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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
In this course we examine some of the myriad ways that Christian biblical narratives have appeared in certain movies. What are the overt and subtle ways that these films seek to interpret and employ biblical texts? Why do they draw upon the texts they do and read them as they read them? What can cinematic interpretations of biblical texts reveal to us about how these texts are used in broader U.S. culture? How does an awareness of this scriptural dimension in a work of "popular culture" affect our interpretation of both the film and the scriptural text's meanings? How do varying interpretations of biblical texts help us to understand cinematic meaning? By assuming that we can read both biblical texts and films in multiple and contradictory ways, this class can use film as the occasion for interpreting, analyzing, and debating the meanings, cultural functions, and affective responses generated by biblical narratives in film. Finally, this course asks us to analyze how movies may interpret certain biblical texts in order to crystallize and reflect certain political, economic, ethnic, racial, sexual, and social parameters of U.S. cultures. Attention to the biblical imagination of U.S. cinema and the cinematic imagination of biblical texts will necessitate interdisciplinary study of text and representation and a concern with the implications of ways in which we read texts and films. While this course will read selected biblical and extra-canonical texts, including selections from canonical and non-canonical gospels, the letters of Paul, and the book of Revelation, our foci will be on the way that movies (and the people who make them and watch them) seek to make meaning out of and with reference to these biblical texts.
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3.00 Credits
One of the two most consequential texts in human history, the Qur'an is more conscious of itself as text and the work of interpretation that is part of the life of a text. Because it is God's most important sign (and also because it is relatively short) millions have memorized it and the art of Qur'anic recitation is one of the supreme Islamic performing arts. Nevertheless it is primarily as a text that the Qur'an exists in itself and in the minds of Muslims. The text of the Qur'an will thus be the focus of this course, reading it extensively, intensively and repeatedly throughout the semester. We will attend to the structure and variety of styles and topics in the text and to the Qur'an's understanding of itself in relation to other forms of literary expression. We will place the form and content in the context of seventh century c.e. Arab society and attend to the life of the Prophet (PBUH) that provides one crucial framework to the text. Through the lens of tafsir, Qur'anic commentary, we will also use the text to give an initial survey of some of the main theological, philosophical, mystical and legal developments in the Islamic tradition. Finally we will explore some of the aspects of the place of the text in the life of Muslims, including the development of calligraphy and recitation.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
This course will be an introduction to Islamic intellectual history with a focus on the themes of God's speech, the relation of reason and revelation, and the vision of a good and just society. The course will begin with a survey of the legacy of Neoplatonic thought in the early Islamic period and the interreligious polemic of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, philosophers and Muslims. Out of this arose two separated movements in Islam: theology (kalam) and philosophy. In the first portion of the course we will trace the rise of the Mu'tazila movement, their views on 'divine speech' and the Asharite and Maturidi response. We will then turn to the key figures of the classical Islamic tradition, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Ibn 'ufayl. In the final portion we will examine the rise of Islamic mystical thought (Sufism) and the complicated interrelations of that rich movement with theology and philosophy in the figures of al-Ghazali, Suhrawardi, Ibn 'Arabi, Mulla Sadra and finally Muhammad Iqbal, "the father of Pakistan."
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3.00 Credits
The collapse of the Soviet Union, the recognition of untapped mineral wealth, and Islamic resurgence have all led to an increased focus on Central Asia and its neighbors, Russia, China, the Middle East. This course will be an introduction to the Caucasus, the Central Asian Republics, Xinjiang and Mongolia and the interests of their neighbors, including now the United States in those areas. This will be a lecture course that will introduce the salient themes and issues that are necessary for understanding these areas. The course will inevitably be deeply comparative focusing on themes of "the clash of civilizations," the construction of national identities, notions of ethnicity and the treatment of ethnic minorities, resurgent religious movements, and the relation of state and civil society. This course will also function as an introduction to doing social scientific research on these areas and special attention will be devoted to the preparation of a research paper.
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3.00 Credits
This survey course addresses the main economic, religious, political and cultural trends in the modern Middle East. Topics to be covered include the cultural diversity of the Middle East, relations with Great Powers, the impact of imperialism, the challenge of modernity, the creation of nation states and nationalist ideologies, the discovery of oil, radical religious groups, and war and peace. Throughout the course these significant changes will be evaluated in light of their impact on the lives of a variety of individuals in the region and especially how they have grappled differently with increasing Western political and economic domination. This course is part of the Exploring Diversity Initiative because it compares the differences and similarities between different cultures and societies in the Middle East and the various ways they have responded to one another in the past.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the relationship between body, gender, and religion or community in South Asia, using three countries--India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh--and three major religions--Induism, Buddhism, and Islam--as its focus. It begins by unpacking the critical theories in which the human body serves as map for society and vice versa. It then examines the South Asian discourses linking body with nation, population, or purity. It explores a South Asian sociology of the body that occasions solidarity as well as social suffering and structural violence. Along the way, it looks at a diverse set of practices that count or control bodies to produce social cohesion including yoga, sex selection, family planning, monasticism, and fundamentalism. The body emerges as a lens through which to view the production of a politics of identity as much as fragmentation or social hierarchy.
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3.00 Credits
Because mystifying references to Zen are strewn throughout American popular culture-from episodes of the Simpsons to names of perfumes and snack foods-most Americans have an image of Zen Buddhism that is disconnected from anything actually practiced in East Asia. This course offers a corrective to this image by familiarizing students with both the history of Zen and the historiographical roots of these popular perceptions. This course will examine the origins of Zen (Ch'an) in China, trace its transmission to Japan, and cover its development in both cultural contexts. It will conclude with an examination of Zen's unique role in American popular culture. The course will enrich the conventional image of Zen by addressing its involvement with power and governance, gods and demons, mummies and sacred sites, sex and violence, nationalism and scholarship. Texts will include selections from primary works in translation (The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, The Gateless Barrier, The Lancet of Seated Meditation) as well as selections from secondary literature including Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, Victoria, Zen at War, and Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy.
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3.00 Credits
This undergraduate seminar emphasizes writing, critical reasoning, and analytical skills. It explores a variety of Zen art forms {painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics, tea ceremony, and gardens} as expressions or visualizations of the ideals and doctrines of Zen Buddhism in the context of Chinese and Japanese cultures. Highlights include Zen's aesthetic principles as manifested in painting; dry gardens; the tea ceremony and its related art forms; iconographic development in Zen art; political functions of Zen in China and Japan's samurai culture; and feminine motifs of the Bodhidharma (founder of Zen Buddhism) symbology.
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3.00 Credits
Curse for sin, opposite of fun, or curiously peripheral, as in the now conventional career advice, "Do what you love and the money will follow," work has generally gotten short shrift, at least by the male authors with soft hands one usually reads in college. This course will examine shifting attitudes and approaches to human labor in the history of western thought. We will begin with a multifaceted consideration of why we work and the ways in which approaches to human labor intertwined with reflections on human inequality, especially slavery and its justification, and the identification between poverty and the resistance to hard work. With the abolition of slavery and consequent arrival of modernity, two trends are strikingly added to the traditional discourses on work: the workplace as the public site for the achievement of justice, e.g., a living wage, workplace safety and equality of opportunity; and the articulation of individual identity and worth in the context of work, e.g., notions of profession, career and status. The legacy of both those trends is still very much with us, but the twentieth century dislodged the focus on humans as laborers in favor of a view of them as consumers. That is in part a consequence of the continuing shift from a production to a service economy, but also is intimately connected with the fortunately incomplete licensing of desire and leisure that are becoming the hallmark of both our current consumer economy and workplace. These competing issues leave us with the central split in American society between the slightly larger portion of Americans who say they 'get a sense of identity from their jobs' and the remaining significant minority who describe their jobs as 'just what they do for a living.' This course will explore some of the reasons for this fundamental cleavage. In addition to readings in the classics of Western thought including the Bible, Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Weber, we shall explore contemporary portrayals of work and workplaces in literature and film and conclude with contemporary authors including Svendsen, Muirhead, Florida, Gini, Lindsay, Sennett.
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3.00 Credits
In terms of vocabulary and metaphor, the Jewish experience of exile pervades modern, western discourse on the experience of being alienated, severed, and separated from one's national and natural homeland. Thus in this course we will take the Jewish experience of exile (galut) as our point of departure for a broader discussion of these themes as they relate to other diasporic communities. As a consequence of increased mobility, political instabilities, economic insecurity and the proliferation of means of communication, the state of Diaspora increasingly characterizes populations across the globe, from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. While we will not focus specifically on these communities, one of our tasks will be to discover how the Jewish experience shapes the discourse on exile and Diaspora that pervades modern discussions of displacement and emigration. We must further consider what is at stake politically and philosophically in privileging the Jewish experience, especially given the post-1948 community of Palestinian refugees. To illuminate this discussion we will draw on the literature of the Jewish tradition from the Hebrew Bible and rabbis to Twentieth Century accounts and reflections of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as materials that reflect the voices of other refugee communities. We will then move to examine the relationship of the notion of the homeland to that of the promised land. We will consider the ambivalence in the nineteenth and twentieth century concerning discourse of blood and soil, and the consequent possibility that exile and rootlessness could signal positively.
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