Interdisciplinary Seminars
Art Now: Tradition and Change
K20.1222 HUM, 4 CR SSI: MW 5:30-8:30 Raiken/Ruhe
This course focuses on the contemporary art world and the forces producing continuous change and the re-creation of tradition. We examine new media, technologies and performance and trace their origins in ancient communities, shamanism and ritual. We explore the relationships between new media/performance forms and traditional artistic practices. We ask such questions as: What is the importance of place in energizing creativity? Have the forces of the art world shifted from capital cities outward toward unexpected influences and movements? Is New York still the capital of the art world? We pursue these questions by visiting museums and galleries, through imaginative writing and making art; and through individual and group projects. Readings may include Meyer Schapiro’s Modern Art, Irving Sandler’s The New York School, Harold Rosenberg’s The Tradition of the New, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Clyde Taylor’s The Mask of Art, Suzi Gablik's Reenchantment of Art, John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket, Victor Turner’s From Ritual to Theatre, Dorothy Lee's Valuing the Self, Mary Anne Staniszewski’s Believing Is Seeing and Robert Goldwater’s Primitivism in Modern Art.
Classic Texts and Contemporary Life
K20.1239 HUM, 4 CR SSI: TR 5:30-8:30 Rutigliano
This course examines several “classic” texts to understand both their own intrinsic merit and their influence on society from their inception until our own time. Our emphasis, indeed, is on using these texts to understand our lives and world now. We explore classic texts in relation to contemporary life’s dilemmas of consumerism and spiritualism, individual rights and community rights, vocation and career, God and the afterlife, rebellion and escape from freedom. Readings may include Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, Sappho’s Poems, Plato’s Republic, Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe, Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Cicero’s On the Laws, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
Nonverbal Communication
K20.1260 SOC, 4 CR SSII: TR 10:00-1:00 Axtmann
The body moves, expresses, and communicates. In popular culture, diet and exercise fads, and recent scholarship, the body has become a critical site of cultural representation and inquiry. This course examines that body through readings and discussion, classroom activities, and fieldwork. An introduction to nonverbal communication, we look at how the body performs in the arts, literature, and the media. We also explore notions of space, time, gesture, posture, and group patterns. One goal is to become more aware of the body’s power to embody self and culture. A familiarity with bodily movement stimulates a deeper understanding of life itself. Requirements include weekly response papers to the readings and field assignments, a mid-term exam, and a final project. Readings may include Goldman, As Others See Us; Greenspan, Body Language; Kandera, Identity; and selections by Mauss, Shilling, and others.
The Cultural Politics of Childhood
K20.1268 SOC, 4 CR SSII: MW 5:00-8:00 McCreery
This interdisciplinary seminar examines the ways that society has imbued children and childhood with certain cultural meanings. We start by focusing on two widespread assumptions about children—that they are naturally innocent and that they are routinely endangered by social problems such as violent crime, drug abuse, and sexual predators. Next, we study how these cultural assumptions originated in Romantic and Victorian visions of childhood and how “childhood” itself emerged as a coherent life stage only in the past several centuries. Finally, we study how childhood increasingly has become the focus of academic attention, popular concern, and state control. While the main focus of the course is on cultural understandings of childhood, we also examine how children themselves have made sense of their lives. Texts come from the fields of literature, history, political science, psychology, and queer theory. They may include Aričs’s Centuries of Childhood, Barrie's Peter Pan, Levine’s Harmful to Minors, and Postman's Disappearance of Childhood.
Theorizing Politics: Machiavelli, Marx, and Foucault
K20.1272 SOC, 4 CR SSI: TR 1:30-4:30 Shulman
This course explores American ambivalence toward and alienation from “politics.” What do our apathy and cynicism say about politics as it is practiced in our society, and what do they say about ourselves? To pursue these questions we analyze what politics–as a concept and a practice–has meant in history, means to us now, and could mean. The course proceeds by closely reading several canonical texts in political theory and using them to think about current events. Working through several profound visions of politics will help us learn to “think politically.”
City and Empire: Fictionalizing History in the Nineteenth-Century
K20.1295 HUM, 4 CR SSI: TR 5:30-8:30 Murphy
formerly titled “the history in the story: city and empire in nineteenth-century fiction” (course is not repeatable).
How does literature engage, comment upon, rewrite, and even transform the material world? We pose this question through the study of the way in which nineteenth and early twentieth European and American fiction process the relation between city and empire. When the novel is the dominant genre and realism the dominant mode of representation, novelists focus on contemporary issues and daily life: the crowded, industrializing city with its contrasts of wealth and poverty itself becomes a character in fiction. At the same time, as Edward Said pointed out, the expansion and consolidation of European empires forms a sometimes ghostly background to stories of modern life in the metropole. In this course, we pay careful attention to the social and cultural role played by the novel in producing and reproducing the images of city and empire and to the ways in which categories like home/abroad, self/other, domestic/exotic, civilization/savage come to be mutually constituting. Readings may include works by Charlotte Bronte, Thackeray, Melville, Gaskell, and Forster.
The Poetics of Visual Culture: Context and Content in Exhibition
K20.1296 HUM, 4 CR SSII: TR 1:30-4:30 Carbonell
formerly titled “siting cultures: context and content in exhibition” (course is not repeatable).
A significant literature on the “poetics” of visual culture has emerged in the last ten years to affirm that organizational strategies and figures of speech are employed in exhibitions (as they are in verbal texts) to create narratives, to make arguments, and to provide aesthetic pleasure. This course explores relationships between context and content in the exhibition of objects, cultures, and histories. We will study and visit a number of local sites, including museums, historical societies, alternative exhibition spaces, and public art venues, in order to examine the various ways in which objects and spaces can be used in the production of narratives. In addition to analyzing these strategies, we will examine the pressure exerted by the “rhetoric of the frame” in larger forms of enclosure including buildings themselves, the arrangement and character of the rooms within them, the “open air,” and the space of communities and environments which provide or resist the space of the exhibition.
The Ancient Greeks and Their Influence
K20.1322 HUM, 4 CR SSII: MW 1:30-4:30 Rock
The astounding power of the ancient Greek philosophers and poets has been felt from their times to ours. Scholars in every age have pondered the questions they raised: What is the nature of man? What is the relationship of God or gods to humans? What is a good life? How do we live it? What is our relationship to nature? This course examines the way the Greeks examined these questions and the Greek influence on subsequent cultures. Works to be studied may include: The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, The Symposium, The Consolation of Philosophy, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and selected poetry from Wordsworth, W.B. Yeats, and Wendell Berry.
