New York University

Gallatin School of Individualized Study

• Liberal Arts Requirement
• Schedule of Classes
• Course Schedule Changes
• New Fall Courses

• First-Year Program
• Interdisciplinary Seminars
• Writing Courses
• Arts Workshops
• Community Learning
• Individualized Projects

• First-Year Program
• Interdisciplinary Seminars
• Writing Courses
• Arts Workshops
• Community Learning

The Meaning of Silence

K20.1063 SOC, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 M.-L. Achino-Loeb

In this course we will examine the meaning of silence from the perspective of linguists, philosophers, anthropologists and poets alike, all pointing to the understanding that silence is at the heart of speech, at the heart of power, and at the heart of intimacy. A survey of the anthropological approach to silence; a critical reading of Plato’s idea of knowledge and its repercussions on our categories of identity; and a comparative analysis of the myth of Orpheus, as it surfaces in different forms, will provide the backbone for our discussions. Because our topic can be amorphous, it will be necessary to ground it through a rigorous reading of the social science sources at our disposal and through a committed discussion of the literary texts. A willingness to do both is the first requirement for this course. Our readings will include Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Tannen and Saville-Troike, Perspectives on Silence; Plato, excerpts from The Republic; Trudgill, Sociolinguistics; Shanklin, Anthropology and Race; Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Ibsen, A Doll’s House; Cocteau, Orphee; as well as material distributed in class.

Contemporary Aesthetics and Cultural History

K20.1081 HUM, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Elliott Barowitz

The objectives of this course are to familiarize students with the major thinking in art theory the last century, in the belief that only knowledge can triumph. Ergo, this course follows the rise, drift and decay of modernism, as it mutated into a condition called postmodernism. This is a course in cultural history with specific emphasis on images—modern painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, film, and postmodern art—video performances site-specific work, “woman’s art,” TV and popular images in slick publications. It is designed to engage students interested in the arts, social sciences and humanities within a social context. It asks the question: Is postmodernism the reverse side of modernism or is it a [w]hol[l]y new mint? The above will be examined and augmented with the following: Readings by Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Victor Burgin, Roland Barthes, Jerome Klinkowitz, Laura Mulvey, Patricia Mellencamp, Judith Williamson and others; fine art slides and films—Vertigo, Modern Times and Brazil.

Pride and Power: Renaissance Revolutions in Art and Culture

K20.1103 HUM, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Bella Mirabella

The Renaissance in Europe remains one of the most creative, prolific, and dramatic eras in human history. It was a period in which tumultuous events—such as the bubonic plague, the Reformation, and political intrigue—were accompanied by an unprecendented explosion in the arts, with the work of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and many female writers such as Christine de Pizan and Veronica Franca. This course examines the politics, literature, visual arts, and music of this period and focuses on its manners, morals, daily life, and the role of women. We will explore the new ideas about existence, the self, and humankind fostered by humanism, philosophy, and the arts. Readings may include Christine de Pizan’s The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Castiglione’s The Courtier, Shakespeare’s plays, and the work of the Italian female poet, Gaspara Stampa.

The Spirit of the Comic and the Spirit of the Age

K20.1113 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Antonio Rutigliano

Comedy, no less than tragedy, yields insights into the great questions of an age. This course examines the ways the comic, from the ancient world to modern times, reflects attitudes about love, marriage, religion, power, and war. In addition to the philosophical writings of Meredith, Freud, and Hegel, readings may include Aristophanes’ Clouds and Lysistrata, Plautus’s Pot of Gold, Petronius’ Satyricon, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Congreve’s The Way of the World, and Beckett’s Endgame.

Love and Desire: Antiquity to Renaissance

K20.1122 HUM, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Bella Mirabella

This course examines the very human impulses of love and desire—from the platonic to the erotic—which have tantalized, plagued and ruled people since ancient times. Focusing on key texts from Greek antiquity through the Renaissance, we will consider how thinkers, writers, and artists have chosen to portray these passions and their roles in the human drama. We will examine philosophical concepts of love, medieval and Renaissance ideas of “courtly love,” and read plays, poems, and current essays. We will also listen to the music of the troubadours and the Renaissance and may see a play or attend an opera. Readings may include Plato’s Symposium, Sappho’s Poetry, Capellanus’ The Art of Courtly Love, Ficino’s On Love, Bogin’s The Women Troubadours, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Romeo and Juliet.

Bodily Fictions

K20.1128 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Laura Ciolkowski

Freud once famously announced that femininity is a riddle and the female body is a problem. Some years later, feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir insisted that the problem is not the female body as such but rather the fictions we produce about the body. In this course, we will focus simultaneously upon two kinds of bodily fictions: Works of literary fiction with the body as their subject; and the various social fictions and cultural representations of the body that are to be found in a wide range of scientific, sociological, and critical texts. Some of the key questions that will structure our work include: How has our understanding of male and female bodies been shaped over time? What does it mean to explore the body as a historical rather than a biological object? How do we define deviant bodies and which bodies get to count as normal? How does our understanding of the opposition between Nature and Culture structure our beliefs about gender and the body? Authors may include: Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Susan Bordo, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, and Joan Brumberg.

Modern American Narratives

K20.1130 SOC, 4 CR M 12:30-3:15 George Shulman

Culture is shaped by the stories that people tell themselves about themselves, and “narratives”—at once collective and personal—are ways of understanding the world and forms of power. In every culture, too, some stories are dominant and determine who is entitled to speak, and what is defined as normal, realistic, or true, setting the very terms by which we engage in self-reflection and action. No wonder narratives are crucial in politics! Focusing on America since World War II, we will ask: How are fundamental aspects of American society—especially white supremacy, but also mass immigration, industrial capitalism, consumer culture, and the cold war—represented in stories? How is the very idea of an “American” identity created through narrative? How is civil rights activism, anti-war protest, counter-cultural revolt, feminism (and backlash against them) justified by stories about a special American nationhood? How should we now narrate the meaning of 9/11? Texts include: essays by C. Wright Mills; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; Norman Mailer, Why Are We In Vietnam?; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Barati Mukherjee, Jasmine; the movies Thelma and Louise and Lonestar; Tony Kushner, Angels in America; and Philip Roth, Human Stain.

