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This course examines selected works that have been considered classics by and within the Islamic, Indian, Chinese and Japanese traditions. The course is both text- and problem-centered, emphasizing the exploration of views and approaches alternative to those found with the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. It is not intended as an initiation into either these Asian traditions or the specific disciplines represented by the texts and problems assigned for reading and discussion. It is, however, hoped that students will feel challenged personally by these texts and problems; that they will focus thoughtfully on these alternative perspectives; and that they will thereby exercise both their intellects and moral imaginations. The readings may include: The Koran Interpreted; Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History; The Bhagavad Gita; The Buddhist Tradition; Confucius, The Analects; Lao Tzu, The Way and Its Power; Wu Ch'eng-en, Monkey: Folk Novel of China; Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Yoshida Kenko; Anthology of Japanese Literature; and Natsume Soseki, Kokoro. (All works are in translation.)
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Cross-Cultural Rhetoric
Lawrence Green
MWF, 10:00 -10:50
Rhetoric 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Modern Russian Art
John E. Bowlt
MWF, 9:00 - 9:50
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50
The 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/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
Fantastic Tales
Kirill Postoutenko
TTh, 9:30-10:50
This course will examine the question of genre in the works of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), particularly as that question focuses the issue of how a writer as a whole, as a cultural phenomenon, is received and read. Though Gogol emerged from the culture of Romanticism, he was quickly reinterpreted by Russian journalists as a "realist" critic of the Russian social order. Only at the end of the nineteenth century was the generally more accurate, but diametrically opposed, reading of Gogol as a writer of the fantastic and the absurd revived. The course will examine Gogol's works in the intersecting light of these two critical traditions, with somewhat more emphasis placed on the genre of the fantastic. That emphasis will include selected works of English, French, and German "fantastic" literature. In addition to gaining some sense of the overall shape of a major writer's oeuvre (the reading will span Gogol's career from his early "Ukrainian" tales to his novel Dead Souls) students will become aware of how and why (to what ends) that oeuvre can come to be understood in radically different ways as it meets the demands of its culture. The reading list includes Gogol, "The Terrible Vengeance," "The Portrait," "Nevsky Avenue," "The Nose," "The Overcoat," and Dead Souls; DeQuincy, Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Hoffmann, one or two selected tales; de Balzac, The Wild Ass's Skin; Belinsky, "A Survey of Russian Literature in 1847"; Gippius, "Gogol and the Devil"; Eikhenbaum, "How Gogol's 'Overcoat' Is Made"; and Setchkarev, Gogol: His Life and Works.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
City of Myth
Thomas Seifrid
TTh, 9:30-10:50
This course will explore St. Petersburg, Russia as an extraordinary cultural phenomenon. We will consider its role in Russia's history, but also the ways in which Russians have used it to create a "myth of St. Petersburg" which has served in turn as the repository for a complex array of fantasies, anxieties, and hopes. Unlike cities that developed gradually in the middle ages, St. Petersburg was the willful creation of Tsar Peter I, his "window opening onto Europe" which was also intended in its function and design to mirror that Europe. As Dostoevsky's narrator puts 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). In short, we will explore the lively mutual connections between the city and its culture, concentrating on the nineteenth century but ranging from the city's founding in 1703 up through its reincarnation in Petrograd during World War I, then Leningrad in 1924, and its rebirth in 1991 as St. Petersburg. Works to be read include Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman" and Eugene Onegin; Gogol's 'Petersburg tales'; Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment; Bely's Petersburg; Brodsky's Guide to a Renamed City; and others.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Russian Novel
Alexander Zholkovsky
MWF, 10:00-10:50
