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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Conceptions of God and Self
John Dreher
TTh, 8:00-9:20
This course examines a variety of conceptions of God and the self as represented in literary and philosophical texts. The semester will begin with an examination of the idea that the self is created in the image of God and will go on to explore the consequences of the disintegration of religious faith for self-conception and self-definition. Very roughly, three views will be studied: objectivist, religiously inspired conceptions of the self, the radical subjectivist views of the contemporary era and what in retrospect may be seen as the unstable intermediary position sought by the Enlightenment. The medieval view will be articulated principally by a close reading of Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and secondarily of Descartes' Meditations, which will be seen both as the first modern and the last major medieval philosophical text. Much time will be spent on the Enlightenment views of God and humanity. Discussion will be based upon readings drawn from Leibniz, Voltaire, and Hume. An important goal of the course will be to impart an appreciation of philosophical argumentation through a close reading of parts of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The course will conclude with an examination of a variety of subjectivist views of self drawn from nineteenth and twentieth century sources, including Flaubert, Nietzsche, Hesse, Camus and Satre.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
L.A.: The Fiction
Thomas Gustafson
TTh, 9:30-10:50
The focus of the course will be the Hollywood novel, which Leslie Fiedler called "the great literary invention of the Thirties." The majority of these novels will be from the 1930s and 1940s, but the course will also study this genre in relation to other fiction and film set in Los Angeles (e.g., John Fante, Ask the Dust, Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go, James Cain, Mildred Pierce, "Chinatown") and some later versions of the Hollywood novel (e.g., Didion, Play It As It Lays). Through additional historical and critical material, the course will also consider such subjects as: L.A. mystery novels, crime stories, and film noir; the collision of established writers with the film industry; the competition and collaboration between literature and film as narrative art forms of different mediums; and cultural/social criticisms of Hollywood/Los Angeles. The course will begin by examining some of the early and influential novels in this genre as an attempt to chart some of the recurrent iconography of Hollywood mythologies as it is developed, extended, replicated, or challenged by later writers. Other texts will include: Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon; Raymond Chandler, Little Sister; Fitzgerald, Pat Hobby Stories; Carey McWilliams, Southern California: Island on the Land; Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?; Anna Deveare Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit and Other Plays; and Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Cross-Cultural Rhetoric
Lawrence Green
TTh, 9:30-10:50
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
TTh, 9:30-10:50
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
Novels and Anti-Novels
Marcus Levitt
TTh, 9:30-10:50
In this course we will try to 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. The problem of translation will also be addressed, as we will pay 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: Pushkin, Eugene Onegin; Lermontov, A Hero of Our Times; Gogol, Dead Souls; Goncharov, Oblomov; Turgenev, Fathers and Sons; Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?; Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground or Crime and Punishment; and Tolstoy, "The Kreuzer Sonata".