Race

K20.1184 SOC, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Henry Williams

“Race” has no reality in the biological sense, yet its power to influence our lives and our self-understanding is enormous. This course explores the shifting and contested meanings of race, from the European “Age of Conquest” onward. Starting from the proposition that race is not a stable or fixed category of social thought and being, our primary task will be to ascertain how Western ideas about race have changed, and why these changes have occurred. We will explore the large social processes and discourses developing and shaping the concept of race, particularly how various groups, e.g., native peoples of the Americas, Africans, and Europeans became racialized via slavery, trade, and colonialism as well as the various justifications (religious, legal, philosophical, scientific) for notions of racial inferiority and racial superiority. While we will spend considerable time analyzing how what it means to be “white” has been historically contingent on being non-Black or Indian, we will also explore the subjectivities of racialized and oppressed peoples, especially their critiques of racism and domination. Readings include William Shakespeare, The Tempest; Bartolome de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies; Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader.

The Emergence of the Unconscious: From Ancient Healing to Psychoanalysis

K20.1188 SOC, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Lee Robbins

Recognized in the modern world as Freud’s id and Jung’s collective unconscious, what we call the unconscious has a long and dignified ancestry in the ancient art of psychotherapy and in the history of religion, philosophy and medicine. The focus of this course is to trace the history of the idea of the unconscious from the Upanishads, Plato and Augustine through the Enlightenment, Freud, Jung and beyond, to the linguistic analyses of Lacan, Kristeva, and Benjamin, and recent discoveries in the genetic roots of consciousness.

Culture as Communication

K20.1193 SOC, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Vasu Varadhan

This course examines the concept of culture through its forms of communication. The shift from orality to literacy and on to electronic processing has important consequences for the social, political, and economic structures within a culture. If we take as axiomatic that every culture wishes to preserve itself through its forms of communication, we then need to ask ourselves which forms of communication are best suited for this purpose. What happens to cultures when traditional forms of communication are forced to compete with the newer technologies? What do we mean by “knowledge” in the age of information? The impact of written narrative on orality will be discussed as well as the changes brought about by the invention of the printing press. We will examine the development of electronic media including the newer technologies such as the Internet and analyze their effects on individual and cultural levels. Readings may include Plato’s Phaedrus, Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and Lessig’s The Future of Ideas.

Narratives of African Civilizations

K20.1197 HUM, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 C. Daniel Dawson

African civilizations speak to us as much through monumental edifices, visual artifacts, sign systems, oral tradition, and films as they do through alphabetic texts. In their varied expressions, these societies, ancient and contemporary, present us with new ways of knowing. When we encounter these social imaginations through their multiple texts, the experience is reflexive, double-imaged, because of the complex interaction of the perceptions of Africa with the West’s own image of itself. Texts may include hieroglyphics, architectural symbolism, music, visual art, epics, folktales and proverbs, cosmologies and rituals, such as the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead; medieval Ghana and Mali through The Epic of Sundiata and other mythical works; the society of the Dogon and their extraordinary cosmology. African modernist art and writing will also be represented, through novels like Conde's Segu, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Mda's Ways of Dying, and films like Lumumba, Mandabi, and Hyenas.

The Existential Imagination

K20.1208 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Jean Graybeal

To think in an “existential” mode is to attempt to address the most basic problems of individual human existence—the (possible) purpose of life, the meaning (if any) of death, the nature of the individual self, the possibility and limits of freedom—without premature recoures to answers prescribed by religion or tradition. In spite of or maybe because of the weightiness and darkness of such questions, many of the responses proposed by philosophers, religious thinkers, psychologists and writers of fiction have shone with compassion and appreciation for both the absurdity and the beauty of human lives. Readings may include Irvin Yalom’s Love’s Executioner, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and works by Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Beckett, and Nawal El Saadawi.

Narrative Investigations

K20.1215 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Stacy Pies

How does narrative create a sense of identity and give value to our lives? What are the ethical implications of looking at knowledge as a construction of narrative? The concept of narrative is currently used across disciplines to describe how people, texts, and institutions create meaning. This course will explore the idea that stories organize our thinking and our lives. We will begin with Plato’s ideas on tragedy and Aristotle’s Poetics, which later narrative explorations emulate and challenge. Our reading of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting will investigate the ways fictional texts radically reinvent literary forms and question social conventions. The works of critics such as Bakhtin, Chatman, Schafer, and Iser will reveal how narrative has been adopted as both a theoretical model and a methodology within a variety of fields. Students will carry out projects that explore narrative trends within their particular areas of interest.

The Politics of Media:Power, Persuasion, Perception

K20.1241 SOC, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Stephen Duncombe

The mass media are some of the primary means through which we know the world we live in and dream of a world that could be different. They condition how we understand ourselves and influence how we act and are acted upon. The media are deeply political. There is no one way, however, to look at the politics of media. We will start the course by theorizing the relationship between media and politics. We then turn to questions of Production: who produces media, how, and for what reasons? Ideology: what are the ideas and images being communicated? Consumption: how do people make sense of what they see or hear? And finally Impact: how do the media shape political process and participation in the United States and across the globe? Authors will include Matthew Arnold, Marx and Engels, Ben Bagdikian, Janice Radway, John Milton, Joe McGiniss, Robert McChesney, Plato, Ernest Schachtel, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Lippmann, Noam Chomsky, and Henry Louis Gates. Popular movies, past and current television, and beloved children’s stories will provide grist for our critical mill.

