Interdisciplinary Seminars

Art Now: Tradition and Change
K20.1222 HUM, 4 CR SSI: MW 5:30-8:30 Laurin Raiken/Barnaby 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.

Anatomy of Love
K20.1238  HUM, 4 CR  SSII: TR 10:00-1:00   Susan Weisser

Recently the feminist author Vivian Gornick announced “the end of the novel of love,” though romance has in fact a powerful place in the history of Western literature.  Romantic love is a ubiquitous phenomenon in Western culture; we are saturated with images from the popular media about its value and inevitability, but historians and anthropologists cast doubt on its universality, sociologists point out its unreliability as an index to happy marriages, and contemporary literary treatments tend to run from skeptical to scathing.  In this course students will analyze major shifts in definitions and treatments of romantic love, attending especially to issues of gender and power.  We will read a selection of representative poetry and fiction, excerpts from research in the psychology of love, cross-cultural and historical views of romantic love, and feminist appraisals of women’s relationship to romance as a cultural institution.  Course work may also include texts by Plato, Dante, Goethe and Lawrence; and a selection of love poetry from Sappho to the contemporary era.

Classic Texts and Contemporary Life
K20.1239 HUM, 4 CR SSI: TR 5:30-8:30 Antonio 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.

Theorizing Politics: Machiavelli, Marx, and Foucault
K20.1272 SOC, 4 CR   MTWRF 1:30-4:30   George Shulman
MAY INTENSIVE: Course meets for three weeks only, May 12–May 30.

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.”

The Ancient Greeks and Their Influence
K20.1322 HUM, 4 CR SSII: MW 10:00-1:00  Pat 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.

London, Paris, New York: The Novel and the City, 1860-1925
K20.1347  HUM, 4 CR TR 5:30-8:30 Sara Murphy

The city itself becomes a character in the modern novel: a place of mystery and danger, a place of seduction and riches, a dreamscape or a hell. Identities are destabilized on city streets; a fine lady is taken for a prostitute and vice versa; a benevolent helper is in actuality a dangerous crook. The city is a place where one can wander, lose oneself, one’s money, one’s soul—or find redemption in a stranger’s glance. The city is envisioned as a place of infinite possibilities.  But it is also a place where one can be haunted by everything old or left behind. This course will take as its focus the relations sustained between novels as a form and the modern city. Studying a small number of novels that take Paris, London, or New York as their primary  scenes, we will examine how the novel comes to create cities and how in turn it is created by them. We’ll supplement our reading of the selected fictions with theoretical and historical texts ranging from Marx and Benjamin to contemporary writings on labor, poverty, finance, consumption patterns and housing issues. Authors considered may include Dickens, Zola, Wharton, Woolf, and Breton.

The Global Neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan
K20.1403  SOC, 4 CR  SSI: TR 10:00-1:00 René Francisco Poitevin

This course explores three downtown Manhattan neighborhoods: the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and the West Village. What are the historical and political roots of these communities? What are the social and economic forces shaping their identity, from architecture to public space and community organizations? How is globalization transforming them? How are their residents fighting back? Through lectures, readings, walking-tours, films, class presentations, and field work with community-based-organizations, students will gain a first hand understanding of the idiosyncrasies and struggles that make New York City such an unique place. Reading assignments include Janet Abu-Lughod, Jack T. Chen, Saskia Sassen, Neil Smith, and Sharon Zukin.

The Philosophic Dialogue
K20.1425   HUM, 4 CR  MTWRF 1:30-4:30  Stacy Pies
MAY INTENSIVE: Course meets for three weeks only, May 12–May 30.

In this course, we will read philosophical dialogues and their modern successors, poetic prose pieces and a play whose subjects are art and rhetoric. Ancient to modern writers have been fascinated with the power of art, and for each, ideas about art are connected to those about language and society. In our reading of Ion and Gorgias we will look at Plato’s ideas on art, rhetoric (oratory), and power before his Republic. Phaedrus, written later, complements the discussion in earlier texts, developing Plato’s ideas about the relation of the intellect, the emotions, and the appetites. We will then discuss Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, which revisits some of Plato’s themes from the perspective of the eighteenth century and the changing world of the Enlightenment. Finally, we will explore the dialogue form in the twentieth century through Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia and excerpts from works of modern writers. In our dialogue, we will explore not only at what these writers say, but how they say it, and speculate on how and why conversation, rather than monologue, can give rise to knowledge. Among the questions I hope we consider are the following: How are ideas born from conversation (and, I hope, our conversations)? What is the importance of human relationship in intellectual inquiry? How does the dialogue imply, and necessitate, our participation as readers? Readings may include works by Plato, Diderot, Stoppard and selected excerpts from Bakhtin, Mallarmé, and Murdoch.

Sports, Race and Politics
K20.1493 HUM,  4 CR  MWR 10:00-4:00 Millery Polyné 
MAY INTENSIVE: Course meets for three weeks only, May 12–May 29.

Beyond spectacular touchdowns and walk-off grand slams, sport remains a vital institution for analyzing the ideological/theoretical frameworks of nationalism, diplomacy, corruption, gender and race.  From Joe Louis’s historic fight against Max Schmeling in June 1936 to the recent murder of Pakistan’s cricket coach in Jamaica during the World Cup, sport should be understood beyond masculine bravado, violence and the joy and agony of competition, but also as a serious vehicle for conceptualizing and analyzing the triumphs and limitations of our society and its complicated history.  This course examines sports (baseball, boxing, soccer, basketball and cricket), primarily from a U.S. and Latin American context, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In what ways do these sports reify concepts of race and gender? How is it utilized as a tool of diplomatic relations?  Through primary document analysis and secondary source readings such as Adrian Burgos’s Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line, Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian, and Franklin Foer’s, How Soccer Explains the World this course will allow students to further assess the significance of sport in shaping culture and politics in our global society.

Monsters in Popular Culture: Invented, Awakened, Invading
K20.1494  HUM, 4 CR  SSII: TR  5:30-8:30 Patricia Lennox

From the earliest myths to the latest big-budget action film, powerful monsters continue to menace the innocent. Monsters have been pivotal to folk tales, literary texts, and films. In the nineteenth century, they became intertwined with industrialization, scientific experimentations and inventions. By the end of that century, a psychological monster emerges whose terror lies in its grip of the reader/viewer’s subconscious. Post World War II and the shock of a massive Atom Bomb explosion release primitive monsters; while later space exploration creates another generation of alien monsters. In the 1950s, monster films like The Blob, The Thing, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers offered veiled political commentary. Other monster types that have endured include the myth/folk/fairy tale figure of the Beast Bridegroom and the multi-headed, multi-limed, physically monstrous creature, sometimes a hybrid of living being and machine. In this course, our monsters will include, but not be limited to Frankenstein, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Nosferatu, Metropolis, Godzilla, King Kong, assorted Blobs, Things, and Aliens, as well as creatures from the worlds of Harry Potter, Bilbo Baggins and His Dark Materials’ Lyra. The reading/viewing material will include a mix of fiction, films, and critical articles.