In this course we will try and understand the peculiar 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 and philosophical stances, gender problematic, response to modernity, interrogation of genre, narrative, and language. In this way, the students will also become aware of modern critical approaches to literature and the novel. Several films will be shown during the semester, helping illuminate the issues of genre and "translation" of the Russian novel across national and aesthetic borders. The problem of "translation" will also be addressed in the literal sense--by paying attention to the mis-and re-interpretations involved in the transmission of the texts from one language (Russian) into another (English). The reading list includes the following (in full or in excerpts): Pushkin, The Captain's Daughter; Lermontov, A Hero of Our Times; Gogol, Dead Souls; Goncharov, Oblomov; Turgenev, Fathers and Sons; Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?; Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground; Crime and Punishment; Devils [The Possessed]; Tolstoy, Childhood; War and Peace.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics of Greek Philosophy and Literature
Kevin Robb
MWF, 11:00-11:50
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 from Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cleanthes.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Steve Moore
TTh, 9:30-10:50
This 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Right, Wrong and Tragedy in Literature
William Cutter
TTh, 9:30-10:50
Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, and the Gospel of Mark, (both in Oxford translations) this course lays out some of the ancient Judeo-Christian definitions of goodness and evil. As a transition to the modern period, we shall examine Shakespeare's Hamlet for its perspective on good and evil, and its treatment of the young person in turmoil about that polarity. Among modern authors who will be read are: Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, J.D. Salinger and Rebecca Goldstein. Students will be expected to develop a sense of the differences between the text as a self-contained cosmos and the text as referring to some condition in the lived world. Readings will include some critical theory on representation and gender perspective.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Imagination and Revolution in Modern Russian Literature
TTh, 11:00-12:20
Jenifer Presto
In this course, we will examine the fascinating period in Russian literature beginning with the Revolution of 1917 and ending with the fall of the Soviet empire. This period was met by radical transformations in the political, social, and economic spheres which had a profound impact on the cultural scene. The literature produced in this period was not only charged with political ideas, but was also extremely innovative and experimental. In this course, we will devote ourselves to an analysis of the forms that the literary imagination took: we will read works that reflected the dreams and ideals of the Soviet state, as well as texts that expressed disillusionment with the regime, paying particular attention to the relationship between political and revolutionary ideas and artistic form in these works. One of the goals of the course will be to destroy the perception common among students that literature written in Russia after 1917 pales in comparison to the literature of the pre-revolutionary period. The reading list for this course includes Akhmatova, Requiem; Babel, Collected Stories; Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog and Master and Margarita; Chukovskaya, Sophia Petrovna; Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Life; Gladkov, Cement; Mayakovksy, The Bedbug; Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Terts, The Trial Begins; and Zamiatin, We.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Landscape and Poetry
Lynn Matteson
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
This 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).
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Los Angeles: The Fiction
Thomas Gustafson
TTh, 11:00-12:20
Los Angeles has always been a place full of hype. Let me add some to it. No city in the United States has a more significant fiction and popular culture associated with it since the 1930s than Hollywood and Los Angeles. As much of the political posturing in the 1990s about sex and violence in films reminds us, throughout the twentieth century Los Angeles/Hollywood has been a primary staging ground--or projection screen--for our political and cultural conflicts, particularly for our debate about the place and influence of popular culture and for our concerns arising from confronting one of America's fundamental contradictions. Opposed to the stories (or songs) of California and the West as a free and open space for escape, renewal and an easy attainment of the good life is the fact of the West as a territory of conquest and oppression. Indeed, the West in general and Los Angeles in particular is not the place where we have escaped from each other. It is where we--Native Americans, Latinos, Blacks, Anglos, Asians, Easterners, Midwesterners, Southerners, immigrants from all over the globe, Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, Protestants, etc.--all met, and will continue to meet. This course offers an opportunity to study Los Angeles and Southern California as a political and cultural borderland: a space of collaboration, friction, conflict and fusion among peoples of various cultures and regions. 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
