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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Takes up an extended history of atheism and doubt (in the context of a history of religion). It begins in Greece and then moves on to a brief discussion of anthropological perspectives on belief, before returning to Greece, to the Hebrews and Rome, to India and Baghdad, and then back to Europe during the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the romantic period. Time is spent in England and America in the 19th century, when disbelief was being tied to radical politics, before moving on to the connection between disbelief and realism, modernism and postmodernism. The main arguments for and against the existence of God are considered. However, the main purpose of this course is to force students to confront and grapple with some of the most sophisticated and profound human expressions of disbelief. Authors read may include Cicero, Hume, Holbach, Paine, Shelley, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Woolf, and Freud.
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4.00 Credits
Uses but also updates William James's pioneering approach to interpreting and understanding religion in psychological rather than theological terms. Examines how the term "religion" is more confusing than helpful when it fails to differentiate between a wide variety of utterly incompatible beliefs and practices at different stages of cognitive and emotional development. Discusses the phenomenon of "political religions" (nationalism, totalitarianism, apocalyptic fundamentalism) as attempts to reject modernity (the modern scientific mentality), in order to fill the vacuum that Sartre called "the God-shaped hole in the soul of modern man" that resulted when the traditional sources of moral, legal, and political authority (God, religion, pure reason) lost their credibility as sources of knowledge. Considers that political religions result from psychological regression and contrasts them with the current moment in the evolution of religious consciousness, in which the challenge is to find progressive forms of religious expression, understanding, and experience consistent with the modern scientific mentality, while not being reducible to it. Concludes by examining whether this is the context in which the next major step in the evolution of both culture and personality will need to occur.
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4.00 Credits
The century covered in this course saw disasters of many kinds, some all too familiar to us in the 21st century. It was the century of the Black Death and the decimation of the population on an enormous and unprecedented scale; a time of an economic recession that changed the pattern of prosperity that had existed in the preceding two centuries; a time when the papacy and the Roman Church were faced with the rise of heresy and challenges to religious authority; a time of wars and of rebellions. Yet, in the same era, there was a march forward-toward new ideas, new political forms, vernacular languages, a reawakening that brought changes of immense consequence for all of Europe and for our own culture. Through the darkest periods, the great and beautiful changes that are the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance emerged. This was the age of Petrarch and Boccaccio, among many others, and the great Italian painters and writers who transformed the nature and conception of literature and art and who informed our own worldview. Overall, we study a century that many historians have understood as the most creative and the most terrible of all the centuries until the 20th century. The Making of an Iconic Image AHSEM-UA 148 Cross-listed with Photography and Imaging of the Tisch School of the Arts as PHTI-UT 1120. Willis. 4 points. Iconic images are pictures that become rooted in our personal memory and are stored away for future reference through our experiences with them. Often, the power of an iconic image extends beyond the meaning of its original purpose and takes on another form socially and historically. This seminar explores the range of ideas and methods used by photographers, artists, historians, filmmakers, and critical thinkers in addressing the notion of iconic images within photography, video, and film. It combines historical, contemporary, and theoretical approaches to identity politics and visual culture, and addresses how images are constructed through art, media, advertising, political campaigns, war and disaster, beauty, and popular culture. Class discussions highlight the trends and transformations that have characterized the evolution of the iconic image. Using a series of case studies, we explore the construction of beauty and style, gendered images, race, and pop culture. We also consider issues of representation, display, and reception, as well as the wider social context in which art, music, and culture are experienced in private and public spaces. In addition to classes held on campus, field trips are taken to archives, museums, and galleries. Each week, students discuss a photograph of their own choice.
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4.00 Credits
The Dream of the Red Chamber is an epic literary classic produced by Cao Xueqin in the middle of the 18th century. Following the traditional form of Chinese fiction, known as "the chaptered novel," it covers a vast terrain of Chinese culture and social life and is widely regarded as the culmination of the vernacular novel of imperial China and a synthesis of Chinese aesthetic and philosophical traditions. With the tragic love story between two teenage members of an aristocratic clan in southern China at its dramatic center, the novel intimately explores the questions concerning what is eternal and what is ephemeral; love and affection, or "qing," as the heart of being that both animates and destroys life; the nature of individual talent and its fragility; the excesses and decadence of the privileged; as well as the growing, if hidden, social and class tensions. Its manifold structure and intricate plot development, coupled with its dazzling array of memorable characters, make this novel the most complex and colorful of all times. Both reading and discussions are conducted in English.
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4.00 Credits
This TIMES seminar considers the most basic patterns across the realms of nature and mind and searches for common functional principles that create those patterns. The guiding context is the fact that evolution is a form-generating process. In a general sense, evolution occurs on multiple scales: biological (Darwinian evolution), cultural (invention and social selection), and cognition (learning and creativity). All these scales possess unique but also similar subprocesses of replication, variation, and selection. Therefore, where the functional advantages of certain solutions are the same to the challenges of existence across the realms, we should expect to find common patterns as those solutions. (See the instructor's book and papers on "metapatterns" for more.) Students find this an exciting area of inquiry and enlarge their intellectual horizons as they engage in research that becomes more self-chosen during the course. Students from all disciplines are encouraged to enroll.
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4.00 Credits
Humans are as violent as any creature, but we have something in abundance that others may lack: the ability to sustain and glorify our violence by justifying it. After attempting to develop coherent accounts of this phenomenon, students consider ways in which pacifist systems of thought have interacted with violent systems of justification, often but not always with genocidal results. It was in the midst of such a violent crisis that Hobbes initiated what remains an undeveloped approach. If one can extrapolate from Hobbes's nationalist agenda and redirect his approach in a democratic way, one can arrive (as many have) at the following claim: Only when globally sovereign conflict-resolving institutions are fully authorized will any subordinate system justifying violence lose its force and coherence, except in the case of violent revolutionary movements that challenge the global authority itself. Partly by examining various fledgling attempts to operate aspects of a future sovereign system, we ask of this claim not so much whether it is practical as whether we resist its implications or suspect its grounding.