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
City of Myth
Thomas Seifrid
MWF, 10:00-10:50
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
Eccentric Memories
David Leiwei Li
MWF, 10:00-10:50
This class intends to complicate the nationalist premise in the study of autobiography, that stories of exemplary selves are expressive of a particular national temperament. Under this premise, for example, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is read as a typical American story with its dual impulse of self perfection and social mobility. But such a premise may beg the question about life stories which do not share Franklin's pattern of fulfillment: shall these be considered un-American? It is the objective of this class to read such "marginal" autobiographical narratives and examine the ways with which they register and reconstitute the "central" notion of American-ness. The thematic focus of the individual and the nation will be explored along with problems of the autobiographical form, such as the gap between the actuality of experience and the conditions of its recollection, between the "I" of language and the first-person "self," and representation and invention. The reading list may include: Fredrick Douglas, Narrative; Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery; Mary Antin, Promised Land; Lisa See, On Gold Mountain; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Henry Louis Gates, Colored People; Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory; David Mura, Turning Japanese; and Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Homer, Virgil, and Dante
William Thalmann
MWF, 10:00-10:50
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
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Steve Moore
MWF, 10:00-10:50
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). Screenings of selected films will be required.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Religion and Community in the Ancient World
Clifford Ando
MWF, 10:00-10:50
As late twentieth-century Americans we often assume that we can separate the religious from the secular, but this assumption stands in contradiction to the beliefs that obtained throughout the ancient world. Yet acknowledging that religious concerns shaped all forms of artistic endeavor does not provide an interpretive key with which to unlock the secrets of ancient texts. On the contrary, it prompts a series of difficult questions. How does literature stand in relation to religion? How have some texts been privileged (or dismissed) as mere literature or mere Scripture? What role do texts have in shaping religious communities and assigning individuals a place in the various communities to which they belong? How do texts mediate the demands of family, church and state? Could readers then, and should readers now, read these texts without engaging their religious dimensions? We will draw the literature of Judaism, Greece, Rome and Christianity over a period of a thousand years, from early in the first millenium B.C.E. to the fourth century of this era. The readings include both well-known and little-read texts from many different genres, including tragedy, autobiography, prose fiction, history, elegiac poetry and martyr acts. Possible readings include: Genesis; Aeschylus, Oresteia; Sophocles, Antigone; Euripides, The Bacchae and Hippolytus; Joseph and Aseneth; Josephus, Autobiography; The Gospel of John; The Acts of Paul and Thecla; Revelation; Ovid, Fasti; Livy, History of Rome, Book 1; Symmachus, Relatio 3; Libanius, "For the temples"; The martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas; Jerome, Letter to Eustochium.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Reading Berlin in the Twentieth Century
Sharon Gillerman
MWF, 10:00-10:50
Considered the preeminent city of the twentieth century, Berlin has been at the geographic, political and cultural heart of contemporary Europe. As the leading center of modernist culture, Berlin embodied both the utopian vision and cultural despair that characterized pre-World War II culture and politics in the West. From within the city, Germany's leaders administered five political regimes, commanded two world wars, and directed the genocide of the Jews. As the flashpoint of the Cold War, Berlin came to symbolize the postwar European order, and with the fall of the Berlin wall, Berlin again became a symbol, this time of east German liberation, German unification, and the end of a divided Europe. Many of the dramatic changes of this century have been imprinted on the urban landscape of Berlin. By reading literary and other texts produced in this city, and by reading the city itself as a text, students will explore how the city can function as an "unwitting autobiography" of a culture, reflecting not only the tastes and values of a society, but also its aspirations and fears. In this multi-disciplinary Arts and Letters class, students will develop their critical thinking skills through close readings of a variety of artistic, literary, historical, sociological, and philosophical texts. Reading texts produced within successive contexts of cultural and political polarization, the students will consider multiple perspectives in human experience, comparing, for example, the writings of Nazi and Jew, East German and West German. By examining texts written by authors of different social, religious, and political perspectives, students will also be asked to reflect on larger questions of subjectivity and writing. As they read memoirs and literature, examine architectural plans, and analyze key historical documents, students will learn to think critically and develop their ability to interpret the values, attitudes, and cultural meanings encoded in their own cultural, political and urban environments. The selected readings include: Simmel, "Metropolis and Mental Life"; Mumford, The City in History; Doeblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz; Wolf, What Remains and Other Stories; and Schneider, The German Comedy, Scenes of Life After the Wall.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Landscape and Poetry