Plato and His Contemporaries
Frank Lewis
TTh, 11:00-12:20
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
Renaissance Drama
Charles Berryman
TTh, 11:00-12:20
An introduction to Renaissance Drama with special attention to the methods of interpretation--language, history, character and imagination--ways to understand and enjoy dramatic literature created for the Renaissance stage. We shall consider plays by Shakespeare and at least two of his contemporaries (Marlowe and Webster) to see how social, political, and religious concerns are defined and challenged by the action and poetry on the Renaissance stage. The class will read six or seven plays, consider historical information, discuss interpretations, possibly direct and/or act a few scenes, and explore ways to respond with short essays and exams. The reading list includes: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Tempest; Marlowe, Dr. Faustus; and Webster, The White Devil.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Lyric Tradition
Daniel Tiffany
TTh, 11:00-12:20
This is a course in the history of the lyric tradition in poetry. Although lyric poetry was present at the birth of democracy in antiquity, and remains the predominant form of contemporary American and European poetry, we must ask what it means to speak of a lyric "tradition." The course therefore begins with Greek and Roman writers (Sappho and Simonides; Horace and Catullus), and examines through these writers the dominant themes of ancient lyric, as well as its relation to other genres. English lyric poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries occupies a central place in the course--and not without some detailed attention to the poet's craft and the art of prosody. In addition, the course examines what lyric means to modernity, beginning with German Romanticism and extending to the question of literature's relation to the Holocaust. Reading modern poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, and Sylvia Plath, we will inquire about the role of lyric in the formation of modern subjectivity, as well as the place of poetry in the philosophy of art. What role, we must ask, can poetry play in modern society and in the great debates about technology, economics, and politics which dominate our era?
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Chinese Imagination: Culture in Fiction
George Hayden
TTh, 9:30 -10:50
This 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Decoding Medieval Visual Culture
Carolyn Malone
TTh, 11:00-12:20
This 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Readings of the American Southwest
Dagmar Barnouw
TTh, 2:00-3:20
The historically multicultural Southwest with its Native American, Hispanic, and "Anglo" populations has been documented as a social (political) reality but also constructed by a modern cultural imagination for difference in the work of writers, painters and photographers who sought to represent it. Their representational perspectives reflect the different ways and different degrees to which cultural norms and patterns have been shared here and changed in the process, but also aspects of an enduring distinctness. We will study a variety of texts and images (photographs and paintings) that have recorded or (reconstructed) sameness and change in the Southwestern coexistence of different cultures over time.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Philosophy in Fiction: Conrad, Kant and Kafka
Arnold Heidsieck
TTh, 3:30-450
This course offers discussions of selected early twentieth-century novels--and how philosophical theories from the German tradition might help to interpret them. Topics include: European civilization and its faith in historical progress as disguises for imperialist interests; contrasts between European and American views of adolescence and socialization; the conflict of human sympathies and moral doctrine with regard to a person's conduct; 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Modern Literature and Modern Life
William Handley
MWF, 10:00-10:50
This will be a course on how different modernist writers attempt, in their literary texts, to negotiate the dilemmas of life in the twentieth century-especially existential issues concerning how to act and behave honorably in a fragmented world without a sense of shared values and beliefs, in a world increasingly torn apart by wars, hatred, and cynicism. These negotiations and approaches vary from pessimism and despair to stoicism, hope, comedy, and at times downright joy. Readings might include the poetry of W. B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, and Seamus Heaney; and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Michael Cunningham.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Masterpieces of the Short Story
Alexander Zholkovsky
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
This 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."
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Novels and Anti-Novels
Marcus Levitt
MWF, 9:00-9:50
What is a novel? And why is it that Russian authors tend to write "anti-novels" rather than "novels"? Tolstoy once claimed that "the history of Russian literature since the time of Pushkin not merely affords many examples of... deviation from European forms, but does not offer a single example of the contrary... In the recent history of Russian literature there is not a single artistic prose work rising at all above mediocrity which quite fits into the form of a novel, epic, or story." In this course we will try and understand the peculiar phenomenon of the "Russian novel" and its struggle against "European form" during its nineteenth century golden age. This period--from Pushkin and Gogol to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky--was an era of bold artistic and intellectual experimentation with the "novel,"transforming it into a major vehicle of Russian cultural self-expression. Thus course will explore the ways in which Russian "novels" sought new means to express new cultural realities, philosophical and aesthetic issues. This approach will enable us to examine such things as narrative presentation, character types, issues of gender, literary techniques, and the various ways in which literary form itself can carry meaning.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Human Reason: Its Scope and Limits
Janet Levin
MWF, 12:00-12:50
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
A World of Heroes
Jerold Frakes
TTh, 12:30-1:50
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 Quijote; Popol Vuh; and John Milton, Paradise Lost.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Art and Text in Imperial Rome
Anthony J. Boyle
TTh, 12:30-1:50
A detailed critical and analytic study of selected works of literature and of visual art (architecture, sculpture, painting) from early imperial Rome. The focus will be on intense reading and intellectual analysis of the works themselves, of their relationship to each other and to the culture(s) which produced them. The course will focus on two periods: the Rome of Augustus (27 BCE-14 CE) and that of Nero (54-68 CE). The art for the course includes the following: Augustan Period: Augustan monuments, esp. the Forum Augusti; official sculpture, esp. the Altar of Peace and the Prima Porta; and Roman imperial painting, esp. the 'ornamental style' and sacro-idyllic; and Neronian Period: Architecture, esp. the Palaces; Sperlonga sculptures and the Laocoon; Roman imperial painting, esp. the 'theatrical style.' The texts for the course will include: Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Fasti; Petronius, Satyricon; Seneca, Troades ('Trojan Women'); and Tacitus, Annals.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Girlhood: Twentieth Century Perspectives
Alice Gambrell
TTh, 12:30-1:50
When 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; Nabokov's Lolita). We will then turn to the contemporary moment, paying special attention to the narrative innovations of Toni Morrison's 1974 novel Sula, 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, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jayne Anne Phillips), we will look at writing by young feminists who are currently working to reclaim the importance and to redefine the significance of the "girl."
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Use of Love
Carla Kaplan
TTh, 9:30 -10:50
This course will seek to understand the "cultural work" performed by love stories. By looking at love stories from the middle ages to the present, we will seek to investigate why love stories seem always to have been so extraordinarily popular. How does telling love stories help us to narrate ourselves, both collectively and individually? How does the love plot fashion a "self"? How does it help us imagine ourselves as a people or as a nation? How do romances do the cultural work of creating and maintaining boundaries of race, class, sexuality and gender? How much difference is there between the cultural work done by traditional love stories and that done by non-traditional ones? What, finally, counts as a "love story"? We will test the limits of the genre by reading a wide variety of texts, from medieval to Harlequin to gay romances, from novels which take for granted that the proper and likely outcome of a human life is marriage and family to novels that seem very skeptical about the romance plot, perhaps about any connection between two people. Our reading of the romance will take place in a context of both films and non-literary texts that will help us explore some of the different social, psychological, historical, allegorical, and national "uses" of love. Our texts are likely to include: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Bronte, Jane Eyre; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Malory, Morte de Arthur; Gone With the Wind; Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Walker, The Color Purple; Naylor, Mama Day; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Casablanca; West Side Story; Peck, Martin and John; Titanic; It Could Happen to You.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Narrative Forms in Literature and Film
William H. Brown
MW, 2:00 - 4:30
This 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Prescriptions for Faith: Jews and Christians of the First Centuries
Yaffa Weisman
TTh, 12:30-1:50
The two centuries before the birth of Jesus and the two centuries that followed his crucifixion witnessed the formation of theological and institutional paradigms that significantly influenced Western culture. During these centuries, Judaism's and early Christianity's literature such as the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Christian Scriptures helped shape people's diverse faiths. This course examines, through the reading and interpretation of theses texts, 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. Texts read in the class will reflect the competing ideas and responses to the particular historical circumstances proposed by different sects, 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
Post Cards from the Past: Travel Writing in Pre-Modern Europe
Andrea Frisch
TTh, 12:30-1:50
This course will introduce you to European travel writers of the 13th-16th centuries, and to the maps and visual images they both consulted and produced. Some of the authors will be familiar to you, if only in name, such as Marco Polo, Cristoforo Colombo and Amerigo Vespucci; others, no less prominent in their own time, play a less vivid role in our current cultural imagination (e.g., Bartolome de Las Casas and Michel de Montaigne). One of the major goals of the course is in fact to try to understand how and why certain of these travelers have come to stand for entire ideological programs (be they programs of "discovery and civilization" or of "destruction and appropriation"), while others have tended to elicit considerably less charged responses. Several types of question will help us move toward this goal: How do these travelers represent themselves and their motivations for travel in their writings? How were they represented by other writers in their own time? How do they represent the lands and people that they encountered? What are some of the cultural and technological factors that helped shape ideas about non-European, non-Christian civilizations in the 13th-16th centuries? How has the image of, say, Columbus changed over time? How has it remained the same?
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Nation and Its Others in American Literature and Film
Viet Nguyen
TTh, 12:30-1:50
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
The Literature and Art of AIDS in America
David Roman
MWF, 1:00-1:50
This course examines the art and literature of the American AIDS epidemic. We will survey a diverse field of AIDS literature and art including autobiography, poetry, drama, essays, fiction, film, performance, painting and photography. One of our goals for the semester will be to trace the ways that AIDS is represented both in traditional genres and community-based art projects. Our course will be historical and interdisciplinary. We will focus on the literary, performing, and visual arts produced throughout the United States during the past two decades. Throughout the course, we will be taking up questions of power and social change, especially as they relate to the arts. The course will address the following questions: What is the relationship between AIDS and representation? How do AIDS representations circulate and to what effect? What is the relationship between artistic production and community survival? What are the primary methods for interpreting AIDS literature, art, and culture? How do the arts and humanities shape our understanding of AIDS? Readings for this course will include: Peter Adair, Absolutely Positive (video documentary); Marlon Riggs, Tongues United (film); Thom Gunn, Man with Night Sweats (poetry); Carolyn Jones and Kermit Cole, Living Proof (a photography exhibit); Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story (a memoir); Rebecca Brown, The Gifts of the Body (short stories); Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir; Gil Cuadros, City of God (poetry and short fiction); Sarah Schulman, People in Trouble (a novel); Jonathan Larson, Rent (a musical); Sapphire, Push (a novel); Tony Kushner, Angels in America (a play); Jonathan Demme, Philadelphia (a film); and Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Film and Literature
Tania Modleski
TTh, 11:00 -12:20
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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature, Songs and Opera
Cornelius Schnauber
MW, 2:00-3:20
Many of the world's most famous operas, song cycles, oratorios and symphonic works are based on works of known literature. This course gives an introduction into literary works of German and other European authors which have been used most often for music or have inspired some of the most well- known musical masterpieces. It will include Goethe's Werther, Egmont and Faust, Schiller's Don Carlos and William Tell, Shakespeare's Othello, Wild's Salome, tales of E.T. A. Hoffmann, plays and stories by French authors and poems by Goethe, Heine and other Romantic German poets which have been used for some of the greatest songs and song cycles. In this course students will also learn how to analyze the content and style of the chosen literary works and will be introduced into how these works were put to music in different styles by different composers from different countries, such as German composers Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms, Humperdinck, R. Strauss, Austrian composers Mozart(Salzburg), Schubert, Wolf, Mahler, French composers Berlioz, Bizet, Gounod, Massenet, Italian composers Rossini, Verdi, Busoni, Russian composers Mussorsky, Tschaikovsky, German-French composer Offenbach, Hungarian-Austrian-German composer Liszt, and British composer Britten. In the case of opera and songs, students will also analyze how musical phrasing and intonation relate to spoken intonation and prosodics of written text. While the focus of the course will remain on the literary text, the introduction into musical style will be equally important.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
War and Memory in Korean Literature
Jinhee Kim
MW, 2:00-3:20
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, the Korean War, and the War in Vietnam. We will explore the links between collective and individual experiences, and the centrality of memories as a means to construct the past. Works by Korean authors (Chông-hyo Ahn, Chông-rae Cho, and Man-sik Ch'ae) will be closely examined along with recent publications by Korean-American writers (Nora Okja Keller, Helie Lee, and Heinz Insu Fenkl). Students will be especially 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: Chông-hyo Ahn, Silver Stallion; Chông-rae Cho, Playing With Fire; Heinz Insu Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother; Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman; Richard W. Kim, Lost Names; and Helie Lee, Still Life With Rice. All readings are in English. No knowledge of Korean language or literature is required.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Reading Scripture as Skeptic and Believer: The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament, and the Qur'an
Reuven Firestone
MW, 2:00-3:20
