrated in class, as needed. The readings will include excerpts from the writings of Renaissance authors, as well as from modern studies of the period.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Nation and Its Other in American Literature and Film
Professor Nguyen
MWF, 12:00 - 12:50
Section: 47479
This course examines the development of American national identity. We will start historically at the origins of American society, in the nexus of cultural confrontation between the English settlers, native Americans, and African slaves. Although these initial confrontations seem to be explicitly about race, we will also see the complex interplay between class, gender, sexuality and cultural self-imagination. This complex interplay has shaped the early foundation of American identity and exclusion from that identity. We will continue to explore the legacy of this early identity as it has evolved into the 19th and 20th centuries, and we will examine how our contemporary notions of cultural difference concerning other issues besides race--feminism, homosexuality, foreigners (legal and undocumented), and the poor--find some of their origins in this legacy. Ultimately we will make inquiries about the present state of American national identity: is it singular and unified or multiple and in negotiation? The tensions between different groups, resulting from struggles for cultural and economic dominance, have long been a primary concern for American artists. It is through the work of writers and filmmakers that we will explore these tensions, both as the content with which they are concerned, and as the formal limits of their work that they wrestle with. Ultimately, what we are concerned with is the function of literature and film as part of America's cultural self-expression; literature and film both expose and embody the tensions and contradictions of American character. Film screenings outside of class, from 5-7 PM on at least a half-dozen evenings, are mandatory. Students should also expect to deal with controversial issues that may be construed as "offensive" or "difficult." Texts may include: Douglass, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave; Erdrich, Love Medicine; Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!; Franklin, Autobiography; Melville, Benito Cereno; Morrison, Beloved; Selby, Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn. Films may include: Ford, The Searchers; Griffith, The Birth of a Nation; Scorsese, Taxi Driver; Welles, Citizen Kane; and lesser known independent films.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
On Beauty
Professor Tiffany
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50; Section 47483
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20; Section 47501
Beauty is a touchy subject these days--in part, some would say, because beauty has disappeared, or been pushed, from the horizon of serious discussion. Just to talk about beauty as an idea today, we usually have to historicize it (relegate it to the past), or approach it ironically (to speak as if something were beautiful). What would it mean, however, to take seriously the pleasures, the anxieties, and the power we associate with beauty? Would it be necessary to recover a sense of the relation between philosophy and beauty, or between art and beauty? To begin to answer these many questions about beauty, we will read widely in the history of aesthetics (the philosophy of art), but also analyze essays of art and literary criticism, by authors ranging from Edmund Burke to Arthur Danto to Roland Barthes. We will consider the enormous impact of popular culture on contemporary notions of beauty, moving from Vogue magazine to fractal diagrams to hip hop. In addition, to complicate our sense of beauty--and to discover its partial nature--we will read back and forth between poetry and philosophy, as if we might fashion, through dialogue, a kaleidoscopic sense of beauty. These imaginary conversations between (for example) Plato and Baudelaire, Lessing and Emily Dickinson, or Plotinus and John Ashbery, will form the backbone of our analytic project, and they will also supply us with a conceptual and imaginative vocabulary adequate to probing the mystery of beauty.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Pain and Suffering in Literature and Philosophy
Professor Meeker
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
Section: 47482
Critic and essayist Elaine Scarry has claimed that “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” On the one hand, we might agree with Scarry that pain can never be completely or truly expressed in words. On the other, we might also understand the act of writing as involving or producing moments of pain and suffering. Not only can writing be painful, but the desire to write in the first place can often be linked to an experience of pain or to an episode of suffering. In this course, we will examine the ways in which an eclectic series of writers--novelists, poets, philosophers, and playwrights--have represented pain in their works. In addition, we will investigate the role played by pain and suffering in generating written texts. We will look at the idea of pain as both an inspiration for works of literature and as the basis for philosophical systems, and in doing so we will pose some of the following questions: how do we represent pain? how does it define our experience(s)? how do we escape it? Is there a connection between the experience of pain and the act of thinking? is writing necessarily a form of suffering? We will try to understand how pain and suffering provide not only a starting point for reflection on human existence but a kind of limit to language itself--a boundary made visible in the moment when words don’t seem to be able to express what exactly makes pain so painful. We will also look closely at the writings of some philosophers who themselves were intimately acquainted with the experience of pain (often as a result of illness) in order to decipher what place this knowledge of suffering might have occupied in their works. Finally, we will attempt to think about the practice of writing as an effort to mitigate or assuage different forms of suffering. Readings will include: Jim Crace, Being Dead; the Book of Job; Sigmund Freud, Dora; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Montaigne, Essays; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Rousseau, Confessions; selections from Seneca’s Letters; Shakespeare, King Lear.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Painting and Prints of Japan's Floating World
Professor Reynolds
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section: 47455
This section is now titled Korean Painting.
Ukiyo-e, the so-called "images of the floating world," present a vivid and highly romanticized vision of the dynamic urban culture of Japan during the 17th and 19th centuries. This class will examine the paintings and woodblock prints of the "floating world" and their relationship to literature and popular culture. We will consider ways in which prints glamorized life in the licensed prostitution quarters and represented sexuality and gender. We will discuss the role of ukiyo-e in the promotion of kabuki theater, and will study some of the strategies that print designers and publishers used to dodge government censorship as they ruthlessly parodied contemporary life, literature, and venerable artistic traditions. The class will draw on recent scholarship on prints, the novels of Ihara Saikaku, kabuki plays, and writings in cultural studies. Readings will include Donald Jenkins, The Floating World Revisited, Timon Screech’s Sex and the Floating World and a course reader.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Plato and His Contemporaries
Professor Lewis
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
Section: 47499
Plato 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Plays and the Question of Performance
Professor Anderson
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section: 47458
Plays are meant to be seen, not read, something we can forget when studying drama in the classroom. This course focuses on plays that are themselves obsessed with questions of performance, to makes us think about this fact. Using texts by Shakespeare, Behn, Wycherley, Gay, Goldsmith, Wilde, and Stoppard, among others, we will examine scenes that reflect on the generic conventions of drama: plays within plays, characters masquerading as other characters, discussions of theatrical conventions. We will ask questions such as, what is performance accomplishing in each of these plays? Does this internal reference to performance change our experience of the play? Do cultural conditions inform this thematic pattern? Does the gender of the character affect the way performance is implemented? Does the gender of the playwright?