Lynn Matteson
TTh, 10:00-11:20
This course considers the relationship between British landscape painting, gardens, pastoral poetry, and music, from 1700 to 1900. We will also look at broader European art during that same period. Students will examine how the British school of nature poetry instilled into a moribund and despised branch of painting a vitality and immediacy that emerged in the 19th century as the major voice of artistic expression. The primary texts are John Dixon Hunt, The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, which is an anthology of nature writings, and Kenneth Clark, Landscape Into Art. This will be in addition to the pertinent poetry, which will be assembled in a reader.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Ethical Utilitarianism and Its Critics
Sharon Lloyd
MWF, 11:00-11:50
In this course we will critically investigate one of the most important and influential schools of thought in analytic moral and political philosophy. According to the "greatest happiness principle" of utilitarian ethics, we should judge actions and policies according to their effect on the happiness, pleasure, or satisfaction of everyone affected by them. We will closely study some of the writings of utilitarianism's founding father in the late 18th Century, Jeremy Bentham, the works of the doctrine's most illustrious 19th Century proponent, John Stuart Mill, and the works of today's most visible advocate of utilitarianism, Peter Singer. We will examine both the philosophical foundations of utilitarianism, and its practical application to such questions as the ethics of our response to world hunger, population policy, and animal rights. As we seek to understand utilitarian theory in its various forms, we shall also consider how well it withstands the objections of its critics. Such critics as Adam Sedgwick (in the 19th Century) and Bernard Williams (in the 20th Century) have objected to utilitarianism on the grounds that it cannot be usefully applied by mere humans whose information and time for deliberation are limited, that its requirements are so demanding that they leave no personal space within which individuals might enjoy their own particular life projects, that it cannot adequately account for our feelings of conscience and for moral motivation, that it fails to afford due respect to the requirements of justice and the rights of the individual persons, and that it exerts a degrading influence on the character of those who will accept it. We will assess the force of these criticisms, and the strength of replies to them by Mill, Singer, J.J.C. Smart, and other contemporary utilitarians. The readings will include Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation and Theory of Legislation; Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women and Sedgwick's Discourse; Singer, Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics; Sedgwick, A Discourse on the Studies of the University; and Smart and Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Political Fictions
Jenifer Presto
MWF, 11:00-11:50
This course adapts the goals of the category "Arts and Letters" to the context of the changing relations between the aesthetic and ideological principles that have governed Russian literature in the twentieth century. Modern Russian literature evolved within a context so politicized that even supposedly "apolitical" works conveyed political meaning, and it therefore provides a particularly fitting body of material for this investigation.
The course further aims to provide students with an active understanding of various literary terms and devices, and the ability to analyze works of literature in relation to both the works' own internal structures and the conventions of various literary periods and critical schools. The reading list includes Isaac Babel, Collected Stories; Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog; Chukovskaya, Sophia Petrovna; Gladkov, Cement; Mayakovksy, The Bedbug and Selected Poems; Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Terts, On Socialist Realism and The Trial Begins; and Zamiatin, We.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Jane Austen: In Her Culture, and in Ours
Hilary Schor
MWF, 11:00-11:50
This class examines one of the central novelists of the modern age not as a unique example of individual genius, but as one version of what women writers were attempting to achieve at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century-and, in turn, as an example of the way our culture continues to be interested in women writers and the "heroine's story." What, in short, made "Jane Austen" into the writer she was; and what makes her of such continuing interest today? To discuss this question, we will examine two sets of texts: the first will offer an overview of the historical and cultural transformations of early 19th century culture and the rise of the woman novelist. We will look at novels by Frances Burney and Elizabeth Inchbald, before turning to such Austen novels as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion. Our larger goal will be an understanding of the relationship of story-telling to cultural anxiety and stories about gender and power: this will continue to be our lens when we turn to our own cultural moment, and look at some of the modern versions of the "Jane Austen novel." Among our texts: Barbara Pym's Less than Angels, Elizabeth Jane Howard's Odd Girl Out, and Laurie Colwin's Happy All the Time, and such films as Clueless, Sense and Sensibility, and Sunday Bloody Sunday. Our continuing questions: what is the Jane Austen story; does it retain (if so, why) a cultural authority; what do various revisions of it teach us about that story; and is this story good for us as a culture and, particularly, as women and as readers of texts about women?
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Varieties of Love and Literary Form
Joseph Boone
MWF, 11:00-11:50
This course will focus on the way in which changing concepts of love and romantic union shaped some of western culture's most important literary works. The class will explore the ways which various forms of literary expression have served to mirror evolving social norms of love, as well as the ways in which literature has sometimes not just articulated but helped create new expressions of desire or ideal relationship. Reading will begin with the classicus locus of love-doctrine in western philosophy, Plato's Symposium, which we will compare to an example of Greek tragedy, Euripides's Medea, and an example of pastoral romance, Longu's Daphnis and Chloe. We then measure the gulf between the medieval idealization of adulterous courtly love found in troubadour love poetry and the English Renaissance's consolidation of love, courtship, and marriage in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. What happens to "happy endings" in the modern period will be investigated in a range of texts and genres, including Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Chinese Imagination: Culture in Fiction
George Hayden
TTh, 11:00-12:20
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
Women in Literature and Art
Gloria Orenstein
TTh, 11:00-12:20
TTh, 3:30-4:50
This course is intended to present and examine the issues and feminist analyses surrounding discussions about women and creativity, both literary and visual, predominantly in the modern western tradition. Thus, it should serve as an introduction to the feminist paradigms and problematics involved in a gendered analysis of creation in other arts as well. However, in order to enlarge the scope of our understanding of the patriarchal and feminist diversities, we will also consider an alternative creative system, one with earth-based values--that of the pre-patriarchal Goddess civilization. The readings will include books from the following list: Simone de Beauvior, The Second Sex; Kate Millett, Sexual Politics; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own; Paula Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of the Light; Gilbert and Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women; Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time; Alice Walker, The Color Purple; Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet; Judy Chicago, Through the Flower; Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in Art and Sexual Politics, ed. T. Hess; Boude and Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art; Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess; and N. Broud and M. Garrard, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Masterpieces of the Short Story
Alexander Zholkovsky
TTh, 11:00-12:20
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
Shakespeare and His Rivals
Heather James
Th, 11:00-12:20
This course investigates the dramatic, theatrical, and cultural conditions that gave us a Shakespeare we paradoxically imagine as embodying and poetically transcending his historical moment. As his rival playwright Ben Jonson put it, Shakespeare is both "the soul of the age" and "not of an age, but for all time." This curious double pull is less mysterious if we place Shakespeare's art in the cultural ferment which produced the beginnings of modern ideas about political contract, nationhood, and the theatrical or performative self. Shakespeare wrote and performed in a collaborative spirit, and we may better understand how the Renaissance relates to modern ideas about politics, nationhood, and identity, when we place the period and its most famous author in their contexts, beginning with the London theatrical scene. The class will read plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd and a range of cultural and historical writings. Questions will include the pragmatic and the speculative: Who were the actors? What did the playhouses look like? How were scripts produced? Why was the theater so popular in Renaissance London? How did the popular stage help raise questions about cultural identity?
