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SPRING 2003 COURSE GUIDE
Category V: Arts and Letters
ARLT 100g
These 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 Spring 2003 Schedule of Classes.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The African American Literary Legacy
Professor James
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50
This course will analyze the nature and history of Black American writerly strategies, from slavery (Douglass, Jacobs, Washington), through turn-of-the-century and Harlem Renaissance eras (Chesnutt, Dunsbar, DuBois, Hughes, Hurston), to mid-century and contemporary periods (Ellison, Baldwin, Hansberry, Morrison). The course will have a firm aesthetics base as well as a politico-cultural orientation.
Top of PageARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Art and Society in the Ancient World
Professor Pollini
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
This course will examine specific works of art and architecture of the ancient world in a historical cand cultural context. This is not a course about art appreciation or connoisseurship. Instead, the focus will be on those monuments of art and architecture that best represent the religious beliefs, interests, concerns, and aspirations of the society that produced them. Attention will be given to modern misperceptions of the ancient world, as a result of our information about it having been filtered in the past through a biased Judeo-Christian tradition. Other topics of consideration will include the nature of the visual evidence, how fragmentary monuments of art and architecture can be reconstructed, how materials and techniques might have imposed restrictions on the artist/architect, and the limitations of art in reconstructing the past. The texts for the course will include: Marilyn Stokstad, Art History; Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing About Art; and a course manual.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Art and Text in the Imperial Rome
Professor Boyle
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
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: Augustus, Res Gestae (Achievementi) Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Fasti; Petronius, Satyricon; Seneca, Troades (Trojan Women); and Tacitus, Annals.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Chinese Imagination: Culture in Fiction
Professor Hayden
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
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
Cinderella's Stepsisters
Professor H. James
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
The romance plot, which traces the stages of courtship leading to marriage, is one of the most popular and abiding narratives in fiction. While the adventure story reveals the hero's character through his exposure to new and possibly dangerous lands and peoples, the marriage plot reveals the character of the heroine as she encounters opportunities and setbacks at home, at the post office, the ball (or dance), or on a field trip. This course is concerned with non-standard or "perverse" heroines in the romance plot: the women whose characters are revealed by the difficulties they face in cooperating with the great love story that is supposed to govern all forms of happiness for women. Of particular interest are the women who genuinely disappoint the expectations of romance fiction rather than the "ugly ducklings" who grow into swans and satisfy those expectations. What do these "repellent heroines" tell us about the dream of romance? Texts include Sophocles, Antigone; Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well and Taming of the Shrew; Jane Austen, Mansfield Park and Emma; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre and Villette; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Gissing, The Odd Woman; Jean Rhys, The Wide Saragasso Sea; Fay Weldon, The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil; Toni Morrison, Sula; and Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics in Modern Philosophy
Professor Damnjanovic
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
A close reading of several important works in seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy. Emphasis on the cultural context of these works as well as on their philosophical content. The reading include Decartes, Meditations on First Philosophy; Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding (selections); Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, Principles of Nature and Grace; Berkeley, Principles on Human Knowledge; Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics of Greek Philosophy and Literature
Professor Robb
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
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 such authors as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cleanthes.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Conceptions of the Self
Professor Slingerland
TTh, 12:30-1:50
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
This course is intended to introduce students to the various ways in which the "self" has been portrayed (implicitly and explicitly) in both Eastern and Western religious traditions, as well as how these differing conceptions of the self have resulted in quite disparate manners of understanding ethics, the relation of the self to society, the valuation of particular human abilities, and similar issues. A main focus will be the history of the construction of the modern Western, liberal conception of self, and some of the problems endemic to this conception. The idea is to help the student see: 1) that he or she has a conception of him-/herself, whether he or she was previously aware of it or not; 2) where this conception of the self came from, and what some of its tensions are; 3) how any conception of the self is inextricably tied up with theories about human nature and some sort of (usually religious) worldview; and 4) how other conceptions of the self (ancient Greek, Taoist, Confucian) differ from the most dominant in the modern West. Thinkers to be treated include Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Camus, Confucius, and Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu). The required texts include Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; Descartes, Mediations on First Philosophy; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil; Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of Modern Identity; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus; The Analects of Confucius; Chuang-tzu; and a course reader.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Cross Cultural Rhetoric
Professor Green
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
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
Fantastic Tales
Professor Postoutenko
MWF, 10:00 - 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
Girlhood: Twentieth Century Perspectives
Professor Gambrell
TTh, 9:30-10:50
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
Homer, Virgil, Dante
Professor Thalmann
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Virgil based his great epic poem the Aeneid on the Iliad and the Odyssey. Dante chose Virgil as his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy. Through these texts, this course will consider the development and transformation of literary and cultural traditions. It will emphasize techniques of reading, various properties of literary texts such as narrative voice, allusion, and genre, and the development of persuasive written arguments in response to that reading. At the same time, it will introduce students to three critical periods of cultural transformation--the late eighth century B.C.E., Augustan Rome, and the late Middle Ages--and specifically to three stages in the development of the city-state and therefore of the very notion of the state and the political community. Emphasis will be placed on this broader social and cultural context, and specifically on these texts as responses to political developments in their construction of what it means to be a citizen with rights in and responsibilities to a larger polity. Readings: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Virgil’s Aeneid; Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno and Purgatorio complete, selections from Paradiso).