This course will examine some of the ways through which the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam establish paradigms of interpretation. We will read sections of each scriptural tradition from the "inside"--that is, as if we are believers in the religious system that the Scripture represents, and also from the "outside"--as critical observers of a religious system through its classic literature. This methodology will enable the student to gain a deep appreciation for different approaches to reading Scripture at the same time that she will learn how Scriptures "read" the world. One unique aspect of this class is that we will study how the three great monotheistic scriptures read some of the "same" topics. One sample topic, for example, might be Abraham as religious founder. Is the Abraham of Islamic Scripture the same person as the Abraham of Christian Scripture, or of Jewish Scripture? Other possible common topics include the meaning of prophecy, God's relationship with humans, and the destiny of humankind. The texts will include Wayne A. Meeks, ed., Harper Collins Study Bible; Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall, transl., The Meaning of the Glorious Koran; F.E. Peters, Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature and the Choosing Self
Susan Laemmle
TTh, 2:00-3:20
This 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--as well several essays. The course reading list includes the following works: Adam and Eve and The Joseph Story from the Bible; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House; Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman; William Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence"; Robert Frost, "The Road Less Traveled"; T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; Willa Cather, The Professor's House; Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man; and E. M. Forster, Howards End. In addition to several papers, course requirements include a short- answer midterm, and a take-home essay final examination. If possible, there will be an optional class trip to see a play.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Music and Society in the Renaissance,1440-1610
Giulio M. Ongaro
TTh, 2:00-3:20
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
From the 1990s to the 1890s -- American Fin-de-Siecle Culture
Judith Jackson Fossett
TTh, 2:00-3:20
This course proposes an intense engagement with American literary culture in the last decade of the 19th century. Given our own contemporary anxieties and expectations about the 21st century and prospect for the "new millennium," how might we understand the consequences of the notion of the fin-de-siècle or "end of the century" in light of events--debates about women's rights, racial equality, the "Negro Problem," the "Indian Problem," immigration, massive industrialization, and the possibilities of cultural "degeneration"--that occurred one hundred or so years ago? We will consider a variety of cultural milestones from the period and their impact on literary culture: the "golden age" of exhibitions around the world: Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), the Paris Exhibition (1899), and the St. Louis World's Fair/Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904); the rise of imperialism and global political and economic expansion, the establishment of codified racial segregation in the U.S., and the closing of the American "frontier"; the birth of the "New South" in the wake of the Civil War, the rise of the railroad and the beginning of modern standardized time; scientific innovations like the discovery of radium and the X-ray, and the invention of the moving picture; the popularity of minstrelsy and vaudeville; the creation of the modern Olympiad; as well as the publication of Sigmund Freud's first essays on psychoanalysis. As a consequence, our analysis of larger literary movements such as the rise of naturalism and realism, the tensions between "high" literary culture and its "local color" country cousin, and the relation between American cultural production in this period and its European counterpart will offer rich opportunities to discuss ideas about region, race, gender, labor and technology. Finally, I hope to carve out a course segment on library research, specifically archival work, using microfilm and actual volumes as a means of discovering popular periodicals of the period. A list of primary texts may include works from the following authors: Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Booker T. Washington, Owen Wister, Edward Bellamy, Stephen Crane and Sarah Orne Jewett.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Language of Poetry
Donald Freeman
TTh, 2:00-3:20