Sex, Gender, Nature, Culture: Feminist Theory/Gender Theory

K20.1251 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Sara Murphy

Is anatomy really destiny? Does physiology precede culture? Or is gender socially constructed? If so, how, on what grounds, through what agencies, does that construction take place? The interrogation of sex and gender raises fundamental issues not only about identity and the relations of nature to culture, but also about the authority of different disciplines to articulate those relations. In this course, our goals will be twofold: first, we propose to examine some central questions about sex/gender as they have been taken up by writers from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, focusing on various feminisms and emergent gender theories. Second, because our inquiry is of necessity interdisciplinary, we’ll be paying close attention to the ways in which different disciplines think about these questions, what kinds of methods they use and assumptions they make. Readings will be taken from Wollstonecraft, Mill, De Beauvoir, and more recent investigators like Freud, Lacan, Butler, Foucault, Irigaray, and Kristeva.

Shakespeare on the Uses of This World

K20.1253 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Pat Rock

Shakespeare, looking back to the Middle Ages and forward to the Renaissance, asks: “Is it possible to be at home in this world?” Falstaff warns Prince Hal that if Hal banishes him, he banishes “all the world,” implying what a tragedy that would be. Yet Hamlet says the uses of the world seem to him to be “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” This course examines the dynamic tension that lies between these two world views, and the complex and challenging ways Shakespeare deals with the question. Readings may include Henry IV, Part I; Hamlet; King Lear; Much Ado About Nothing; and Twelfth Night.

The Condition of Postmodernism

K20.1269 SOC, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Edmund Fong

For some three decades now, discourses of postmodernism have proposed provocative and controversial claims about the links between culture and politics, society and individual identity. Despite the disparity of these discourses, one can nevertheless discern a loose trajectory in postmodern debates within the realm of social and political theory. From broadsides about a new state of affairs characteristic of the postmodern condition, to strategies and techniques for how to think and live the postmodern, and finally to questions about the contours and possibilities of a postmodern politics- this trajectory bespeaks of the challenge of connecting postmodern descriptions with postmodern projects. Hence, this course explores the tensions, ruptures, and continuities that continue to shape postmodernist approaches to social and political life. Readings will include Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, Jameson, Derrida, Butler, and Bhabha, among others.

Ecology and Environmental Thought

K20.1298 SCI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Gene Cittadino

Open to Gallatin students only.

Objectivity and the Politics of the Journalism Revolution

K20.1299 SOC, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Paul Thaler

At the birth of this nation, it was assumed by journalists and their readers that journalists were partisans, telling stories from particular points of view. But the growth of the modern newspaper combined with the ideals of science transformed the image, self-image, and practice of journalism, which now claims to worship at the altar of objectivity, to present infomation or “news” without bias. This ethic has carried over to the contemporary media, despite challenges from critics. Rather than multiple media outlets presenting different optics or lenses through which to see events and their contexts, media outlets claim to speak impartially. In this course we examine this ideal or promise: is it possible? desireable? To pursue this inquiry we consider challenges to objectivity by figures such as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, who linked a “new journalism” to a personal point of view. Did such innovations debase journalism? Or is it better for journalists to admit that they can disavow, but can never escape, a point of view? In turn, we relate this question to the political theory of Jurgen Habermas, who defends an “emancipatory mode” of journalism. Lastly, we bring these arguments about journalism to several case studies: the OJ Simpson murder trial, the Clinton impeachment, and the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential campaign. Readings will include Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Sinclar Lewis, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr and Jurgen Habermas.

Sigmund Freud and Modern Social Theory: Understanding Life in the Therapeutic Age

K20.1301, 4 CR, F 11:00-1:45 Michael Laskawy

The aim of this course is twofold—to gain a clear understanding of Freudian theory, and to place it in relation to broader critiques of what many have called our “therapeutic age.” In the first part of the course, we will engage in a close reading of Freud’s major works, with a special focus on how he built upon his theory of the individual to craft a powerful critique of modern society. In the second part of the course, we will read works by authors who have used Freudian theory as a starting place for more comprehensive and elaborate critiques of modern life. We will seek to understand their revisions to Freud and why they see Freudian theory as vital to their explanations of contemporary society. Readings from Freud will include several of his major case studies, The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on Sexuality, and Civilization and Its Discontents. Other readings will include works by Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Nancy Chodorow and Philip Rieff.

Ethical Theory in Action

K20.1302 HUM, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Justin Holt

The purpose of this course is two-fold: first, to study the structure of ethical action in classical and modern ethical theories; and second, to apply what we learn about ethics to several contemporary moral and social issues. By reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and Mill’s Utilitarianism, we will survey a broad range of the content and form of ethical actions. Finally, recent essays that attempt to define ethical action will be our way to address the ethical dimension in contemporary issues such as the distribution of wealth, abortion, and capital punishment.

Mad Science/Mad Pride

K20.1311 SCI, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis

Open to Gallatin students only.

In recent years, questions of madness and psychiatry have been the subject of considerable strife and controversy. This class maps out the terrain of these conflicts by exploring competing approaches to psychiatric concerns. The approaches we consider include biopsychiatry, psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, existentialism, feminism, postcolonialism, the consumer-survivor movement, and recent work in post-psychiatry. The authors we read include Roy Porter, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing, Victor Frankl, Franz Fanon, Jane Ussher, and Nancy Andreason, Linda Morrison, and Michel Foucault. Along the way, we will compare and contrast our considerations with the fictional memoir Prozac Highway by Persimmon Blackbridge.

Rethinking the Biological Sciences: Haraway, Theory, and Culture

K20.1316 SCI, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis

Open to Gallatin students only.

