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Humanities Course Descriptions and Syllabi

Humanities 120 Crisis and Culture, Professor Arpad Kadarkay
Athens, Florence and Budapest

This seminar investigates the ways in which individuals and communities respond to cultural crisis and transformation - that is, those historical moments when traditional and dominant beliefs and practices are called into question and reevaluated. Students are introduced to the scholarly method through in-depth, interdisciplinary study of two or three historical moments. The writing in the course is a way to discover and explore ideas. This section of the seminar begins by addressing the cultural nexus of Athens in the fifth century BC. The class then studies the conflict between Christianity and neo-Platonism in Renaissance Florence. The course concludes by examining the crisis of modernity in late 19th century Budapest.
Scholarly and Creative Inquiry core

Humanities 120 Crisis and Culture, Professor George Erving
The Scientific Revolution and the Romantic Movement

This seminar investigates the ways in which individuals and communities respond to cultural crisis and transformation - that is, those historical moments when traditional and dominant beliefs and practices are called into question and re-evaluated. Students are introduced to the scholarly method through in-depth, interdisciplinary study of two or three historical moments. The writing in the course is a way to discover and explore ideas. This section of the seminar explores the causes and consequences of two decisive turning points in Western culture - the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th Centuries (especially the arguments of Galileo and Newton), and the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries (especially the French Revolution and British Romanticism). The overarching aim of the course is to understand the complex nature of these cultural upheavals in their political, religious, economic, scientific, and aesthetic dimensions, and to appreciate how their effects have continued to shape Western attitudes and values. Syllabus
Scholarly and Creative Inquiry core

Humanities 120 Crisis and Culture, Professor William Beardsley
London and Vienna at the Turn of the Century

This seminar investigates the ways in which individuals and communities respond to cultural crisis through an in-depth, interdisciplinary study of a particular transforming historical moment, the start of the Twentieth Century, as it is played out in two important imperial capitals, London and Vienna. The class examines the writings of thinkers such as Freud, Russell, and Wittgenstein, and read the poetry, novels and plays of Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Schnitzler, and Musil. The class also studies the art of Beardsley and Klimt and listens to the symphonies of Elgar and Mahler and an opera of Richard Strauss.
Scholarly and Creative Inquiry core

Humanities 120 Crisis and Culture, Professors Geoff Proehl and Peter Greenfield
Dionysus and the Art of Theater

This seminar investigates the ways in which individuals and communities respond to cultural crisis and transformation - that is, those historical moments when traditional and dominant beliefs and practices are called into question and re-evaluated. Students are introduced to the scholarly method through in-depth, interdisciplinary study of two or three historical moments. The writing in the course is a way to discover and explore ideas. This section of the seminar examines Dionysus, the Greek god of theatre, who provides one of the most enduring metaphors for culture and crisis, culture in crisis, and culture as crisis. It is impossible to consider Dionysus, the myths that surround him, the philosophy his image has inspired, and the art that directly or indirectly embodies him without immediately entering into a detailed examination of an ongoing and dynamic dialogue between the forces of culture and the forces of crisis. This course uses images of this god, close readings, thoughtful writing, and experiential learning (attending and making theatre), to explore these complex interactions. This course is a particularly appropriate choice for students interested in the study of theatre.
Scholarly and Creative Inquiry core
 

Humanities 121 Arms and Men: The Rhetoric of Warfare, Professors Robert Garratt and David Lupher

This course explores the words, actions, thoughts and feelings of the individual amidst the catastrophe of war. The course treats a wide variety of materials from the ancient world to the present, including history, epic, lyric poetry, novels, memoirs, letters,film, and deliberative and commemorative oratory. Students explore the ways in which various rhetorical and narrative treatments of soldiers and of war offer us understandings of the subjective experiences and ethical choices of ordinary and extraordinary people under extreme stress and facing horrendous challenges. The course also intends to consider notions of the individual, the community, and civilization (with all that word implies), against the backdrop of the chaotic action of war and combat. Syllabus
Seminar in Writing and Rhetoric core