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Human Reason: Its Scope and Limits
Professor Levin
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
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
Imagination and Revolution in Modern Russian Literature
Professor Presto
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
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; Mayakovsky, The Bedbug; Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Terts, The Trial Begins; and Zamiatin, We.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
In Search of America
Professor Handley
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
Through fiction, poetry, essays, and film, this course will examine the idea of America in contrast to American social reality during the twentieth century. Is America an identity or an abstraction from differences? Is it best understood as an idea, a geography of multiple regions, or the flow of capital? Is there “no place like home,” or does every American place resemble every other in a consumer culture? By exploring the tragedy and promise of the American dream’s elusive appeal, we will seek to understand the relationships between materialism and desire, between the ideology of individualism and the communities that claim us, and between romance and nostalgia. The course aims also to interrogate abstract American notions such as “freedom” and “mobility” from African American, white, and gay perspectives, among others, in a collective search for American character. Writers will include John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, Wallace Stegner, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and Anna Deavere Smith.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Japanese Fiction and Film
Professor Bialock
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
This course examines major movements, themes, and genres in Japanese literature and film from the Edo (1603-1868) period to the present. Topics include the development of the modern novel in Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishô (1912-1926) literature, tradition and aesthetics in modern Japanese culture, cinematic and literary representations of war and the atomic bomb, changing perceptions of self, family and the nation in modern Japan, and the use of fantasy and science fiction in the representation of technological and dystopian societies. In examining these themes and topics, particular attention will be paid to the interrelationships between literature and film, and to the ways in which both literature and film combine traditional and modernistic elements in order to make statements about issues related to twentieth century and contemporary Japanese culture. In format, the class will be discussion-based, with brief lectures by the teacher and some student presentations. Videos will be available for viewing at Leavey. Some film screenings may also require attendance outside normal class time. The required texts include Marleigh Grayer Ryan, trans. Japan’s First Modern Novel: “Ukigumo” of Futabatei Shimei; Natsume Sôseki, The Three Cornered World, trans. Alan Turney; Tanizaki, Junichirô, Naomi, trans. Anthonly H. Chambers and In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper; Ibuse Masuji, Black Rain, trans. John Bester; Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker; Yoshimoto Banana, Kitchen, trans. Megan Backus; Enchi Fumiko, Masks, trans. Juliet Carpenter; and a course reader. All readings are in English.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature of Resistance
Professor Weisman
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
How does a culture react to oppression? What literary and artistic products are created in the process? Can literature be an act of resistance? What modes of overcoming oppression are suggested in such literature? The course will explore these issues in a variety of societies and groups that experience(d) oppression deriving from their cultural, religious, gender, and national affiliations. Students will analyze and discuss diverse genres of spiritual, political, military and cultural resistance to subjugation and oppressions, from antiquity to modernity. The various genres will include, but will not be limited to, texts such as biblical narratives, fiction, poetry, sermons, diaries, historical documents and political manifestos, films, and other modes of artistic expression created by authors such as Atwood, Bradbury, Camus, the Dalai Lama, Dylan, Ginsberg, M.L. King Jr., Marx, Orwell, Wolf, and many others. While some lectures will provide the theoretical context for class discussions, most of the critical and analytical work will happen in class as a product of the students’ contributions and participation.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature, Science and Science Fiction
Professor Dilligan
MWF, 8:00 - 8:50
MWF, 9:00-9:50
This is a multidisciplinary class that explores the interactions between literature and science. Course material will deal with some of the major developments in Physics and Biology during this century. The primary texts for the course include scientist’s accounts of scientific discovery, such as James Watson’s The Double Helix; biographies of scientists such as William Poundstone’s biography of John von Neumann, Prisoner’s Dilemma; works that address the ethical and cultural dimensions of scientific discovery, such as Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth; novels by and about science, such as Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; and science fiction novels, such as Benford’s Timescape; Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven; LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Shelley, Frankenstein; Snow, The Two Cultures; Stoker, Dracula; Stirling, The Stone Dogs; Turner, Brain Child; and Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five. The course will make extensive use of the World Wide Web, e-mail and computer multimedia.
