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*Enrollment in these classes is restricted to Humanities majors for the first three weeks of registration.
HUMN 1010: Introduction to Humanities I
Giulia Bernardini/Kelly Hansen
Humanities 1010 is a 6 credit hour course that meets six times a week (three literature discussion classes and three lecture-demonstrations in art and music). The course provides an analytical and comparative study of works in literature, music, and visual arts from Antiquity to the 17th听century.听Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: historical context or literature and the arts.
Music: The music lectures will cover the basic elements of musical compositions, providing those without a music background a solid foundation from which to build upon. The class studies the music found in a number of different time periods starting with Antiquity, then moving on to Medieval, followed by Renaissance vocal/instrumental music and dance, as well as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation periods. Readings and listening assignments will be assigned on a regular basis (an audio CD is included in the textbook).
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Art:听The art lectures will begin by studying the art and architecture of ancient Greece. We will then look at the artistic production and architectural innovations of ancient Rome, before moving on to Romanesque and early Gothic architecture and architectural sculpture. The semester ends with a survey of major Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Reformation works in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Students are expected to complete weekly readings from听Gardner鈥檚 Art Through the Ages听and occasional additional readings.
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Literature: The literature section includes works such as Homer鈥檚听Odyssey, Greek tragedy, Plato鈥檚听Symposium, Dante鈥檚听Inferno, Cervantes听Don Quixote, Boccaccio鈥檚Decameron, a Shakespearean tragedy, selections from Montaigne鈥檚听Essais. When registering for Humanities 1010, students should sign up for a literature section. These sections meet three times a week, MWF.
HUMN 2000: Methods and Approaches to Humanities
Paul Gordon/David Ferris/Anthong Abiragi/Darin Graber
Humanities 2000 will be team-taught by various members of the Humanities Department faculty who will each offer a separate 鈥渕ini-course鈥� on one of the essential issues or methodological concerns which students can expect to encounter in their future coursework for the Humanities major. Although the subject of each mini-course may be expected to vary from year to year, topics proposed by faculty in the past include: word/image studies; rhetoric; translation; the canon; gender studies; cultural studies; literature and the other arts; literary theory; philosophy and literature; etc.听Prerequisite HUMN 1010 or 1020. Restricted to Humanities Majors.
HUMN 3093: Topics: Modern Media and the Parisian Avant-garde, 1848-1914
Giulia Bernardini
From 1848 to 1914, France experienced intense socio-political tension and transformation. As imperial and republican forces struggled for power its cities grew into sprawling urban centers populated by a working class inspired by the ideals of socialism, and by a growing bourgeoisie with expendable income and leisure time. The artists of the avant-garde 鈥� painters, musicians, and authors 鈥� attempted to translate this new state of modernity into their chosen media. This class will study the Parisian avant-garde 鈥� its artistic and literary personalities and movements 鈥� to investigate the notion of the artist as cultural commentator and to inquire how it built the foundations for twentieth century modernism.听Restricted to juniors/seniors.
HUMN 3210: Narrative
Annjeanette Wiese
This course will examine narrative as a central form of representation in the twentieth century by analyzing the effects of form on how we understand and construct our world. Two questions will guide this examination: 鈥渨hat kind of relation (if any) is there between narratives and reality (or 鈥榣ife鈥�)?鈥� (posed by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan); and, 鈥渨hat kind of notion of reality authorizes construction of a narrative account of reality?鈥� (posed by Hayden White). With the aid of different theories of narrative, we will attempt to answer these questions by closely analyzing how narrative structure informs perception as well as how perception has changed over the course of the past century.
Authors to be studied include Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!), Borges (selected stories), Nabokov (Pale Fire), Reed (Mumbo Jumbo), Atwood (The Handmaid鈥檚 Tale), Spiegelman (Maus I) and possibly Everett (Erasure) and Foer (Everything Is Illuminated). We will also view and analyze one film (Pan鈥檚 Labyrinth) and will consult theoretical works by Benjamin, Bruner, Chatman, Herman, Prince, Rimmon-Kenan and White.听听Prerequisites HUMN 2000 or Junior/Senior standing.