Today’s biology has moved out of the lab and into our biofutures. Genetically modified foods, in vitro fertalization, cloning, the biomedical enhancement debates, neurochemical psychic manipulation, and even the possibility of a posthuman culture all loom on the immediate horizon. These biological developments challenge our familiar ways of thinking, and they upset many of our most cherished categories and priorities. As a result, new ways of thinking must emerge to understand and cope with today’s biological sciences. One of the most important scholars to respond to this challenge is feminist historian of science, Donna Haraway. Haraway is unique because, more than anyone else, she uses recent theoretical work from humanities and cultural studies to think again about biology. We devote this class to a close study of her work. We consider the intellectual context of Haraway’s work in both theoretical humanities and the biosciences, and we do careful readings of her key texts on the cultural history of biology.

Readings in Asian and Comparative Philosophy

K20.1331 HUM, 4 CR F 2:00-4:45 Lou Nordstrom

This course attempts to introduce students both to Asian philosophy/religion and to notable examples of comparative philosophy. The primary sources will consist of one reading each from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism; the texts, respectively, are the Bhagavad Gita; The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Nagarjuna); and Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu). The comparative philosophy texts are the following: Loy, Non-Duality; Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness; and Abe, Zen in Comparative Perspective. Some of the themes that will be focused on include the problem of evil; the nature of mystical experience; the concept and experience of emptiness (sunyata); the idea of non-duality; and the concept of the Way (Tao) as all-inclusive reality.

Contemporary Political Economy

K20.1336 SOC, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Kim Phillips-Fein

formerly titled everyday economics: contemporary economic issues.

Economic policies and the state of the economy shape all of our lives in fundamental ways, affecting our social position, the kind of work we are able to do, the types of goods we are able to consume, and our very ability to survive. This course will teach students to understand basic modes of thinking about the economy. We will discuss different models of the economy and categories of economic analysis, and then we will analyze real-world economic issues in their historical context. This course will emphasize the economic history of the past thirty years. Examples of topics we will cover include: free trade, globalization and the anti-globalization movement; the stock market; homelessness; unions; monetary and fiscal policy; the economics of war; the causes of inequality. This is not an economics class, but a course that should give non-economists some familiarity with contemporary economic history.

Hiroshima

K20.1340 HUM, 4 CR M 2:00-4:45 Nina Cornyetz

On August 6, 1945 the city of Hiroshima in Japan was leveled by the first atomic bomb. On August 9, the city of Nagasaki was leveled by the second bomb. It is estimated that between 210,000 and 270,000 people were killed, some immediately, some from the radiation days or months later, These estimates do not include more long-term impacts of the radiation, such as birth defects, or various cancers. How can we, as human beings, make sense of these events? How can we cope with, and represent unthinkable trauma? What are the politics of such representation? What processes of healing are possible through remembering? Is it important to represent such traumas, and if so, why? This course will explore a selection of Japanese historical, literary, cinematic, musical, and other venues in which this unrepresentable trauma was, and continues to be, indeed, represented. We will aim at exploring the processes of mourning, remembering, and representing collective cultural trauma. Readings will include: Michael Hogan, ed. Hiroshima in History and Memory, John Treat, Writing Ground Zero, Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Walter Benjamin, selections, and selected short fiction from Crazy Iris. We will view documentary and narrative films, including Black Rain.

Facing the Music: Globalization, Popular Culture, and the Practice of the Diaspora

K20.1354 HUM, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Guillermo Brown

This course will explore music’s interrelationship with poetics and politics in the age of globalization. The approach is an interdisciplinary one, using critical theory, cultural studies, and history to trace the relations between musical styles and the politics of commodification in late capitalism. The rise of the “world music” genre and the internationalization of hip-hop symbolize important phases of popular aesthetics in the global economy. This course interrogates popular culture, postmodernity, and globalization, and will survey some transformations of popular music and political economy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sonically mapping immigration and cultural flows over circuits of empire. We will examine a variety of musics including salsa, electronica, indie rock, “Desi-hop” and Bhangra, the ‘narcorridos’ of the U.S.-Mexican border, and reggae in the context of indigenous struggles worldwide. Readings will include: Lloyd, Sebastian Jah Music; Flores, Juan From Bomba to Hip-Hop; Hebdige, Dick Cut’n’Mix; Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun.

The Cultural Politics of Global News Media

K20.1355 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Holly Davis

In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will develop a conceptual, ethical and methodological framework for today’s transnational and multi-media news industries. Histories such as Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and US Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 describe how the cultural politics of news have helped form and inform US foreign policy, trade and wars. Other media critiques, such as Herbert Gans’ Deciding What’s New and Rodger Streitmatter’s Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History, will help students question the legacies and limits of corporate media, while media watchdogs and activists, such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), will provide examples of responsible and independent transnational news coverage. Together in class we will use al Jazeera, the 1979-80 Iranian revolution and hostage crisis and the 2002 coup in Venezuela as institution- and event-based case studies of global news. Weekly research and writing assignments will culminate in final presentations of students’ own research.

The Qur’an

K20.1357 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Sinan Antoon

The political upheavals and events of recent years have focused much attention on “Islam” and its cultures and texts, especially the Qur’an. Most of the attention and interest in the Qur’an, however, has been reductive and superficial, amounting to no more than de-contextualized misreadings of certain verses in most cases. This seminar will serve as an introduction to the Qur’an as scripture, but also as a generative and polyphonic cultural text. We will start with a brief look at the legacy of Qur’anic studies within the larger paradigm of Orientalist scholarship and “western” approaches to all things Islamic. We will, then, address the historical and cultural background and context of the Qur’an’s genesis as an oral revelation, its intimate affinities with Biblical and Near Eastern narratives, and its transformation into a written and canonized text after the death of Muhammad. We will then examine the Qur’an’s structure as a “book” and read selections from its most famous chapters and explore how they were deployed in various discourses as Islam became the official religion of a civilization and an empire. Readings and discussions will focus on the themes of prophecy, gender and sexuality, violence and peace. The seminar neither assumes nor requires any prior knowledge of Islamic studies or Arabic. In addition to the Qur’an and its exegesis (in translation), secondary sources may include Marx, Said, Bell, Sells, Bouhdiba and Ahmed.