ARTS AND LETTERS 101g
Los Angeles: The Fiction
Professor Gustafson
TTh 11:00 - 12:20
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
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
Many Faiths: Many Truths?
Professor Crossley
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
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 the Christian Uniqueness.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Models of the Hero, Ancient and Modern
Professor Dewald
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
Heroism may not take a thousand faces, but it has recently regained new meaning in our media-centered world. In this course we will read two ancient Greek epics with heroes in them, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, and then we will read a modern epic, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, written during World War II. We will use Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces to think with, but our ideas and arguments about heroism will principally be shaped by a close reading of the epic texts. We will additionally confront the religious dimensions of the ancient Greek hero and (for those who wish to do so) explore how events since September 11, 2001 have changed the notion of the hero in a contemporary American context.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Modernity and the City
Professor Norindr
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
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 the Modern Imagination
Professor Simms
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
This class will be devoted to a close study of music from the 20th century that expresses important characteristics of the modern imagination--including social and scientific phenomena, political and racial ideologies, and ideas from the other fine arts and letters of the century. To learn how music intersects the modern world, we will read critical essays, scientific writings, polemics, and works of literature and assess in detail their influence upon selected musical compositions and the outlook of major composers. No reading knowledge of music is necessary, although repeated listening to the assigned music is required. The class sessions will contain lectures, student presentations, and guided discussions. All of the assigned listening is found on cassette tapes on reserve for this class in the Music Library, and the assigned reading is collected in an anthology that may be purchased at the bookstore.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
No-Place? No-Time? Society and Utopian Fiction
Professor Barnouw
TTh, 3:30 - 4:50
Utopia means "no place," but utopian fictions projecting alternate cultures have always been comments on their own. We will read them in their historical contexts, spanning two and a half millennia. The topics to be discussed are the books; lectures will provide the historical contexts; the discussion depends, in part, on the students, guided in each class by a leader who has prepared a short list of questions and suggestions (e.g., imagination and moral power in the Republic; social power and economic structure in Utopia; the power of science in New Atlantis; the perception of the other in Gulliver’s Travels; curiosity in Rasselas; nature vs. culture in the Discourse and the Supplement; anti-industrialism in News from Nowhere; scientific optimism in A Modern Utopia; critique of technocracy, rather than science, in We and Brave New World, and of totalitarianism in 1984; better or different worlds in The Dispossessed; imagination and amoral power in Solaris.)