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Utopia and Anti-Utopia
Paul Alkon
TTh, 11:00-12:20
This course will consider the development, imaginative appeal, and social as well as literary significance of utopian fiction from its origins during the Renaissance to its uses in the twentieth century. The starting point will be Saint Thomas More's Utopia. Close analysis of it will serve to define the genre while also introducing students to methods of interpreting and judging the quality of this and related modes of literature. Other readings will be selected from the following list of landmark works to illustrate how the classical utopian model inaugurated by More has been varied and applied: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels; Voltaire, Candide; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine and A Modern Utopia; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland; Yevgeny Zamyatin, We; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; Joanna Russ, The Female Man; Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale; Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Language, Rationality and Culture
Robin Jeshion
TTh, 11:00-12:20
Language is alternatively said to be that which binds and that which divides humanity. On the one hand, language is said to be the mark of human rationality. Our linguistic ability is the hallmark of the particular sort of rationality that distinguishes us from other animals. It is what makes us capable of engaging in objective inquiry about the world and capable of acting morally. The rationality inherent in human linguistic ability enables us to understand one another and, consequently, unites humanity. On the other hand, language is said to be a fundamental cause of insurmountable and inevitable barriers between human beings. All thought is essentially linguistic, and so all thought is tied to the specific language that one speaks. Since specific languages structure facts about the natural and moral world in different ways, speakers of different languages necessarily have different worldviews. Because the differences are so deeply embedded in language, many think these
worldviews are incommensurable, and that consequently, relativism about reality reigns: there are no culture-neutral facts about the world; and there are no objective moral rights and wrongs. The philosophical question at issue is whether, and in what way, language entails relativism about the natural world and about morality. In this course, we will engage in an historical and interdisciplinary study of this question and associated questions about the relationship between language, rationality and culture. Our readings will be primarily from linguistics, anthropology, and, (the bulk) philosophy, and will include writings of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Noam Chomsky, Nelson Goodman, Paul Grice, Ruth Benedict, John Bennett, W. V. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Artists, Revolutionaries, Dictators: The Russian Avant-Garde
Marcus Levitt
TTh, 12:30-1:50
The Avant-Garde attempted to overturn art's place in society, at the same time pushing the envelope of artistic expression to its limits-and beyond. We still inhabit the world created by the Russian Avant-Garde, whose heritage lives on in art, film, dance, architecture, music, design, as well as in the legacy of revolution and socially committed art. This course will use a broad spectrum of materials, including novels, manifestoes, film, painting, poetry, the Internet, and more. For some, the Avant-Garde-a term borrowed from the military, suggesting the "front-line" in the struggle for a new world-represented a radical critique of bourgeois political and cultural values. The Avant-Garde put "art" into quotation marks, self-consciously questioning its place in the modern world and its class-bound, capitalist mode of existence. Some branches of the Avant-Garde tried to close the gap between popular art of the masses and what the latest technological and industrial advances offered, in order to create a classless world of the future. For some, art promised to lead the way to an actual political revolution, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 (which came at the heyday of the early Avant-Garde) seemed a fulfillment of the Avant-Garde dream, promising incredible new vistas for artistic expression and for changing mankind's aesthetic orientation. In all areas, the Avant-Garde tried to redefine the modern world and sought new means to express it, in at turns wildly original, idiosyncratic, mind-blowing, frustrating, exhilarating, hilarious and ridiculous works. In the last part of the course, we will discuss some "post-revolutionary" developments of the Avant-Garde in Russia and consider some recent critiques of the Avant-Garde from a contemporary "postmodernist" standpoint. Was the Avant-Garde a movement toward radical freedom and liberation, or did its utopian dreams logically lead to totalitarianism and fascism? Was the entire avant-garde project of overcoming history a self-deluding, utopian impossibility? Readings include works by Zamiatin, Pilniak, Babel, Mayakovsky, Kharms, and Khlebnikov; Tom Stoppard, Travesties; Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art; Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto; Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism; and Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square; as well as a selection of Avant-Garde manifestos.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Innocents Abroad
Jerold Frakes
TTh, 12:30-1:50
The genre of travelogue-whether conceived as fact or fiction, whether as history, epic, chronicle, fantasy, report, letter or novel-functions in a variety of socially significant ways: to characterize the Self and his/her culture, to represent the Other and his/her culture, to compare and contrast the two, to prepare potential future travelers for the road mentally and emotionally, to prepare for military intervention, colonization, tourism. Surviving travelogues (taken in a broad sense), from the earliest periods of literature up through the "discoveries" and conquests of recent centuries, provide a fascinating window on cultures in contact, not always in conflict. The texts may include: Lucian, A True Story; Homer, The Odyssey; Herodotus, The Histories; "Alexander's Letter to Aristotle"; Adamnan and Arculf, On the Holy Places; Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades; Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, Book 1-2; The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America; Fadlan, "Vikings on the Volga"; Polo, The Travels; Mandeville, The Travels; Colon, The Four Voyages; Cabeza de Vaca, Relation; Swift, Gulliver's Travels; Ibn Battutuh, Rihlah; Verne, Around the World in 80 Days; and Dougherty, Travels in Arabia Deserta. The films will include: "Cabeza de Vaca," "Mountains of the Moon," "Aguirre, Wrath of God," and "Apocalypse Now."
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Quest
Anthony Kemp
TTh, 12:30-1:50
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: Homer, The Odyssey; Plato, The Republic; Gawain and the Green Knight; Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"; Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"; Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; W.H. Auden, "Atlantis"; C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. 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
The Use of Love
Carla Kaplan
MW, 1:00-2:20
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, 1:00-3:30
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
The Image of the Individual in Renaissance Literature
Andrea Frisch
TTh, 2:00-3:20
This course offers an introduction to Renaissance culture through a focus on competing images of the human being in Renaissance literature. The main part of the course will be devoted to an analysis of this image in the works of three highly influential authors: Desiderius Erasmus, whose witty critique of authority inspired intellectuals across Europe; Francois Rabelais, whose satirical and oft-censored prose works are considered by many to be the first examples of the modern novel; and Michel de Montaigne, whose free-ranging Essays constitute the first secular autobiography in Western Europe. We will also read shorter works by Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla, and Juan Luis Vives. In the first part of the course we will read the shorter works in order to gain an understanding of what nineteenth-century critics called "the rise of the individual" during the period from about 1400-1600. This part of our study will also serve to introduce some of the specific literary genres (e.g. letter; dialogue; oration) prevalent during the period in question. We will then explore how the writings of Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne put this by now somewhat cliched view of the Renaissance individual into question. In this central part of the course, as in the first part, we will pay attention to the relationship between literary form and philosophical content. The course will then move to a consideration of the manner in which very different images of "Renaissance Man" have been constructed over the centuries, and will end with a look at various images of "the Renaissance" in contemporary culture.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Music and the Modern Imagination
Bryan Simms
TTh, 2:00-3:20
This class will be devoted to a close study of music from the 20th century that express 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
Women in Ancient Jewish Literature
Tamara Eskenazi
TTh, 2:00-3:20
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: Pespectives on Biblical Women; Meyer, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Woman in Context; Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality; and Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Renaissance Culture
Margaret Rosenthal
TTh, 2:00-4:20
This course will introduce students to Italian Renaissance culture through an interdisciplinary study of literature, social issues, philosophy, and the arts (music, painting, architecture). We will read literary works in relation to the social context in which these works were written. We will look at the role of the family, marriage, and the ways in which gender relations played a crucial role in literature and society. Historical and philosophical issues regarding new conceptions of God, humanity, the individual, and nature will form topics of study. Although the idea of the Renaissance is explored transnationally, emphasis will be placed on Italy. We will read diaries and memoirs (Pitti, Dati), novellas (Boccaccio), love poetry by men and women (Petrarch, Michelangelo, Stampa, Franco, Colonna), dialogues and orations (Pico della Mirandola, women humanists, Castiglione, Alberti, Fonte), theatrical comedy (Machiavelli), political and feminist treatises (Machiavelli, Marinelli), and autobiography and letters (Cellini, Franco, Macinghi Strozzi). Some of the issues we will address are: How did the discipline of the humanities grow out of this historical period? Did all people have a Renaissance? How did women respond to the social pressures placed upon them? In what ways might we see this period as modern? The readings may include the following: Machiavelli, The Prince and The Mandrake Root; Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier; Petrarch, Canzoniere and Seceretum; Franco, Terze Rime; Stampa, Poems; Fonte, The Merit of Women; Dati and Pitti, Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence; Cellini, Autobiography; Boccaccio, The Decameron; Alberti, On the Family; Michelangelo, Poems; and da Vinci, Notebooks. (All works are in translation.)