This course will explore the close reading of poetry, using the new analytical approaches made possible by contemporary research in cognitive metaphor and poetic syntax. We'll start with the three big Renaissance sonneteers, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, moving from there to Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and the non-dramatic poetry of Ben Jonson and, if time permits, the very difficult poetry of Emily Dickinson. Likely textbooks: an anthology of Renaissance poetry (to be determined); Marlowe's Tamburlaine; Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (1996); Timothy R. Austin, Poetic Voices (1994); a course pack of articles on the stylistics of poetry, including some research that isn't yet published.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Jew in American Fiction
Stanley Chyet
MW, 3:30-4:50
Through 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.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Writing Revolutions: New Fiction in Latin America
Roberto Diaz
MW, 4:00-5:20
In this course we will take up the phenomenon called "the new Latin American narrative," which includes works by authors such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, Juan Rulfo, Luisa Valenzuela, and Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, the most significant forerunner of this major development in twentieth-century literature. We will frame the reading of these authors by addressing literary and historical factors, such as the Cuban Revolution and the internationalization of literary culture in Latin America, which coincided during the 1960s when this phenomenon was recognized inside and outside Latin America. Through close reading and formal analysis of novels and short fictions, we will see how these writers raise questions about political change, social transformation, and literary and cultural value. We will also explore how the new Latin American fiction interrogates the critical vocabulary and concepts usually employed for reading and interpreting works of narrative.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Quest
David Rollo
MWF, 12:00-12:50
The quest is a journey through space and time in search of some object, place, or state that we lack in the present. Its most basic premise is a dissatisfaction with what is. Why should we not simply rest content with what and where we are? What absence drives us on? What do we seek? What will happen to us if we find it? Through what landscape are we travelling? In this course we will look at examples of the quest from widely divergent cultural situations, at quests heroic, philosophical, chivalric, romantic, postmodern. We will look at the ways in which this persistent literary form reveals the most deeply-held ideas and values of a culture and of authors who both embody and oppose those ideals. Readings: Anon., The Quest for the Holy Grail; Anon., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Shakespeare, The Tempest;
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Kate Chopin, The Awakening;
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head; A.S. Byatt, Possession; and Hanif Kureshi, The Buddha of Suburbia. Questers only should embark for this voyage as no guarantees of intellectual safety can be given; the complacent will fall by the wayside or be cast overboard.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature and Modernity
Panivong Norindr
MWF, 12:00-12:50
Beginning in the Renaissance and culminating in the twentieth century, the possibility that values, truth and reality itself can change over time has led different thinkers to different conclusions: Some have welcomed this process of change; others have concluded that unchanging values should be sought and upheld. Now that modernity is perhaps coming to an end (we are now postmodern), these questions are being asked with increasing urgency. In this course we will trace the rise of modernity through selected works of literature, philosophy, and art from the sixteenth century to the present day. The required texts include: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method; Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Michel de Montaigne, Essays; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays; Shakespeare, The Tempest; and Voltaire, Candide, Zadig and Other Stories.
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ARTS AND LETTERS 101g
The Modern Short Story
Albert Sonnenfeld
MW, 3:30 - 4:50
This course is designed to teach techniques of close-reading, to stimulate students' thinking on some key questions raised in fictional form by masters of the short story and novella: the artist and society; the artistic temperament; class conflicts; realism and economics; Romantic Rousseauism vs. miserablism (proletarian art); race relations and conflict in American Southern literature; illusion and reality; fiction into film. At all times there will be implicit instruction in techniques of interpretation of various symbolic systems of expression.
ARTS AND LETTERS 101g
Death and Immortality
Dallas Willard
TTh, 9:30 -10:50
This 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; Decartes, 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"; Wm. 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.