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4.00 Credits
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was the greatest cultural critic that America has ever produced-or so a good many cultural critics of our own time have come to believe. Wilson belonged to a circle of writers from the First World War generation that included John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. He wrote novels, poetry, plays, and diaries. But mostly he wrote book reviews and essays on literary, political, and historical topics, which ran in the New Republic, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and other magazines. Reading a substantial sampling of Wilson's work, we will examine a series of large topics, including the cultural atmosphere of Greenwich Village early in the 20th century; the rise of literary modernism; the influence of Marxism; the literature of the Civil War; and various traditions of American thought and literature over the centuries. We will pay close attention to Wilson's style of journalistic writing: his emphases on clarity, on conversational ease, and on emotional forcefulness. Students will be asked to apply Wilson's principles of writing to their own compositions-an extremely useful thing to do for any student who seeks to become a better writer. Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in 20th-Century America AHSEM-UA 168 Cross-listed with History as HIST-UA 664. Please note that this course does not satisfy the advanced research seminar requirement for the history major. Nash. 4 points. Conflicts over racial equality, freedom of speech, and equal protection under the law that were guaranteed in the Constitution have been contested terrain throughout U.S. history. These struggles sharpened in the 20th century as African Americans fought to end racial segregation, women sought equal rights, business interests resisted labor militancy, while federal and state governments suppressed radicals and other dissenters. This seminar examines the legal struggles and the social movements that took place as Americans fought for civil rights and civil liberties during periods of war, industrial unrest, and social change. It explores these stories by analyzing legal history through the lenses of political, social, and cultural history. This is an interdisciplinary course. Students study novels, poems, and oral memoirs; view films; and read historical monographs that speak to this big and important subject. The Tamiment Library, one of the most important repositories in the United States documenting the history of radical politics, civil rights, and civil liberties, is our laboratory. Students work with archives and other special collections on a weekly basis, learning how to use and evaluate these primary sources, interpret evidence, make analytical arguments, and develop research questions.
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4.00 Credits
The seventy-or-so years this seminar examines were among the most turbulent in the history of the world. They start with the butchery of World War II, the Shoah, and atomic devastation, and end with the often violent birth of new nations through the decolonization of African and Asian lands. But they were also years of reconstruction and modernization, leading to booming economies and social improvement. The rise of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism and the emergence of China as the colossus of the 21st century were among the signposts of a changing world in which peoples demanded-and won-their freedom. Perhaps most revolutionary, women at last attained freedom and equality in many parts of the globe. Many writers and thinkers felt such concern for the world around them that they were inevitably drawn to dealing with contemporary issues. Others focused on broader, more philosophic approaches to the existential problems of man in this world; others still sought escape from commitment in artistic paths, removed from social and political considerations. By working with texts-novels, essays, short stories, plays, and films-that reflect artists' and intellectuals' reactions to their times, we will explore and analyze many of the leading creative voices of these turbulent years, including, but not limited to: Arthur Miller, Albert Camus, Assia Djebar, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Betty Friedan, and James Baldwin. The keynote to the seminar will come from Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature?
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4.00 Credits
In contemporary media and in the wake of 9/11, the Spanish Inquisition has been used as shorthand to denote intolerance, persecution, fanaticism, and a disposition to cruelty in the pursuit of "truth." While some elements of this reputation are well-earned, the history of the Inquisition is far more complex and interesting. We begin the semester with the heated question of the origins of the Inquisition and its key role in nation building, in order to then turn to the Inquisition's internal organization and standard practices. From there, we consider the various targets of inquisitorial suspicion or persecution from the late 15th through late 17th centuries: Judaism and crypto-Judaism (the conversos), Protestantism, prohibited books, mystics and Illuminati, witches, Islam and crypto-Islam (the moriscos), and those accused of sexual or religious misconduct (blasphemy, bigamy, and sodomy). We close the semester considering what finally brought about the definitive abolition of the Inquisition in 1834. We will read transcripts from Inquisitorial trials, edicts and proclamations, historical chronicles, novels, plays, autobiographies, an Inquisitor's manual with instructions for torture, a witch-hunting treatise, and devotional literature. We also will examine more contemporary reflections: Dostoevsky's 1880 The Brothers Karamazov, Monty Python's 1970 "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" skit, and the film adaptation of J. K. Rowling's 2003 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
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4.00 Credits
Analyzes the ways that animal and human lives intersect and examines how relationships with animals reflect and shape social life, culture, and how people think about themselves. Explores the myriad and contradictory positions that animals occupy in society (e.g., as pets, pests, mascots, and food) and deconstructs the social origins of these seemingly natural categories. (After all, one society's pet is another society's dinner.) Takes a grounded look at what actually happens when humans and animals interact, which sheds new light on the nature of human and animal consciousness and troubles some of the assumptions we make about the necessary role of language and symbols in interaction. Fundamentally, students learn how the roles that animals take on in our lives, and the ways that we think about and relate to them, are inherently social processes that are patterned by geography, culture, class, gender, and so on. Central questions include: How do ideas about, and relationships to, animals vary across time and space? What roles do science, literature, and media representations play in shaping how we think about animals? How and why did pets become honorary members of the American family? Why are some animals, but not others, granted moral status and legal protection in society? How do humans and animals coordinate interaction without language?
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