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Film and Literature
Tania Modleski
TTh, 2:00-4:30
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
Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Muslim Literature
Adam Rubin
MW, 2:30-3:50
This course will introduce the student to the image of Jerusalem as a holy city in Jewish, Christian and Muslim literature. The literature of the three religious communities played a central role in transmitting the image of Jerusalem as birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, and holy city for Islam as well. Goal of pilgrimage and cause of Crusade, themes such as "Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem," and "Jerusalem as the Center of the World" infused many aspects of Western Culture, far beyond the borders of the Land of Israel. Assigned readings from biblical and later non-biblical texts will be examined from a critical perspective to provide the student with humanistic, scholarly, and intellectual tools to understand the background of the tensions between the image and the reality of life in Jerusalem from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Modern Period. The texts for the course will include: Peters, Jerusalem: the Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times; The Oxford Study Bible; Josephus, The Jewish Wars; Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane; Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions during the New Testament Period; Purvis, Jerusalem, the Holy City: a Bibliography; and Rosovsky, City of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
War and Memory in Korean Literature
Jinhee Kim
MW, 2:30-3:50
This course will examine autobiographical and fictional accounts depicting wars in the twentieth century, with a special reference to Korea. We will examine works written before, 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 (Chong-hyo Ahn, Chong-rae Cho, and Ch'I-jin Yu) will be closely examined along with recent publications by Korean-American women writers (Nora Okja Keller, Therese Park, Helie Lee). Students will be especially encouraged to think about the complex interactions between literature, drama and poetry, and the social, political, and economic conditions in which they emerge, especially during times of conflict and war. The required texts include: Chong-hyo Ahn, Silver Stallion and White Badge; Man-sik, Ch'ac, Peace Under Heaven; Chong-rae Cho, Playing With Fire; Heinz Insu Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother; Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman; Richard W. Kim, Lost Names and Martyred; Helie Lee, Still Life With Rice; and Therese Park, A Gift of the Emperor. All readings are in English. No knowledge of Korean language or literature is required.
ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Music of the Romantic Generation
Janet Johnson
MW, 3:00-4:20
The goals of the course are: to learn how to listen to classical music; to study the lives and works of Romantic composers (first half of the nineteenth century) who wrote under the direct inspiration of art and literature; to explore the cultural context in which they worked, using literature of the period as a way into the music and vice versa; and to explore the continuing influence of musical Romanticism on our own culture. The required course texts are: The New Grove Early Romantic Masters 1: Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and 2: Weber, Berlioz, Mendelssohn; The New Grove Masters of Italian Opera; and a course reader containing excerpts from the works of Goethe, Shakespeare, Byron, and other writers.
ARTS AND LETTERS 101g
The Modern Short Story
Albert Sonnenfeld
TTh, 12:30-1:50
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
The Monster and the Detective in Literature and Film
Leo Braudy
TTh, 11:00-12:20
This course traces the history of popular culture in Europe and America from the eighteenth to the twentieth century by focusing on two mythic figures, the monster and the detective. The focus on the monstrous and the abnormal as a way of determining what is normal and acceptable takes many different forms in the nineteenth century. But also with the nineteenth century, the figure of the monster becomes countered by that of the detective, whose knowledge of the intricate spaces of the city and whose careful methods of determining the patterns and identity of crime and villainy seem to offer a rational antidote to the miasmic ambiguities of gothic mystery. The strains of both meet in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, but also in the stories and novels of Conan Doyle, where the essence of Sherlock Holmes's ability to plumb the criminal mind is usually described not as detachment but as affinity and empathy. This interplay between the monster and the detective continues into the twentieth century as both genres begin to evolve through new literary and cinematic versions. Questions of adaptation, sequelization, and repetition as essentials of popular culture story-telling will be examined here, along with the metamorphoses of the basic theme of conflict and cooperation between the abnormal and the rational.