There will be four writing assignments for the class: a close reading of a short scene or soliloquy, a mini-research paper on the background of one playwright and the performance history of his or her play, a response paper on a play and topic of your choice, and a longer, analytical paper at the end of the semester. And, because we are talking about performance, students should come prepared to stage scenes from some of the plays we read. Reading include William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew; Hamlet; Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle; William Wycherley, The Country Wife; Aphra Behn, The Luckey Chance; Eliza Haywood, A Wife to be Lett; John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera; Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer; Hannah Cowley, The Belle’s Stratagem; Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; and Michael Frayn, Noises Off.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Political Fiction
Professor Arkhipov
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Section: 47473
The instructor of this course in Fall 2004 will be different from the instructor who issued this course description during a previous semester.
This course adapts the goals of the category "Literature, Thought and the Arts" to the context of the changing relations between the aesthetic and ideological principles that have governed Russian literature in the twentieth century. Modern Russian literature evolved within a context so politicized that even supposedly "apolitical" works conveyed political meaning, and it therefore provides a particularly fitting body of material for this investigation. The course further aims to provide students with an active understanding of various literary terms and devices, and the ability to analyze works of literature in relation to both the works' own internal structures and the conventions of various literary periods and critical schools. The reading list includes Babel Isaac, Collected Stories; Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog; Chukovskaya, Sophia Petrovna; Gladkov, Cement; Mayakovksy, The Bedbug and Selected Poems; Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Terts, On Socialist Realism and the Trial Begins; and Zamiatin, We.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Prescriptions for Faith: Jews and Christians of the First Centuries
Professor Weisman
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Section: 47471
The 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Religious Experience and the Making of Western Culture
Professor Briggs
MW, 3:30 - 4:50
Section: 47508
This 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Representing the Holocaust: History, Memory and National Identity
Professor Gillerman
MW, 12:00 - 1:50
Section: 47477
The act of remembering is related to the repository of images and ideals that constitute the societies in which we live. Memory has not only to do with the past, but with those who do the remembering. Far from being merely an individual experience, memory also constitutes a social act. We will explore the distinctive and often conflicting memories of the Holocaust produced in post- World War II America, Germany, and France. How did the French evolve the myth of the Resistance to appease their conscience and restore self-esteem? Why is Anne Frank the world's most famous Holocaust victim? How is an historical event like the Holocaust interpreted through a distinctively American lens? What happens when the Holocaust and Hollywood meet? Applying a multi-disciplinary approach to texts, this course will focus on questions of cultural and national identity as well as contemporary debates over historical methodology.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Speaking Minds
Professor Pancheva
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section: 47460
In studying the mind, cognitive science addresses the ever-fascinating question of what makes us human. From among the cognitive faculties, language is perhaps the best to reveal the workings of the human mind. Understanding what constitutes knowledge of language, how we learn language and process it in real time, and how the brain supports language, promises to unravel a fundamental aspect of the architecture of cognition. Questions about the nature and structure of language as a cognitive capacity, about its representation in mind, and embodiment in the brain have intrigued linguists, philosophers of mind, cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists for a long time and have engendered lively intellectual debates. In this class, we will read and critically evaluate works on the relationship between language, mind and brain. Selected Readings: Baumgartner, Peter and Sabine Payr (eds.), Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists; Fetzer, James. H., Philosophy and Cognitive Science; Guttenplan, Samuel, Mind's Landscape: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind; Minkel, J.R.,“A Way with Words” Scientific American; Pinker, S, How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct; Bayley, J., Elegy for Iris: A Memoir; Lenhoff, H. et al, “Williams Syndrome and the Brain” Scientific American; Sacks, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales; Bechtel, W., P. Mandik, J. Mundale, “Philosophy Meets the Neurosciences;” Bechtel, W. et al. (eds.), Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader; Blackwell. Block, Ned, “The Mind as the Software of the Brain;” D. Osherson, L. Gleitman, S. Kosslyn, E. Smith and S. Sternberg (eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science; Carter, Rita, Mapping the Mind; Damasio, AR.,“How the Brain Creates the Mind;” and Damasio, A.R., & Damasio, “Brain and Language”.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
War and Memory in Korean Literature
Professor Kim
TTh, 8:00 - 9:20
Section: 47450
This 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 construct 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 Keller, Richard 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”; Nora Keller, Comfort Woman; and Kim, Lost Names. All readings are in English. No knowledge of Korean language, literature, or culture is required.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Literature and Art
Professor Orenstein
MW, 3:30 - 4:50
Section: 47505
This 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; Judy Chicago, Through the Flower; The Power of Feminist Art Ed. by Broude and Garrard; The Guerilla Girls Bedside Companion of Art History; Art and Sexual Politics, Ed. T. Hess, essay by Linda Nochlin; Alias Olympia, by Eunice Lipton; Les Guerrillères by Monique Wittig; and Scheherazade Goes West by Fatima Mernissi.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Literature and Film
Professor Modleski
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
Section: 47472
This 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.
In 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.