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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
This course is designed to enable students to analyze a wide range of Japanese cultural creations-such as Noh Theater, Haiku poetry, art of tea, manga, and anime-by illustrating the influence of Buddhism both on their forms and at their depths. The first part of the course is a study of major Buddhist philosophy and its impact on Japanese literature. The second part observes Buddhist ritual practices and their significance for Japanese performing arts. The last part traces the development of Japanese Buddhist art, and considers the influence of Buddhism on diverse contemporary popular Japanese art media.
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4.00 Credits
This course will recount the development of English literature, from Caedmon's hymn to Ulysses, as a story about the development of the English language, its new musculatures: how the steady accretion of linguistic and word-musical possibilities (French and Latin vocabulary, Italian stanza forms, Germanic and Celtic archaisms, finally a sort of pan-European synthesis) shaped the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Swift, MacPherson, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hopkins, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett.
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4.00 Credits
This class will look at China's most famous traditional tales, such as Mulan, The White Snake, Meng Jiangnu and Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (the Butterfly Lovers?). We will study both the richness and variety of these tales in premodern times, and look into their modern and contemporary manifestations in fiction, stage, cinema and other popular media. Special emphasis is put on tradition and modernity, gender and moral dynamics, regionalism and nationalism.
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4.00 Credits
An introduction to ten iconic monuments of the Islamic world from the beginning of Islam to the early modern period. The course introduces various types of building-mosques, palaces, multifunctional complexes-and city types and the factors that shaped them, artistic, patronal, socio-political, religio-cultural, and economic. Each case study is divided into two lectures. The first presents the monument or city by "walking" through it. The second is devoted to themes elicited from the example, developed in light of comparative monuments, sites, and/or written sources, and to problems of patronage, production, audience and meaning as they pertain to architectural history.
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4.00 Credits
A study of the emergence of a secular literary tradition in the Russian imperial period. Focus on cultural institutions (religion, art, literature), issues of the aesthetic and social critique, and problems of interpretation for contemporary and modern readers. Analysis of novels by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.
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4.00 Credits
What is the function of literary texts in moments, from Plato to the Russian Revolution, that promise total, enlightened societal transformation? Each week, this course will focus on two texts related to selected "revolutionary" moments, one philosophical and one literary. Literary texts do not participate easily in the revolutionary order. They resist the textual simplicities of philosophy. Which do we trust: philosophy or literature? Texts include many found in traditional "Great Books" courses: Plato, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Luther, Milton, Swift, Rousseau, Twain, Kant, Marx, and Chekov, among others.
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4.00 Credits
Examines the materials and artistic processes of artifacts from China, Korea, and Japan, as well as the historical, social, religious, and philosophical contexts in which they were produced. Each week focuses on a different type of object (ceramics, prints, painting, calligraphy, sculpture, architecture, and performance art) linked to different types of spaces (the tomb, household, palace, temple, shrine, and the city). Emphasizes up-close analysis of objects selected from the Harvard Art Museum's collections. Students will work from the beginning of the semester toward a final project consisting of mounting their own (virtual) exhibition of East Asian art.
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4.00 Credits
The course examines the relationship between art and politics in twentieth century Russia and Eastern Europe through visual culture, literature, and film. We move chronologically from the Russian revolution and the period of artistic experimentation to the art of Stalin's era, Gulag and the Cold War, examining writer's trials and dissent in Russia and Eastern Europe as well as the non-conformist art of the late twentieth century. Emphasis is placed on close analysis and aesthetic interpretation in a broader political and historical context. We read works by Malevich, Chagall, Eisenstein, Babel, Brodsky, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Havel, Kundera, Arendt, Vajda and Nabokov.
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4.00 Credits
An exploration of some of the key texts and issues in African American Studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Members of the faculty deliver guest lectures in their own areas of specialization.
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4.00 Credits
This course serves as an introduction to the current crisis of mass incarceration. Specifically, it focuses on the religio-historical roots of the U.S. penal industry, the unprecedented prison population explosion (in terms of race, gender and class), and the relevance of major social problems in American cities to democracy, community and family. A visit to at least one Massachusetts state jail/prison will be incorporated into the curriculum.
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