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.

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.

The Ancient Greeks and Their Influence
K20.1322 HUM, 4 CR SSII: TR 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 1:30-4:30 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  MTWR 9:30-1:00 René Francisco Poitevin

MAY INTENSIVE: Course meets for three weeks only, May 18–June 4.

This course explores the ‘global city’ of New York from the standpoint of three downtown Manhattan neighborhoods: the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and SoHo (South of Houston.) What are the historical and political roots of these communities? What are the social and global economic forces shaping their identity, from architecture and public space to labor markets and community organizing? How is gentrification – and the subprime housing crisis – transforming them? Through lectures, films, theory, literature, and walking-tours of each of these three neighborhoods, students will gain a first hand understanding of the idiosyncrasies and struggles that make New York City such an unique place. Reading assignments include Christopher Mele, Saskia Sassen,  Jane Jacobs, Henry  Chang, and Richard Kostelanetz.

The Philosophic Dialogue
K20.1425   HUM, 4 CR  MTWRF 1:30-4:15  Stacy Pies
MAY INTENSIVE: Course meets for three weeks only, May 18–June 5.

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 and Mallarmé.

Masters and Servants
K20.1549  HUM,  4 CR TR 1:30-4:30 June Foley

In this course, we read about fictional masters and servants and ask how narratives by various writers at different times and places reveal, disguise, contest, or complicate these social distinctions. In Maria Edgeworth’s satire Castle Rackrent (1800), at whom are we laughing when a comic steward tells the tale of profligate landlords? In George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), is the affair between the milkmaid and the lord treated as tragedy? P.G. Wodehouse’s many stories of the clueless gentleman Bertie Wooster and his brilliant valet, Jeeves (1917-1974), are meant to make us laugh. But how do we interpret the butler’s story of his life devotedly serving his master in post WWII England, in Kashuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989)? Athol Fugard’s play “Master Harold and the Boys,” set in South Africa (1982), Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby (1982), set in the Caribbean, and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story, “A Spoiled Man” (2008), set in Pakistan, all examine the aftermath of servitude in supposedly enlightened environments. Participation in class discussion, a brief written analysis of each novel and a final paper are required.

Explorations of Architectural Space in Contemporary American Literature
K20.1550  HUM, 4 CR  MW  1:30-4:30 Bart Eeckhout

How are people affected by the shape and appearance of buildings? How do they inhabit buildings and navigate between them? In what way is architecture informed by intangible realities like the builder’s or user’s social power, or identity categories like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And is there such a thing as the architectural sublime also in writing? This class will explore how literary representations help us understand the invisible characteristics of material constructions. As we seek to define the psychological effects of architecture, our readings and discussions will investigate the birth of the capitalist metropolis, the postwar suburban ideal, gated communities, and postmodern urbanism and its culture of the spectacle. We will also address questions of domestic privacy in relation to gender and the spatial politics of AIDS. Readings will include Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, Steven Millhauser’s novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, T.C. Boyle’s novel The Tortilla Curtain, D.J. Waldie's memoir, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Rebecca Brown’s account of the AIDS crisis, The Gifts of the Body, and Alison Bechdel's the graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.

Science in the Theatre
K20.1551 4 CR  MTWR  9:30-1:00 Matthew Stanley
MAY INTENSIVE: Course meets for three weeks only, May 18–June 4.

Science is full of human drama—persecution and inspiration, betrayal and tragedy—and theater’s ability to distill these tropes provides a powerful way to see how science informs and is informed by the wider culture. This course will explore classic plays built around scientific themes through both close readings of the scripts and a deep engagement with the technical, historical, and philosophical issues that motivate them.  We will particularly pay attention to how science and scientists are represented in theater, and how that shapes the public understanding of science.  We will read Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen alongside David Cassidy’s work on Heisenberg and the Nazi atomic bomb project; Brecht’s Galileo informed by Galileo’s own writings and records from the Roman Inquisition; Inherit the Wind with Edward Larson’s Pulitzer-prize winning account of the Scopes Trial; and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia along with Newton’s Principia Mathematica and the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence.