Humanities Course Catalogue

This survey of American art covers stylistic developments in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Essays presenting specific case studies illustrate the ways in which different approaches, omitted artworks, and in-depth engagements with single works can change our understanding of the narrative of American art. In addition to the broad themes of American art, students will learn a basic art historical vocabulary and examine different art historical approaches.

Survey of works of Western art in the years 1300-1950. Emphasis is placed on developing a vocabulary for the effective description and analysis of art. Other themes considered include patterns of patronage; the interrelationship of art with music, literature, technology, religion, and popular culture; and the changing dynamics of women as both subject and artist.

This course surveys African-American art, including decorative arts created by slaves, mainstream nineteenth-century artists, the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement, the Black Art movement, postmodern art, and contemporary art. We will read primary sources ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke to Romare Bearden and Elizabeth Catlett. Central topics will include the conditions of artistic practice, the relationship to the overall narrative of American art, and the art historical reception of African-American art.

As an icon in American culture, the house is an object rich with social significance. Houses can tell us about the economic development of America, the structure of the American family, the relationship of work to home, and the development of the American city. We will look at the diverse housing types Americans have developed to express their social goals, such as southern plantations, urban row houses, rural villas, model homes, residential hotels, tenements, the post-war suburban home, housing projects, and New Urbanism houses.

This course provides an introduction to modern architecture starting with its nineteenth-century roots and continuing to the present day. We will explore the impact of technological, economic, political, and social change on architecture, as well as study major figures of modern architecture like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Since its introduction in 1839, photography has been an important visual medium. This course will examine changing technical processes and their aesthetic implications; debates about the nature of photography; photography’s relationship to other artistic media; and different contexts in which photography has been used, like art, science, social sciences, colonialism, social advocacy, print media, and postmodernism.

Topics vary from year to year. May be repeated under different course titles for credit.

The sounds and phonation of English. Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Particular attention to the problems of singing intelligibly in English.

Introduction to the creative writing process, with emphasis on poetry or short stories. Includes reading and discussion of student work. Specific focus may vary from semester to semester. May be taken (with permission) more than once if on a different topic.

An intensive study of plays and poetry from the first half of Shakespeare’s career. Besides getting to know Shakespeare’s characters intimately, we will study the place of his plays within one of the most vibrant cultures in all of history, Elizabethan England. As tools to help us understand the plays, we will discuss the importance of pageantry and spectacle in Elizabethan politics; the place of the stage in social struggles; the subordination (and insubordination) of women; the nature of the family; Elizabethan holidays; ghosts, fairies, and other popular superstitions; anti-semitism in Shakespeare’s London; religious conflict during the Tudor period; attacks on the theatres by middle-class Puritans; and significant events in Queen Elizabeth’s long and fruitful reign that are reflected in Shakespeare’s plays. When a good film version is available (or two or more contrasting versions), we will watch excerpts from the plays on film. Throughout the semester, we will approach the plays as entertainments to be performed as well as texts to be read. We will examine the structure of Elizabethan theatres and consider problems and advantages of staging plays in those theatres. Our goal will be this: by the end of the semester, you will enjoy an easy familiarity with Shakespeare, so that you may revisit him often during your lives as a favorite author rather than an intimidating genius, and return to his plays as engaging and imaginative entertainments rather than calcified masterpieces.

A continuation of English 205: an intensive study of plays from the second half of Shakespeare’s career, concentrating on the tragedies and romances.

England’s threat of invasion by the Spanish Armada in 1587, followed by the Armada’s defeat in 1588 in a tempest that the English interpreted as miraculous and providential, produced a period of intense national crisis followed by one of great national pride and rejoicing. In the decade that followed the Armada’s destruction, plays about English history became very popular on London’s public stages. In his own lifetime, Shakespeare’s history plays were the most popular of all his plays. Our time has witnessed a steadily growing interest in these plays on the part of actors, scholars, and teachers of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s history plays do not merely celebrate English nationhood in the wake of England’s great victory at sea; they also examine the meaning of recent English history for their time—and for subsequent times as well. They can be read profitably by any generation for their complex analysis of the varieties of leadership and heroism. Above all, they are wonderful examples of how a nation’s present helps to mold, and is in turn molded by, its sense of its own past. In this course we will study five plays by William Shakespeare and one by his contemporary, rival playwright Christopher Marlowe.

