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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
This course provides an introduction to the study of East Asian religions. It covers the development of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and Shinto. It is not a comprehensive survey, but is designed around major conceptual themes, such as ritual, image veneration, mysticism, meditation, death, and category formation in the study of religion. The emphasis throughout the course is on the hermeneutic difficulties attendant upon the study of religion in general, and East Asian religions in particular.
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4.00 Credits
A critical investigation of the genre's enduring popularity, beginning with Austen's satirical Northanger Abbey and three novels credited with providing narrative templates for contemporary romances (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights). We will then read twentieth-century revisions of these works (Rebecca, Wide Sargasso Sea, Bridget Jones's Diary). Topics: the female writer and reader/consumer of literature; moral warnings against romance, "sensation," and titillation; the commodification of desire; Harlequins; the relationship between high culture and low.
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4.00 Credits
This course is a survey of the major books and ideas of the Hebrew Bible (commonly called the Old Testament). The course will also treat the historical contexts in which the Bible emerged, and the Bible's role as canonical scripture in Judaism and Christianity.
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4.00 Credits
This course examines "popular culture" as a modern, transnational phenomenon and explores its manifestation in Chinese communities (in People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and North America) and beyond. From pulp fiction to film, from "Yellow Music" to "Model Theater", from animations to internet games, the course looks into how China became modern by participating in the global circulation of media forms, and how China helps in her own way enrich the theory and practice of "popular culture".
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4.00 Credits
This course will focus on how concepts of woman and gender have defined meanings of religious and national communities in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa. It will survey changes in these concepts historically through reading a variety of sources-religious texts and commentaries, literary and political writings, books of advice, women's writings, and films-and will look at how contemporary thinkers and activists ground themselves differently in this historical heritage to constitute contesting positions regarding gender and national politics today.
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4.00 Credits
Examines how the intense political pressures of invasion, occupation, and revolution shape a country's intellectual life and are shaped by it in turn, looking at Czechoslovakia's literature, drama, film, and music from the 1948 Communist takeover, through the Prague Spring and Soviet invasion of 1968, to the 1989 Velvet Revolution, a hallmark of the peaceful overthrow of Communism in Central Europe. We consider works by Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Vaclav Havel; films by Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova, Jiri Menzel; theories of political dissident and the "anti-politics" of Charter 77; and questions of historical memory in contemporary Prague.
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4.00 Credits
Explores the culture and way of life of what was, before World War II, the largest Jewish community in the world, whose descendants still constitute the majority of American Jews. Its common language, Yiddish, spread with its speakers from Western to Eastern Europe from the 14th century onward. Through interdisciplinary approach, including history, literature, music, popular culture, course examines Yiddish as vehicle of Jewish tradition and modernization. Often associated with humor, its speakers were main victims of Hitler's Final Solution. We will try to identify paradoxical features of Yiddish culture that may account for its exceptional fate.
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4.00 Credits
2500 years ago a Greek writer chose the word "history" to characterize his account of the Persian Wars. Why? We still use the word today; but what does it mean to us, and how has that meaning developed from the works of our western forebears? This course offers a lively introduction to the ancient historians' works, lives, and afterlives with particular attention to the nature of historical truth, changing ideas of history in their cultural contexts, the role and relevance of history in ancient and modern life, and the cultural legacy of the Greek and Roman world. Readings from Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche.
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4.00 Credits
This course focuses on the arts of sound practiced by Muslims and on debates associated with "music" in a range of Islamic contexts. The purposes are to understand from a musically informed perspective a set of interrelated musical practices that cut across regions (especially South and West Asia); and how different ideologies, philosophies, and texts-associated with Islam locally, nationally, and internationally-shape local understandings and constructions of sound. The content of classes will include lectures, discussions, live musical demonstrations and careful review of audio-visual materials. Students will also have the opportunity to learn to play or sing Persian music.
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4.00 Credits
An introduction and overview of the major creative elements in professional theater including: acting, directing, playwriting, and designing. Special attention given to productions by the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), the A.R.T. Institute and other productions in the Boston area. Students have the opportunity to attend and analyze at least five different productions and to engage in creative collaborative work throughout the term. Additionally, theater professionals from the A.R.T. give guest lectures in their areas of expertise.
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