AIDS and Its Cultural Effects

K20.1364 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Patrick McCreery

Whether by design or happenstance, art often confronts its consumers with political and social challenges. This interdisciplinary seminar examines the challenges presented by films, novels, critical essays, and works of visual art that depict the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Through this case study, we will engage broad questions that have vexed artists, politicians, dissenters, and the art-consuming public for millennia: To what extent is art able to convey the emotional magnitude of a widespread calamity? To what extent can it impact public policy and effect political change? Is art that makes emotional and political sense in one demographic or geographic context easily translatable to others? We will focus primarily on relevant artistic works produced in the United States (especially New York City) and in sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, we will attempt to identify themes that are shared by both regions—the need to protect oneself sexually, the documentation of loss, the creation of memory—and themes that are regionally specific. The works we may engage include Unity Dow’s Far and Beyon’, Larry Kramer’s Normal Heart, Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, Douglas Crimp’s Melancholia and Moralism, Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors, and the art and writing of Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz.

Religion and “The Times”

K20.1378 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Jean Graybeal

Every day the media bring stories demonstrating the surprising and growing influence of religion in contemporary events. Defying earlier predictions that science and secularism would displace faith-based worldviews, religion persists, offering hope, compassion, conflict, and terror. This course aims to develop tools for a critical analysis of the functioning of religion in today’s world. We will engage in a daily reading of The New York Times and other media, with special attention to articles that deal in some way with the impact of religion. We will also read works from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and theology that attempt to elucidate the nature of the forces at work. Readings may include such works as Berger’s The Sacred Canopy, Clifford Geertz’s “Religion as a Cultural Symbol System,” Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God, and Catherine Keller’s God and Power.

Liberalism, Desire and Visions of the Good

K20.1379 SOC, 4CR M 3:30-6:10 Nathaniel Frank

American Liberalism has taken several forms throughout its history. From its Enlightenment roots as a political philosophy of limited government, private property and individual rights, it was transformed by FDR’s New Deal coalition into a program of activist government designed to ensure equality and prosperity. In each case, it has sought to allow a diverse citizenry to define, pursue and regulate competing visions of “the good.” This course will explore that process from the nation’s founding to the present. We will examine several defining struggles in our nation’s cultural and political history beginning with the debates of our founding generation over what kind of people Americans should be and how they should govern themselves. Drawing on the disciplines of history, political theory, sociology and gay and lesbian studies, we will then look at critical periods in the 19th and 20th centuries to assess how Liberalism has identified, expressed, accommodated and limited the desires of the American people. Readings may include John Locke’s Second Treatise, Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal, Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal, Michael Sandal’s Democracy’s Discontent, as well as primary sources and contemporary journalism.

Three Revolutions: Haiti, Mexico and Cuba

K20.1380 SOC, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 A. Lauria-Perricelli

We compare and contrast the revolutionary events, processes and outcomes in Haiti, Mexico, and Cuba. None were simple reflexes of European or North American ideas and politics, although such external factors were among their causes and effects. Each had significant anti-colonial or anti-imperial components, as well as social and political conflicts and alliances within the immediate societies of the revolutionary countries which involved both “internal” and “external” groups and ideas. We consider the roles of such investors, landowners, mineowners, merchants, bankers, politicians, state administrators, peasants, laborers, intellectuals, migrants, and other social groups in-country or in the relevant imperial centers. We analyze interrelations among kinds of capitalism, and anti-capitalist ideologies or social forms and types of rationality; changing revolutionary processes and demands; changing role and organization of the state; the supporters or antagonists of the revolution among differing social groups at differing times; the revolution’s relation to earlier and later movements. Where necessary, we invoke examples from other countries. Readings might include selections from Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century; Du Bois, Avengers of the New World; Fick, The Making of Haiti; Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation; Gonzales, The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940; Nugent, The Spent Cartridges of Revolution; Stephen, Zapata Lives!; Kapcia, Cuba: Isle of Dreams; Saney, Cuba: A Revolution in Mmotion; Pérez-Stabli, The Cuban Revolution.

Creative Democracy: The Pragmatist Tradition

K20.1381 SOC, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Bill Caspary

From Emerson, through William James, to John Dewey, and beyond, Pragmatism has been a uniquely American contribution to political theory and philosophy. Pragmatism, like classical political theory, is concerned with politics as a way of achieving the good life rather than viewing politics narrowly in terms of elections and governments. Through texts by and about the Pragmatists, especially Dewey, the course will introduce theories and practices of participatory democracy, economic democracy, civic journalism, progressive education, participatory action research, and conflict-resolution. Reading Pragmatism as philosophy, in the Hegelian tradition, we will address many of the questions pursued by Marx, Nietzsche, and the postmodernists, and uncover rich alternative answers. Possible readings include Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” James’s "Moral Equivalent of War," Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, "Creative Democracy," and “The Economic Basis of the New Society,” Royce’s The Hope of the Great Community, Seigfried’s Pragmatism and Feminism, and West’s writings on "prophetic pragmatism."

Coming-Of-Age on American Film

K20.1382   4 CR   R 3:30-6:10    Lang

The passage from adolescence to adulthood is one of life’s most profound experiences. Every religion marks this pivotal moment, and every culture tells its own stories about it. This course will examine the rites of passage necessary to become an adult as depicted in American “coming-of-age” narratives from the postwar period to present day. Social scientists, particularly anthropologists and ethnographers, have analyzed the ceremonies that mark the passage from adolescence to adulthood and so the course will focus its analysis through their work. We will pursue such questions as the following: what are the crucial rites involved in coming-of-age? In what ways does the process differ between men and women? How do rites shape identity formation, maintain the social order, enforce social hierarchy, inscribe norms, and increase group solidarity. Why (and how) do rites of passage change over time? Possible Films: Rebel Without a Cause, The Graduate, Risky Business, Menace II Society, Clueless. Novels: The Catcher in the Rye, The Chocolate War and Anywhere But Here. Authors: G. Stanley Hall, Victor Turner, Arnold van Gennep, Erik Erikson, Timothy Shary.