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Outsider in Modern German Literature and Film
Professor Clausing
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
This course will analyze the predicament of the outsider, the individual who challenges or ignores social norms, the individual who may be excluded from the mainstream, as presented in twentieth-century German literature and film. Beginning with the aftermath of World War I, this thematic approach will examine the impact on the individual of the economic, social, and political conditions that gave rise to Nazi Germany and the holocaust, the subdivision of the country, and the democratic and reunited multicultural modern state, the Federal Republic of Germany. Emphasis will be on the development of analytical skills applied to depictions of the individual’s coping with ever-changing conditions. Literary works to be studied include The Trial (Kafka), The Threepenny Opera (Brecht), The Visit: A Tragi-Comedy (Duerrenmatt), The Tin Drum (Grass), The White Rose (Scholl), The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Boell), How German Is It? (Abish). Films to be analyzed will include Kuhle Wampe, The Blue Angel, The Threepenny Opera, M, The Trial, Jud Suess, Triumph of the Will, The White Rose, The Visit, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Christiane F., Sugarbaby, The Promise, Maybe … Maybe Not, Beyond Silence, and others.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Painting and Prints of Japan's Floating World
Professor Reynolds
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
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
Philosophy in Fiction
Professor Heidsieck
MW, 2:00 - 3:20
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: a young person's struggle between political propriety and his conscience; satirical-ironic perversions of natural law and criminal justice; the proposition of a morally right or wrong rule for action as right or wrong for each and every person in like cases alike; values and conscience as expressions of people’s resentment and “will to power”; the sexual or aggressive origin of consciousness, culture, and neurosis. Readings from Conrad, Kafka, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Portraiture in Asian Art
Professor Cho
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
Portraiture occupies an important position in the visual culture of the East and the West. Portraits visualize how a culture constructs the relationship between individuals and their world: they are capable of exhibiting the perceived divinity, political authority, and social status of the sitter. In spite of indifference to this subject in past studies of Asian art, portraiture as a genre has thrived in Asia, and it has developed significantly different traditions from European portraiture in terms of its ritual functions and cultural meaning. Focusing on the portrait paintings of East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan), this course introduces major issues in portraiture and examines various types of Asian portraits. We will discuss a wide range of portrait practices, history and usage in order to broaden our understanding of portraiture as a cultural and political phenomenon in Asia. Regarding commemorative portraiture--among the most numerous forms of portraiture in Asia--we will investigate its linkage with rituals of death and ancestor worship. We will also compare this work with portraiture from other parts of the world. The text books include Jan Stuart & Evelyn Rawski, Worshiping the Ancestor: Chinese Commemorative Portraits and a course reader.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Post Cards from the Past: Travel Writing in Pre-Modern Europe
Professor 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 been remembered (be it as heroic explorers or as the agents of mass murder)while others have faded from the cultural landscape. Several types of questions 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, and how are they represented in ours? How do they represent the lands and people that they encounter? How were these tales of travel interpreted by their first readers? What are some of the cultural and technological factors that helped shape ideas about non-European, non-Christian civilizations in the 13th-16th centuries? Moving closer to our own day, will look at how pre-modern European travel accounts have shaped the modern Western image of Africa, America, Europe and Asia.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Reading and Opera
Professor Diaz
TTh, 3:30 - 4:50
If opera is the marriage of music and words, what happens when we decide to read rather than simply listen to opera? What can the discourse about literature, which focuses on the verbal, say about a genre that is essentially musical? And what can opera, whose words are often not understood by listeners, say about literature, where words are of the essence? And what happens when we actually read these words? Should we read anything into the fact that opera plots often end with the death of female protagonists, or that some operas appear to distort non-European cultures? Or should we just listen to the glorious music? These are some of the questions that we will consider as we read and listen to such operas as Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Verdi’s Otello, Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and Britten’s Billy Budd. To sharpen our listening, we will also study a series of literary works that serve as sources of operatic libretti, consider opera within their plots, or seem to reply to opera, including Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Shakespeare’s Othello, Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Melville’s Billy Budd. The class will attend one or two opera performances.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Renaissance Drama
Professor Berryman
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50
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
Representing the Holocaust: History, Memory and National Identity
Professor Gillerman
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20
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
Right, Wrong and Tragedy
Professor Adler
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Being human means making choices, even though choices may be limited or may be trumped by circumstances beyond our control. In this course we study choices through the dual lenses of literature and ethics. Literature shows us the trajectories of choices from the perspectives of all the characters affected. Ethics identifies for us the thinking on which choices are based, the assumptions about duty, pleasure, and relationships that ground ethical choices. Ethics gives us a shared language so we can talk more precisely about right and wrong in the assigned literature and also understand the basis of on another’s values even when we do not share them. In our readings we will also be asking, “How should people confront situations they did not choose and cannot escape?” Our readings will be Genesis 22 (the Binding of Isaac), some short stories, and several novels: Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Albert Camus’ The Plague.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Speaking Minds
Professor Pancheva
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
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
War and the Literature of Trauma
Professor McCabe
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
This class will focus primarily upon literature responding to World Wars I and II. We will explore the impact of modern technology on warfare and its consequences upon experience and identity. As we explore the horrors and inhumanity of war, we will investigate how gender influences the specific traumas of the front as well as those which permeate civilian life. We will also examine the way various writers construct "post-traumatic stress syndrome" in the aftermath of war. In addition, we will examine the representation of patriotism as well as pacifism, and how these representations craft the "other" as enemy as well as concepts of national identity. We will study fiction, poetry, non-fiction prose and films. Readings include Dos Passos, Three Soldiers; Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Shaw, Major Barbara; Stein, Wars I Have Seen; Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five; Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and Three Guineas; and a selection of poetry. Films include Hitchcock, Saboteur and Wyler, Best Years of Our Lives.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
War and Violence in Ancient Greece and Rome
Professor Nagle
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
In the Iliad and the Odyssey Homer established the theme of violence as one of the principal topics of the western literary tradition. The great playwrights of fifth century Athens followed the lead of Homer and gave central place to the problem of violence in their theatrical productions. In Sophocles' Antigone, for instance, a young woman resists the rulers of her city for what she thinks are legitimate reasons but is forced to pay the penalty of her defiance with her life. Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, also resisted authority and was executed by a vengeful populace. A great story teller from Roman times, Plutarch, spins yarns about the heroes of the Roman Republic such as Fabius who held off the great Carthaginian general Hannibal from the gates of Rome; the Gracchi brothers (often compared to the Kennedys), who were killed in civil strife; and the lovers, Mark Antony and Cleopatra driven to commit suicide by their enemy Octavian. With Julius Caesar we have his own account of the conquest of the Celtic tribes of Gaul, his forays across the Rhine into Germany and across the Channel into Britain. The course will focus on selections from the above authors as well as selections from Herodotus on the wars between Persia and the Greeks, and from Thucydides on the war between Sparta and Athens. The reading list includes Homer, Odyssey; Sophocles, The Theban Plays (the two Oedipus plays and Antigone); Plato, Last Days of Socrates (Apology, Crito, Phaedo); M. I. Finley, The Portable Greek Historians (key selections from Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Polybius); Plutarch, Makers of Rome (selections from his Roman lives: Coriolanus, Fabius, the Gracchi); Plutarch, Fall of the Roman Republic (more Roman lives: Marius, Caesar, Cicero, Antony); and Caesar, The Gallic Wars.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Ancient Literature
Professor Eskenazi
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
As heroes or helpmates, prophets or sages, victims or warriors, women make striking appearances in the Bible and other ancient Jewish literature. This course will examine these female representations, as well as their interpretations in later traditions. In addition to discovering the wide variety of women in the Bible and other ancient writings, our purpose will be to cultivate critical skills in assessing meanings derived from such texts. We will ask: What can we learn about beliefs concerning women? What do these reveal about the lives of actual women? What influence did these stories have on subsequent perceptions of gender issues? How do these stories find expression in today's world? We will concentrate on several critical approaches, including literary and historical. The books for the course include The Oxford Study Bible; Bellis, Helpmates; Harlots, Heroes: Women's Stories in the Hebrew Bible; Darr, Far More Precious than Jewels: Perspectives on Biblical Women; Meyer, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Woman in Context; Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality; and Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Literature and Art
Professor Orenstein
MW, 3:30 - 4:50
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; and Les Guerrillères by Monique Wittig.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
A World of Heroes
Professor Frakes
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
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 Quixote; Popol Vuh; and John Milton, Paradise Lost.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The World of the Red Chamber Dream
Professor Furth
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
Hong lou meng, sometimes translated as A Dream of Red Mansions or The Story of the Stone, is probably the greatest masterpiece of fiction ever produced in China, and a work that has enchanted generations since it was first written in the mid eighteenth century. Composed over many years by Cao Xueqin, an idle scholar living in genteel poverty in Beijing, its l20 chapters are at once a mystical allegory, a tragic romance, a social novel of manners, and an encyclopedia of a great civilization's culture. This class will take the five volumes of A Dream as its core, using the elegant translation of David Hawkes, published by Penguin. Supporting readings will be from classical works of philosophy, poetry, fiction and drama that shaped the outlook and sensibilities of the author and audience of this work, and/or that are presented as significant in the lives of the novel's characters. These will include selections from the Confucian Four Books, the philosophical Daoist classic Zhuangzi, Tang Xianzu's sweeping 16th century dramatic opera Peony Pavillion (Mudan ting ), and classic short stories including "The Yellow Millet Dream" and "The Story of Yingying." Thematically we will use these readings as an introduction to Chinese civilization in its last century of security and prosperity before the coming of the West. We will be exploring how one enters the social and moral world of another culture through its works of art, and the boundaries between literature and history. Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century by Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski (Yale 1987) will serve as a historical reference and guide.
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