A study of the major forms of lyric poetry, exploring poems from several historical periods (Renaissance, neo-classical, romantic, modern, and postmodern) and paying particular attention to modern and contemporary reinterpretations of traditional forms like the haiku, renga, ode, elegy, sonnet, ballad, sestina, pantoum, and villanelle. From time to time, we will remind ourselves of lyric poetry’s historical associations with music, and I will encourage students to explore musical settings of the poetry we read.

We will devote the first weeks of the semester to late nineteenth-century poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the founding parents of modern American poetry. Most of the semester will be devoted to the twentieth century, when an astounding variety and number of original poetic voices proliferated in America. We will study selected works of a wide range of poets, including Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e.cummings, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams, among many others.

In this course we will explore and map the rich and varied landscape of contemporary American poetry from the Second World War to the present. I have designed it to be a continuation of the course on “Modern American Poetry” offered last semester, though that course is not a prerequisite for the current one. This semester we will study intensively selected works of a wide range of poets, including A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, Rita Dove, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton, among others. Our method will be the close study of selected poets and their work, not a broad survey of the field. Without losing sight—or sound—of our poets’ distinctive voices, we will identify major trends in American poetry over the past four decades.

A survey of American theater and performance of the last few decades. Emphasis is placed on how different identities within American society (gendered, racial, and sexual identity) are represented on the stage.

Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Cage’s 4’33”, Happenings, “Body Art,” Performance Art: over the last 100 years a new kind of performance has emerged. Provocative, sometimes absurd, and often radical, a broader definition of performance overflows traditional “Aristotelian” theater to question the boundaries between representation and reality, audience and stage, sense and non-sense, music and sound, and body and self. In this class we will depart from traditional theater to study significant performances of the last 100 years, and what their creators and critics said about them.

According to an old rabbinical saying, “God made people because he loves stories.” The richness and diversity of the world’s storytelling traditions reflects the variety of people—and peoples—in the world. “We are the stories we tell,” according to the title of a recent collection of stories by and about women. The craft of storytelling is nothing less than the primary way in which peoples and cultures shape and define themselves. This course offers a small but rich sampling of those stories: the literary short story as it developed over the past two centuries, with an emphasis on modern innovators such as Anton Chekhov, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner. Contemporary innovations and experiments in the short story form the coda of the course. Along the way, we will discuss the special features and capabilities of the short story: how it differs from other literary forms and what it can accomplish that its larger, obese cousin, the novel, cannot.

Introduction to late twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, concentrating on British, European, American, women’s literature, black writers, science fiction, or Third World literature.

How should we read the following: a human being trapped in the body of a bug, dangling from the ceiling of a claustrophobic room, a person riding a chainless bicycle, another one speaking monologues while buried to his neck in sand, a critic sitting on the same bench in an Art museum for 23 years contemplating the same painting, a writer wanting to re-write Cervantes’ Don Quixote? These and other absurd scenarios will be examined in this course in an attempt to understand the absurd as an expression of existential crisis, a reflection on the role of art itself but also as political criticism. Writers’ studied will include Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Ionesco, Beckett, Bernhard and Jelinek. All readings will be available in English, students wishing to read in the original languages may do so.

Topics will vary. May be repeated under different course titles for credit.

One might have expected modernism in American literature to originate in the great cities of the north. Instead it was to be a Southerner from a small town who did more than any other author to bring the modernist spirit of innovation and experimentation to American fiction. We will immerse ourselves in the work of the most original and powerful American fiction writer of the twentieth century, exploring the construction of racial and gender differences in America; issues of regional and national identity; competing constructions of American’s past, particularly the Civil War and its aftermath; and the use and abuse of individual and collective memory. We will read several novels and short stories by our author. We will also briefly explore his career as a scriptwriter in Hollywood.