Multiculturalism in American Political Thought and Literature

K20.1383       HUM, 4 CR    MW 4:55-6:10           Obourn

This course looks at the ways that the multiethnic and multiracial character of the United States has been narrated in American literature and political writing from the the mid-19th century to the present. We read a set of literary texts, beginning with Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and ending with Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World, alongside the political theory and literary criticism of authors such as Ronald Takaki, Seyla Benhabib, and Nathan Glazer. Through these and other texts we explore the changing ways that Americans have imagined the "multicultural" body politic over the course of the past two centuries (focusing on the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction, immigration, and civil rights movements). As we read we will ask: How have literary artists tried to capture or participate in these changes? Whose voice counts as an "American voice" and why? How do discourses of multiculturalism relate to traditions of liberal individualism, and to more recent cosmopolitan ideas of global citizenship? Assignments include: one class presentation; two short papers on multicultural discourse in popular culture (such as newspaper or magazine articles, current films, advertisements etc.); and a final research paper analyzing a literary text and its theoretical and historical context.

Modernism and Imperialism: Objects of Transcultural Desire

K20.1384 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Clyde Taylor

In popular understanding, modernity puts colonialism and imperialism into the past. But the actual traffic between modernism and imperialism was surreptitious and intense. What were the provocations of colonial objects on Western artists and thinkers that grounded foundational texts and images, and accelerated modernist innovation? How far can we trace ideas of spiritual and physical adventure, glamour, seduction, freedom, liberation, and plenitude in Western modernism to an “imperialist gaze”? The recent re-opening of modernism to include non-Western spaces of creativity calls for a new look at the colonial encounter and a revised appraisal of who and what is modernist. The target is not a survey of colonial literature and art but a re-examination of the dynamics of modernism from a more global angle of vision and more openly engaged with critical historical coordinates. Texts and images being considered are: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Marlene Dietrich as auteur of colonial-modern desire; Michael North, The Dialect Of Modernism; Debra Root, Cannibal Culture; Jean Genet, The Blacks; David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia (video); Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman”; Peregrine-Shaw, The Vogue Noir; Casablanca (video); Aime Cesaire, Tempete; Robin Kelly, Freedom Dreams; André Malraux, Man’s Fate; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism.

Black Cultural Studies

K20.1385 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 E. Frances White

This class will focus on cultural scholars, theorists, and filmmakers who work in the areas of critical race theory and black popular culture. We will pay particular attention to the writings of Stuart Hall and those who have been influenced by him. We will historicize this work, exploring antecedents to black cultural studies and the contexts in which it arises. In the process, we will be asking questions about black identity and its relationships to gender, class, and sexuality. Works to be studied will include those by W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, Kabena Mercer, Anthony Appiah, and Isaac Julien.

Women in Medicine: From Ancient Egypt to ER

K20.1386 4 CR SOC, W 6:20-9:00 Leigh Vaughan

The course will trace the history of women in medicine, from ancient Egypt (where women feigned to be men in order to practice medicine) through the Middle Ages; witch trials and other turmoils; to their subsequent entry into medical school; and the present debates concerning the lack of women in sciences. Our historical studies will also encompass an exploration of the notable contributions made in the field by women physicians, as well as a critical evaluation of various representations of the female physician in popular culture (particularly television and film). Lastly, we will investigate the relationship between gender equality in medical schools (female students currently comprise 46% of all medical school classes), and the factual reality of the balance of power in pivotal leadership positions within the medical profession. A few of the questions we will seek to answer are: Why are there persistent inequalities within this profession in terms of earning power and position? What are possible solutions for redressing such imbalances? and What are the principle challenges facing women entering into the medical profession today? Course readings may include such works as: Blackwell's Medicine as a Profession for Women; Ehrenreich and English's Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers; Campbell's Why Would a Girl Go into Medicine?; Pringle's Sex and Medicine: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Medical Profession.

The Photographic Imaginary

K20.1387       HUM, 4 CR    R 3:30-6:10    Meltzer

In this seminar we will examine some of the most provocative ways in which photography has been imagined and practiced over the past century and a half, from early accounts of the daguerreotype to recent work on the digital image.  Through close examination of photographic practices and the critical discourses that have grown up around them, we will endeavor to understand not just what André Bazin calls the “ontology” of the photographic image, but also how the photograph gets thought about, talked about, utilized and, in turn, produced fantasmatically as a particular kind of object and a special way of picturing.  Readings may include: Barthes, Bazin, Benjamin, Fox Talbot, Kracauer, Manovich, Metz, Sontag, Tagg.

Thinking About Seeing

K20.1388       HUM, 4 CR    M 6:20-9:00   Miller

This course explores visual  communication in  the context of a  media saturated society.  We will analyze how humans “speak” through images  and symbols as well as words, and how we “read” what we see.     This class will attempt to understand the tools we use each day to reach an audience, while at the same time questioning what we think of as that audience.  Images and texts from the past and present will help us assess  both the character of various media and their personal as well as political implications.  Texts will include works by Barthes, Baudrillard,  Benjamin, Debord, Levi-Strauss, McLuhan, Sontag and other  seminal essays  on the media.

Sappho and David: The Greek and Hebrew Poetic Traditions  

K20.1389       HUM, 4 CR    MW 3:30-4:45           McPherson

From the Psalms of David to Sappho’s love songs, poetry in the ancient Hebrew and Greek traditions expressed the gamut of human thought, feeling, and experience. We will explore the Book of Psalms and Sappho, along with the Song of the Sea, the Songs of Songs, and the oracles of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), and the odes of Pindar, the poetry of Anacreon, and Archolochus, and lyrical portions of the Iliad and Odyssey. We will consider historical setting (from war-tribes to kingship and city-state); culture (from the heroic to the democratic and the theocratic); theme (love, God, honor, sexuality, justice, forgiveness); function (the who, what, where, when, and why of any poem).Art and architecture, philosophy, and religious literature will also be accessed to provide an in-depth, three-dimensional sense of the context. And finally, we will, throughout the semester, ask the question why these poems, some of them three thousand years old, speak to us with such startling immediacy, power, and urgency in the twenty-first century.

