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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
The Avant-Garde Spring 2009. Terri Gordon The avant-garde movements of the early 20th century ushered in a revolution on many fronts: a revolution in the arts, a revolution in political values, and a revolution in thinking itself. In this course, we examine central literary and artistic works of the European avant-garde, studying the movements of Italian futurism, German expressionism, Dada, and French surrealism. At the heart of this course is an inquiry into the crucial nexus of art and politics. What constitutes the central critiques made by the various avant-garde movements In what ways did these movements induce social and political change What legacy have they left on our thinking today Finally, what can we make of the complexities of the avant-garde How can we understand the futurist leaning toward fascism, the anarchist stance in Dada, and the gender violence in expressionist art and literature Attention is paid to the visual and verbal arts. We read the genres of poetry, prose, and drama, as well as manifestoes and political tracts. We also view slides of painting, photography, photomontage, and performance art. Works by André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Franz Kafka, Mina Loy, F.T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and Frank Wedekind, amongst others are studied. Theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Bürger, and Georg Lukà csare examined.
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3.00 Credits
Picasso: Artist of the Twentieth Century Fall 2008. Jed Perl Picasso's titanic achievement-as painter, sculptor, and printmaker-reflectnearly every aspect of 20th-century experience. And a close examination of his art and life can show us how one immensely fertile imagination grappled with all the crosscurrents of modern culture. From his early days in Barcelona's hardscrabble bohemia to his later decades as a living legend on the Riviera, Picasso felt the pulse of modernity. His work embraces political radicalism and erotic experimentation, ivory-tower formalism and popular culture. Picasso was a man of paradoxes, and by exploring his contradictions we can gain unique insights into the challenges that any artist faces in the modern world. He was a traditionalist but also a nihilist, a man who remained true to his Spanish origins even as he passed much of his life in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Paris. He painted not only some of the most delicately lyrical works of his century but also, in Guernica, the ultimate political protest mural. His close engagement with Braque in the invention of Cubism may be the grandest collaborative effort in all the visual arts. Yet at times he was the most solitary of creators, developing at the end of his life, in the prints of Suite 347, an unparalleled private erotic mythology. His friends and admirers included some of the essential authors of his time (both Gertrude Stein and André Malraux wrote books about his work), but he was also the first artist to be wholeheartedly embraced by a celebrity culture. In class we examine a series of images and texts that are central to the understanding of Picasso-ranging from his early studies of circus performers, to his surrealist mythologies, to the aesthetic views reflected in his writings. At the same time, students work individually on various aspects of his life and experience-from his political activism and possible anarchist sympathies, to his involvement with the performing arts, to the surrealist photography of his lover, Dora Maar, to his appearances in photojournalism and the movies. We also visit museums and print collections in order to gain a closer understanding of his technical innovations in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and collage.
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3.00 Credits
E ros, Kinship, Culture Fall 2008. Jed Perl This course considers various ways in which love, or eros, has been regarded as incompatible with, yet always born from, the context of social, civic, or political life. We read some key texts in philosophy and social theory that treat this problem, from Plato and Hegel to Freud, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and others. We also follow as our guiding model the most significant poeticliterary treatment of the problem: the myth of Romeo and Juliet, from Ovid through Shakespeare and beyond. The story of Romeo and Juliet allows us to rethink two questions that continue to resonate at the edges of contemporary social theory: 1) What are the conditions for a desirable human attachment without the cooperation and mediation of family, society, culture, a shared language, or sense of history 2) Why should the fate of such an attachment be predominantly represented as tragic; and might it be figured-indeed, lived-in any other way GLI B 5112 Methods of Cultural Criticism Fall 2008. Melissa Monroe and Christopher Hitchens A team-taught seminar, this course focuses on the elements of a strong writing style and on how writers concerned with political and cultural issues deploy various rhetorical techniques in order to entertain and outrage, provoke and inspire. A part of the class, consisting of a close evaluation of student essays in cultural criticism under the direction of Ms. Monroe, also includes reading key texts by a variety of cultural critics, including Matthew Arnold, Mark Twain, W.E.B. DuBois, H.L. Mencken, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lionel Trilling, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Joan Didion, and Edward Said. In the sessions that he leads, Mr. Hitchens analyzes several exemplary cultural critics and discuss his own experience as a public intellectual. Our goal is to understand better how cultural critics make specific literary choices in order to elicit a political and cultural response from their readers.
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3.00 Credits
On Nothing Fall 2008. Anthony Gottlieb This course examines the ideas of nothingness, vacuum, and void, and their significance in Western thought. In philosophy, we start with the paradoxical and intriguing pre-Socratic Parmenides, who argued that one cannot "think of what is not," and Plato's responses to him. We look at throle of nothingness in the systems of various modern philosophers, including Bergson, Heidegger, and Sartre, and at the debate among contemporary analytical philosophers on the question of whether a "null universe" evenmakes sense. We also consider a question first raised by Leibniz: Why is there something rather than nothing This question has been discussed by some of the liveliest recent philosophers, including Robert Nozick and Derek Parfit. We look at their treatments of it and at theological and scientific answers to it. In the history of science, we examine medieval and early-modern debates about the possibility of a vacuum, and what today's cosmologists say about the concept of a vacuum in quantum mechanics. Lastly we look at existentialist angst about the void, starting with the oldest text-the Epic of Gilgamesh-and proceeding to Pascal, nihilism in19th-century literature and 20th-century existentialism.