Humanities 122 Utopia/Dystopia, Professor William Breitenbach

What is human nature? Is it malleable or fixed? What is human happiness? Can human beings live together in harmony? What is the perfect society? Is it possible to achieve such a society? What is the proper role of government in it? How much individual freedom or dissent can be tolerated in it? In a historical survey of utopianism and anti-utopianism, students discover how selected writers and communitarians have answered these questions in theory, fiction, and practice. This class considers the evolution of utopianism (the concept of an ideal society) and its criticism (anti-utopianism) in western thought from ancient times to the twenty-first century. Readings vary from year to year, but may include Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Voltaire's Candide, Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, Gilman's Herland, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Zamyatin's We, Skinner's Walden Two, and documents from actual utopian communities. Syllabus
Scholarly and Creative Inquiry core

Humanities 201 The Arts, Ideas, and Society: Western Tradition, Professor Florence Sandler

Survey of intellectual developments in western civilization from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century. Emphasis is placed on the relationship between the individual and the state examined through literature and the arts. Syllabus
Historical Perspective core
Humanistic Approaches core

Humanities 206 The Classics of Russian Literature, Professor Theodore Taranovski

Most great Russian writers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries have been concerned with the so-called "accursed questions" that address the purpose and meaning of human existence, the role of the individual, the individual's obligations to oneself and to fellow human beings, the claims that state and society may place on human freedom, the individual's relationship to the infinite and the divine. The texts chosen to illuminate these themselves, include, among others, works of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn. Syllabus
Humanistic Perspective core
Humanistic Approaches core

Humanities 301 The Idea of the Self, Professor George Erving

This course engages philosophical and literary works from the late Seventeenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century that document the emergence of the modern concept of the self. The authors considered explore such questions as, "Is the self static, determinate, and unified, or is it dynamic, ephemeral, and fragmented? Is it autonomous or culturally conditioned? Does it will its own actions, or are these determined by external circumstances? Is it innately good, or evil, or neither?" Working from literary, philosophical, historical, and psychological perspectives, the course traces how early modern thought in the West has variously represented the self, how these representations have reflected and influenced its cultural evolution, and how they remain imbedded in contemporary formulations of selfhood. Authors include Pascal, Hobbes, Bunyan, Locke, La Rochefoucauld, De Lafayette, Franklin, Rousseau, Diderot, Hume, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Dostoevsky, Freud, Kojeve, and Girard. Syllabus
Comparative Values core

Humanities 304 Ancients and Moderns, Professors David Smith and William Beardsley

This course focuses how certain "modern" European and American writers and artists from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries have responded to ideas, symbols, and mythology of the ancient Greco/Roman world in order to understand and express their own contemporary modern experience. Themes and topics in the class may include the appropriation of ancient pagan attitudes regarding Christianity, the influence of Greco/Roman civic virtue on the idea of the modern citizen, or the image of the city of Rome and its influence on the idea of the modern city. While course material may vary according to the interests of the instructor, and the modern period under consideration may be extensive or narrow (some professors, for example, may choose to concentrate on only the eighteenth century, or on the twentieth; others may prefer to survey eighteenth through twentieth), this class nonetheless puts students in contact with both ancient and modern subject matter and materials. Syllabus
Comparative Values core

Humanities 305 Modernization and Modernism

An exploration of late 19th and early 20th century culture of Western Europe and the United States, organized around the concepts of modernization and modernism. The course focuses on the way in which modernist art opposes those values inherent in social and political life at the turn of the twentieth century. Against the background of the elements of modernization, including democracy, education, transportation, communication, and technology, the course considers the work of artists and intellectuals such as Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, Debussy, Lawrence, Joyce, Stravinsky, Kafka, and Ives. The course also explores scholarly commentary on both the writers and artists and on the concepts developed to describe the intellectual and cultural history of the period. The course considers, not only the values implicit in the major texts themselves, but also the adequacy of concepts which scholars have developed to explain them. Syllabus
Comparative Values core

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