American Shakespeare

K20.1390       HUM, 4 CR    F 12:30-3:15  Smith-Howard

Open to sophomores only.  Students will be expected to pay for their own travel costs and some admissions fees.
“Shakespeare is the god of American idolatry. He is the intellectual all-in-all of the American people”(DeQuincey, 1850). Ironically, the American nation (a rebel British colony) has from its earliest days revered Shakespeare--Britain's quintessential poet-dramatist--as a touchstone and symbol of intelligence, artistry and wisdom. In this course we will explore facets of what Ralph Waldo Emerson termed the “Shakespearization” of America. The central aim of this course is to introduce students to methods and materials of bibliographic and archival research via pursuit of individual fields of interest within the concept of “American Shakespeare” or Shakespeare in America, such as: performance history (Shakespeare on the American stage); bibliography and print history (Shakespeare as “book” in America); criticism and theory (American writers on Shakespeare); as well as other areas such as education (Shakespeare in the American classroom), visual arts, politics, etc. Students will engage in diverse methods of inquiry to complete written assignments and will maintain a research journal. We will make use of the rich scholarly and cultural resources available in NYC, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum; New York Public Library; the Grolier Club; Fales Special Collections (NYU); and the New York Historical Society. Course readings may include: Bloom’s Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human; Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare; Greenblatt’s Will in the World; Bristol’s Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare; Papp’s Shakespeare For All; selections from such writers as Emerson, Lincoln, Hawthorne, Whitman and Twain. 

Reading Poetry

K20.1420 HUM, 2 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Lisa Goldfarb

Course meets for seven weeks only, September 5–October 19.

Poetry is an art which can express our deepest feelings and thoughts about our human experience. Too many of us, however, encounter poetry timidly. We wonder how we can make meaning of poetic words and rhythms so distinct from those we use in our daily lives. In this course, we will work at developing poetic sensibilities, not by digging to find clues to the mysterious meanings of poems, but by gaining an understanding of how to read poetry as a language within a language. We will study how the concentrated language and sounds of poetry help us to grapple with the shades and subtleties of our own experience. The course will begin with a study of various verse forms, and then focus on the art of close reading. We will read many poems ranging from early English lyrics, popular ballads, and Shakespeare’s sonnets, to modern and contemporary poems, as well as poems originally written in other languages.

The Simple Life

K20.1433 HUM, 2 CR T 6:20-9:00 Pat Rock

Course meets for seven weeks only, September 5–October 17.

This course examines a theme common to Eastern and Western philosophical traditions—the call to a simple life. Great thinkers in both traditions warn of mindlessly accumulating possessions and entering into a dangerous, frenetic competitiveness. This course examines the value of a simple life and asks such questions as: Is it possible to lead a simple life in an urban setting or does it imply living close to nature? Does such a life lead to a dangerous passivity or does it, as Plato suggests, provide reflective leaders for the society? Does it improve our relationships with others or does it affect them adversely? Texts may include selections from Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Thoreau’s Walden, and the poetry and essays of Wendell Berry.

James Reese Europe and American Music

K20.1439 HUM, 2 CR W 2:00-4:45 Michael Dinwiddie

Course meets for seven weeks only, September 6–October 18.

This course will examine the impact of James Reese Europe (1880-1919) on the development of American music in the early twentieth century. An innovative musician and conductor, Europe organized and conducted the first jazz concerts at Carnegie Hall (1912-1914), founded an African American music school, and served as a collaborator with Irene and Vernon Castle, who made social dancing a world-wide rage. During World War I, James Reese Europe led the all-black “Hellfighters” 15th Infantry Band, which performed throughout France and offered Europeans their first exposure to ‘le jazz hot.’ Readings may include A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe by Reid Badger; excerpts from The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I by Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri; From Harlem to the Rhine by Arthur W. Little; Black Manhattan by James Weldon Johnson; and They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis. Sound and film recordings will also be utilized.

Theorizing Popular Culture: Beyond the High/Low

K20.1443 HUM, 2 CR W 3:30-6:10 Karen Hornick

Course meets for seven weeks only, September 6–October 18.

Why do discussions of a popular song or TV show so often begin with the assumption that it’s “bad” and then focus on its political and economic meanings rather than the aesthetic and emotional pleasures it may yield the consumer? This class will broach such issues as it surveys popular culture studies since its origins in the 1800’s. Readings may include critics such as Le Bon, Marx, Arnold, Leavis, Benjamin, Adorno, Macdonald, Barthes, and Jameson; historians such as Leach and Peiss; sociologists such as Riesman and Frith; and the “pop” marketing essayist Malcolm Gladwell. We shall anchor class discussions around two sub-themes: (1) the high/low art debate (we shall contrast the works and reception of Jackson Pollock, Norman Rockwell, and Andy Warhol); and (2) the idea of mass/consumerist culture as collective dreaming (we shall read William Leach’s discussion of the rise of American department stores and the surprising role L. Frank Baum played within it, Baum’s The Wizard of Oz as film and “star vehicle,” and "high art" responses to this idea).

Primary Texts: Plato’s Republic

K20.1449 SOC, 2 CR T 6:20-9:00 George Shulman

course meets for seven weeks only, September 5–October 17. open to sophomores only.