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3.00 Credits
W omen, Gender, and the Production of Knowledge 1702-1870 Fall 2008. Gina Walker This course examines the ambitions and achievements of a cohort of women intellectuals who, prominent in their own time but now largely forgotten, produced new knowledge that contributed to modern understanding. We concentrate on British women and their complex cultural inheritance, with reference to female scholars in adjacent cultures. Our chronological reach, 1702-1870, begins with the reign of Queen Anne and ends in the middle of Victoria's rule when women were first admitted to British universities and Parliament passed the groundbreaking Married Women' s Property Acts (1870 and 1882). We consider the relation between gender and genre in light of emerging academic discourses, the explosion of science, and the expansion of print culture. We look at the pioneering efforts of women in the republic of letters: Anna Jameson, the first English female art critic; Mary Wollstonecraft, self-taught editor of the radical Annual Review; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, professional life-writer of Vitoria Colonna, Manon Roland, and Germaine de Stael in Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal and French Lives; and women's invention of Shakespeare studies to forge new perspectives on national culture. We study scientific advances and popularizations by Priscilla Wakefield in botany, Jane Marcet in chemistry, and Ada Byron Lovelace in early computer technology; and polymaths Harriet Martineau and Mary Sommerville. We investigate new perspectives on the interactions of male thinkers with their female contemporaries, including the collaborative relationships of Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes; Caroline Herschel and her brother William; and Priscilla Wakefield and Carl Linnaeus. We contemplate the particular struggles of Catherine Macaulay, Mary Hays, Lucy Aikin, and Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland to be recognized as history writers. We investigate women's proposals for female education in light of their own experiences as autodidacts and amid pervasive social anxiety about learned women.
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3.00 Credits
Closer: Understanding Tragedy Spring 2009. Jim Miller Through a close "reading" of different kinds of artworks-visual awell as verbal, musical, and abstract as well as philosophical and closelyreasoned- this seminar acquaints students with a variety of analytic and imaginative ways to understand the meaning of tragedy. In order to provoke reflection, representations of the tragic in different media-including literature, art, music, and film-are juxtaposed and interpreted with the help of visiting teachers, expert in understanding the medium in question. One goal is to provide advanced students with in-depth, interdisciplinary knowledge of contemporary methods of criticism and interpretation. Another goal is to question the meaning of tragedy-and to reflect on the peculiarities of some contemporary representations of the tragic sensibility. During the semester, the class will be joined by a variety of guest teachers, including composer Stefania de Kennesy, art critic Jed Perl, literary scholar Paul Kottman, poet and literary scholar Robert Polito, and philosopher Simon Critchley. Works studied include the film No Country for Old Men; Oedipus Rex by Sophocles; texts by Aristotle and Nietzsche; "The Apology of Socrates" as described by Plato; paintings of the Passion of Christ; Bach's St. Mathew Passion; etchings by Goya and Otto Dix; Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; Shakespeare's King Lear; plus additional works by Stravinsky, David, Nerval, Van Gogh, Foucault, Cormac McCarthy, Jim Thompson, and Betrand Tavernier.
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3.00 Credits
Evil and Sin in Western Literature Spring 2009. Melissa Monroe The problem of evil is central to any examination of the human situation. Philosophers and social scientists have taken various stances on this problem, as have different religious traditions. Some hold that people are essentially good, succumbing to evil only as a result of temptation or social pressure. Others maintain that we are fallen creatures who must constantly struggle to overcome our base impulses. Still others view human nature as essentially divided, a battleground between good and evil. Many recent thinkers would argue that all these viewpoints are meaningless, that the terms good and evil have no objective validity, referring only to socially constructed beliefs which vary enormously over time and space. In this course, we read texts, from the Western tradition, which approach evil from various perspectives, both religious and secular. Some major themes include Satan and other personifications of evil, knowledge as temptation, transgression as heroic rebellion, the figure of the doppelg?ger, and the allure of decadence. Our main focus will be on how these themes are addressed in works of literature, but we also read selections from nonfiction authors whose views will inform our discussion of the literary texts. Among the authors read are Saint Augustine, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Hawthorne, James Hogg, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, William James, Flannery O'Connor, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, and José Saramago.
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3.00 Credits
Art and Revolution: From Paris to St. Petersburg Spring 2009. Elizabeth Kendall This course is about the Russian Revolution: the ideas behind it, the events that set it in motion, and the astonishing cultural and artistic experiments that emerged in its wake. We begin with the earlier revolution that served as model to the Russian: the French one of 1789, and the vision of total societal transformation it unleashed on the world. We will leap more than a century, into Russia's decaying imperial regime, exploded in 1917 by a mass popular revolution, followed by an engineered revolutionary coup-followed in turn by wars of doctrine fought amid chaos. We examine eyewitness accounts of these events by journalists and memoirists; compare analyses from historians and revolutionary activitists; and study the radical attempts, by artists in several media, to delineate the confounding new world of the revolution's aftermath, even as they questioned their own artistic languages. Course authors and auteurs include historians and critics T.J. Clark, Hanna Arendt, Edmund Wilson, and Geoffrey Hosking; journalists John Reed, Emma Goldman, and Mikhail Zoshchenko; memoirists Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and Nadezhda Mandelstam; musicians Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev; artists Kazimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova; poets Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva and Osip Mandelstam; filmmakers Esther Shub, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov.
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3.00 Credits
Proseminar in Intellectual History and Cultural Studies Spring 2009. Melissa Monroe and James Miller An intensive workshop for students writing theses, this proseminar is organized through an ongoing process of peer review supervised by the professor. The aim is to create a collegial environment that helps students improve their writing and also helps them meet the challenge of refining and revising a scholarly essay. This course is required for all students within the Liberal Studies program. Before they can register for the course, Liberal Studies students are required to have a thesis advisor and an approved thesis topic.
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3.00 Credits
I ndependent Study Fall 2008 / Spring 2009. This course gives students the opportunity to pursue advanced research on a specific topic with the guidance of a faculty member. Permission of the instructor is required.
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