HUMN 3240: Tragedy
Paul Gordon
In this course we will examine theories of tragedy (Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche) and apply those theories to various works of art. After a careful examination of Greek tragedy, beginning with Aeschylus and Sophocles and concluding with Euripides鈥� last play (The Bacchae), the only extant tragedy which deals with Dionysus and the 鈥渂irth of tragedy,鈥� we will examine the survival of tragedy in numerous 19th and 20th century works of art which challenge the notion of the so-called 鈥渄eath of tragedy鈥濃�攕pecifically, the works of William Butler Yeats, Ibsen (Hedda Gabler), Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard), and Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire).
HUMN 3660: Postmodern
David Ferris
This course will examine the event of the Postmodern and its effect within literature, film, architecture, culture, and critical theory. Beginning with works that signal and examine the onset of modernity, the consequences of postmodernity for our understanding of the modern as a sign of our intellectual, cultural, and social progress will be presented. Once defined in relation to the modern, our attention will turn to the problems and issues posed by the postmodern with respect to history, perception, and the concept of an era that is also our present. We will also examine various recent attempts to think beyond the postmodern. The course will include a broad selection of works from architectural theory to performance art.
HUMN 3702: Dada and Surrealist Literature
Patrick Greaney
Surveys the major theoretical concepts and literary genres of the Dada and Surrealist movements.听 Topics include Dada performance and cabaret, the manifesto, montage, the readymade, the Surrealist novel, colonialism and the avant-garde, and literary and philosophical precursors to the avant-garde.听 Taught in English.听听Same as GRMN 3702. 听Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: literature and the arts.
HUMN 4004: Topics in Film Theory: Jung and Film
Jim Palmer
The basic elements of Jungian psychology will be studied and applied as tools of critical analysis to selected films and a few literary texts., particularly the key aspects that foster the integration of the personality: the Shadow, Anima and Animus, Psychological Types, and the process of Individuation. How well do you know yourself? What possible significance is it to know that you are an extrovert and your closest friend is an introvert? Are you aware of your Shadow side? The promise of this course (鈥減romise鈥� meaning both hope and commitment) is for each of us to become a more self-aware person with a richer understanding of our own and the 鈥渙ther鈥檚鈥� complexity and contradictions. Prominent directors and a range of films from several genres and general categories are featured鈥揾orror, suspense, film noir, the Western, comedy, experimental, and European cinema (British, French and German). Recent films include听The Lives of Others听and听Lars and the Real Girl, as well as classics such as Hitchcock鈥檚听Strangers on a Train听and Rouben Mamoulian鈥檚 brilliant adaptation of听Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
HUMN 4093: Advanced Topics: Poetics of Fragmentation
Anthony Abiragi
鈥淚 walk among human beings as among the fragments and limbs of human beings! This is what is most frightening to my eyes, that I find mankind in ruins and scattered about as if on a battlefield or a butcher field.鈥� (Nietzsche,听Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
The last two hundred years have witnessed not only the disintegration of the unified human subject but a related series of听aesthetic responses听as artists and writers from various domains 鈥� literature, art, and philosophy 鈥� have self-consciously invented and adopted fragmentary modes of poetic composition. This course will examine various forms in the history of the fragment: the fractured manuscript, the aphorism, the thought-image, the ruin, and, in the work of Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot in particular, the fragment as a form of writing that seeks not its completion or redemption in a greater aesthetic whole. From the visual arts of the twentieth century, we will focus on practices of collage, assemblage, and the found object 鈥� and this with special attention to the works of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cornelia Parker.
Throughout we will be concerned with a central problem of Western aesthetics: the relation between part and whole. We will approach the problem from the synchronic perspective of听space, asking whether and how the fragment belongs to a greater cosmic (or social) order, as well as from the diachronic perspective of听time, inquiring into the original, lost unity of each work and its promise of restoration and redemption in the future.听 We will, finally, consider Jean-Luc Nancy鈥檚 philosophical claim that human experience is itself essentially finite and incomplete and that it is the fragmentary artwork that best testifies to this condition of openness to the future.
In addition to Barthes and Blanchot, readings will include works from Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ren茅 Char, Samuel Beckett, and Georges Perec.