This two-credit course focuses on Plato’s Republic. Our goal is two-fold: we learn the art of close reading to reveal the complex and contradictory layers of meaning in a text, and we introduce the enterprise of political theory by lingering over the central questions Plato raises. Those questions concern philosophy and its relationship to politics, the relationship between knowledge and power, the nature of justice, the role of art, poetry, and myth in politics and culture. We analyze these issues in relation both to Plato’s world, and to our own. We read the text slowly, and often out loud, but we also use several other readings about ancient Greek life, Plato’s text, and contemporary political theory.

Wallace Stevens and the Twentieth Century

K20.1421 HUM, 2 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Lisa Goldfarb

Course meets for seven weeks only, October 24–December 12.

Wallace Stevens holds an important place among modern American poets, yet his readers continue to puzzle over Stevens’ work, especially as it relates to the most pervasive concerns of the twentieth century. In his poetry, he writes very little about specific cataclysmic events of his time, yet Stevens ponders questions of faith in a secular world, considers heroism and loss in a century marked by two world wars, and probes our human relationship to nature in an increasingly industrialized and technological world. In this course, we will take a close look at Stevens’ relationship to the twentieth century. While his poetry will be at the center of the class, we will focus our attention on how Stevens gives voice to the contradictions and complexities of the modern world. Stevens’ own work will be the main text of this course, yet readings will include contextual material drawn from literary criticism, intellectual history, philosophy, and politics.

Sissle, Blake and the Minstrel Tradition

K20.1440 HUM, 2 CR W 2:00-4:45 Michael Dinwiddie

Course meets for seven weeks only, October 25–December 13.

This 2-credit course will explore the conflicting ideologies apparent in the works of Noble Sissle and James Hubert “Eubie” Blake. Famed for such hit musicals as “Shuffle Along” and “Chocolate Dandies,” Sissle and Blake formed one of the most successful musical theatre collaborations of the 1920’s. Their work draws strongly on the minstrel tradition in African American theatre, and attempts to subvert many of its conventions. It may be argued that their commercial success had the opposite effect, and served to update and modernize the very theatre conventions they sought to destroy. We will examine the effect of Sissle and Blake’s oeuvre on musical theatre in general and African American musicals in particular. Readings may include Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls by Allen Woll, Black Drama by Loften Mitchell, with excerpts from Terrible Honesty by Mary Douglas, Blacks in Blackface by Henry T. Sampson, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake by Robert Kimball, and essays by W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Archival sound and film footage will be utilized along with such works as Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled.

Looking at Popular Culture: The Poetics of Television

K20.1444 HUM, 2 CR W 3:30-6:10 Karen Hornick

Course meets for seven weeks only, October 25–December 13.

Most television narrative comes to us in the form of a “series,” a dramatic structure that is our basic focus in this class. How has the development of television as an art been assisted or limited by that format? We will consider some of the basic Aristotelian components of “good” drama in relation to American television history—genre, character, plotting, and “spectacle”—in relation to aesthetic questions about how a given program provides pleasure, but also with regard to theories about the social and political consequences of television’s dominance of the American cultural scene in the latter half of the twentieth century. In addition to secondary readings, we will watch a lot of TV—students will choose at least half of the programs we’ll study as a group.

Ancient Reflections in a Time of Modern War

K20.1451 HUM, 2 CR T 3:30-6:10 Laura Slatkin

course meets for seven weeks only, October 24–December 5.

In this class we will explore ancient Greek attitudes toward war, as represented in epic, drama, and historiography. Among the topics we will consider are: rhetoric and rationales for and against war; war and social cohesion; war and empire; the stakes of civil war; war and gender; the social costs of war; the implications for our contemporary situation.Readings may include, Homer, Iliad; Aeschylus Seven Against Thebes; Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis and Trojan Women; Aristophanes, Peace; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War; and 20th century mediations on the problematic of war, such as Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain; Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam; Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the poem of force.

Primary Texts: The Hebrew Bible and Politics

K20.1452 SOC, 2 CR T 6:20-9:00 George Shulman

course meets for seven weeks only, October 24–December 5. open to sophomores only.

This class reads the Hebrew Bible as a work of political thought and literature. From this perspective, it narrates the relationship between god and human beings and the Hebrew people especially, but to raise fundamental questions about the nature of the human condition. In political terms, these questions concern the character of authority and the constitution of community, the meaning of history and the nature of freedom, the causes of suffering and the possibility of redemption. But the Bible does not speak in one voice: it formulates and “answers” these questions in a variety of genres, by parables of fratricide, stories of founding, poems of protest, and in voices as different as Cain, Moses, David or Job. We will analyze the political meaning and cultural implications of these clashing elements, and of the over-arching narrative seeming to contain them. How can we read them? What is their impact? Do they still frame how we think about life and art, about morality and politics? Given such questions, we cannot privilege a religious orientation, which must become one of many perspectives we bring to bear on the meanings of the text. Also, we cannot read the text in its entirety. We will focus on Genesis, Exodus, Prophecy, and Job, and will conclude by reading one gospel text.

The Odyssey: Estrangement and Homecoming

K20.1457 HUM, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Laura Slatkin

course meets for seven weeks only, October 25–December 13. open to sophomores only.

One of the two foundational epics of so-called Western Culture, the Odyssey features a wily hero whose journeys are extraordinary and whose longing for home is unbounded. The Odyssey offers a complex meditation on brotherhood, bestiality, sexuality, kinship, and power; it is the great epic of cross-cultural encounter, in all its seductive and violent aspects, as well as the great poem of marriage. An adventure in nostos (homecoming), the Odyssey shows us the pleasures and dangers of voyaging among strangers. Constantly exploring the boundaries between the civilized and the savage, the poem offers as well a political critique of many ancient institutions, not least the family, patriarchy, hospitality customs, and the band-of-brothers so central to epic ideology. And as a masterwork of narrative art, the Odyssey asks us to consider the relation of fiction to “truth.” We will explore these and other matters in the Odyssey, and may make some concluding forays into contemporary re-workings of Odyssean themes and characters.