HUMN 4120: Greek and Roman Tragedy
Jackie Elliott
We will be reading a selection of the surviving works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (all works written at Athens in the 5th c. BCE) and Seneca (whose 1st c. CE tragedies represent the sole examples of the genre at Rome surviving in non-fragmentary form).听 There will also be substantial secondary or background reading to guide the development of an understanding of the religious and moral dimensions of tragic drama in context. In this course, the aim will be to develop skills and habits of close observation, analysis and argument, as well as respect for ideas, nuances and differences.听 As we read, we will attend to the importance of the texts in the literary historical tradition and their role in shaping cultural norms, habits of thought and the imaginative landscape of western civilization.听 We will also consider what they tell us of what it is to be human in a complex and ever-changing world.听 There is no formal prerequisite, but experience writing and talking about literature will be helpful.听 Same as CLAS 4120.听 Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: literature and the arts.
HUMN 4155: Philosophy, Art and the Sublime
Paul Gordon
Perhaps the most sublime utterance is that inscribed on the temple of Isis: 鈥淚 am all that is, that was, and that will ever be; no mortal has lifted my veil.鈥� (Kant) In this course we will examine theories of the sublime and apply those same theories to various works of art. Beginning with Plato and Longinus, we will then move to modern discussions of the sublime in Burke and Kant before proceeding to the 鈥済olden age鈥� of sublimity, 18-19th century German and English romanticism. After a study of sublimity in Goethe鈥檚 Faust we will then turn our attention to the writings of the English romantic poets (Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge), as well to the early 19th-century novel, Mary Shelley鈥檚 Frankenstein. After an examination of the sublime paintings of Turner (and his predecessors) we will move, in the final section of the course, to an examination of the survival of the sublime in the 20th century paintings and films of Barnett Newman, Georgia O鈥橩eefe, Werner Herzog, and John Carpenter.听Prerequisite HUMN 2000 or Jr/Sr standing.听Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: critical thinking; ideals and value.
HUMN 4504: Goethe鈥檚 Faust
Helmut Muller-Sievers
We emphasize Goethe鈥檚 Faust parts I and II, but the course begins with Marlowe鈥檚 reworking of the original Faust material, includes Byron鈥檚 Manfred and selections from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, before concluding with Thomas Mann鈥檚 novel Doctor Faustus. The Faust theme has intrigued students of literature and thought for many centuries, and it serves as a metaphor for the modern condition. How does one assign a value to the human soul, if Christianity is not accepted as the supreme authority? What happens to notions of the good life in the age of Enlightenment? How are human beings disposed to conceive of their essence 鈥渁fter the death of God?鈥� How does evil manifest itself in the twentieth century? How does the dualism of the here and now versus the here-after influence humanity鈥檚 habitation of the Earth?听Same as GRMN 4504.听Approved for the arts and sciences core curriculum: literature and the arts.
HUMN 4730: Italian Feminisms: Culture, Theory and Narratives of Difference
Cosetta Seno Reed
Studies the meaning of key feminist concepts and the history of Italian Feminism within the International Feminist Movement. Starting from the late Nineteenth Century till contemporary times, this course concentrates specifically on the mother-daughter relationship, on how it changed through the years, and on how sexual difference has become an essential tool in re-thinking Italian women writers.听Taught in English.
HUMN 4811: Nineteenth Century Russian Literature
Vicki Grove
The 19th century was a turbulent time in Russian society, and nowhere are the heated debates over the future and welfare of the country more acutely revealed than in the literature produced in that period. Such issues as 鈥渢he women question,鈥� the liberation of the serfs, radicalism, and nihilism all find expression through the various writers who dominated the literary scene 鈥� Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, among others. This course is intended to introduce students to not only the social movements, but the cultural movements as well. Aside from the topics listed above, we will explore the sentimentalism and romanticism that reflected the Western influence on the Russian novel in the first half of the 19th century, and move on to the novels of realism exemplified by the literary giants of the second half of the century. Grades for the course will be determined by quizzes, short papers, and a final, as well as participation in class discussions. No prior experience with Russian language or literature is required.听Same as RUSS 4811. Approved for the arts and sciences core curriculum: literature and the arts.