Born in Prague of German-Jewish descent, Franz Kafka was one of the most daring and experimental storytellers of the modern period. A Jewish mystic to some commentators, the first existentialist writer to others, Kafka had the dubious distinction of having his writings suppressed under both Nazi and Communist regimes. In this course we will read one of his novels—The Trial—as well as shorter works such as his parables and paradoxes, short stories, and excerpts from his letters and diaries. Although all of his novels remained unfinished and unpublished at the time of his death, he would become one of the most influential figures in all of twentieth-century literature. A 1984 exhibit on Central European culture at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris christened the twentieth century as “Le Siècle de Kafka” (The Century of Kafka). His writings would continue to shape those of later authors such as Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Thomas Bernhard, and Paul Auster, whose works we will read in the second half of this semester. All readings and discussions will be in English, although students who wish to read some or all of the works in German will be encouraged to do so. Cross-listed as GER 276.

A study of major fiction and selected nonfiction by one of the world’s great modern writers and social thinkers, this course focuses on understanding Virginia Woolf’s writings in relation both to her life and to the social, cultural, political, and economic developments of her time, especially the impact of the two World Wars, the spread of modernism across the arts, the increasing popularity of psychoanalysis, and the rise of the modern women’s movement. Cross-listed as HIS 278 and WST 278.

An intensive study of two of Joyce’s major works of narrative fiction – A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Ulysses – as well as some of his poetry, critical writings, and letters. We also seek to situate the works in various historical contexts that shed light on Joyce’s fiction, including the rise of modernism, Irish nationalism, Anglo-Irish relations, Joyce’s musical background and its relation to his fiction, and Joyce’s life.

Topics vary from year to year. Recent topics focus on authors, periods, genre or themes such as drama, Romantic literature, or musicians in literature. May be repeated under different course titles for credit.

This survey of American art covers stylistic developments in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Essays presenting specific case studies illustrate the ways in which different approaches, omitted artworks, and in-depth engagements with single works can change our understanding of the narrative of American art. In addition to the broad themes of American art, students will learn a basic art historical vocabulary and examine different art historical approaches.

Survey of works of Western art in the years 1300-1950. Emphasis is placed on developing a vocabulary for the effective description and analysis of art. Other themes considered include patterns of patronage; the interrelationship of art with music, literature, technology, religion, and popular culture; and the changing dynamics of women as both subject and artist.

This course surveys African-American art, including decorative arts created by slaves, mainstream nineteenth-century artists, the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement, the Black Art movement, postmodern art, and contemporary art. We will read primary sources ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke to Romare Bearden and Elizabeth Catlett. Central topics will include the conditions of artistic practice, the relationship to the overall narrative of American art, and the art historical reception of African-American art.

As an icon in American culture, the house is an object rich with social significance. Houses can tell us about the economic development of America, the structure of the American family, the relationship of work to home, and the development of the American city. We will look at the diverse housing types Americans have developed to express their social goals, such as southern plantations, urban row houses, rural villas, model homes, residential hotels, tenements, the post-war suburban home, housing projects, and New Urbanism houses.

This course provides an introduction to modern architecture starting with its nineteenth-century roots and continuing to the present day. We will explore the impact of technological, economic, political, and social change on architecture, as well as study major figures of modern architecture like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Since its introduction in 1839, photography has been an important visual medium. This course will examine changing technical processes and their aesthetic implications; debates about the nature of photography; photography’s relationship to other artistic media; and different contexts in which photography has been used, like art, science, social sciences, colonialism, social advocacy, print media, and postmodernism.

Topics vary from year to year. May be repeated under different course titles for credit.

This survey of American art covers stylistic developments in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Essays presenting specific case studies illustrate the ways in which different approaches, omitted artworks, and in-depth engagements with single works can change our understanding of the narrative of American art. In addition to the broad themes of American art, students will learn a basic art historical vocabulary and examine different art historical approaches.

Survey of works of Western art in the years 1300-1950. Emphasis is placed on developing a vocabulary for the effective description and analysis of art. Other themes considered include patterns of patronage; the interrelationship of art with music, literature, technology, religion, and popular culture; and the changing dynamics of women as both subject and artist.

This course surveys African-American art, including decorative arts created by slaves, mainstream nineteenth-century artists, the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement, the Black Art movement, postmodern art, and contemporary art. We will read primary sources ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke to Romare Bearden and Elizabeth Catlett. Central topics will include the conditions of artistic practice, the relationship to the overall narrative of American art, and the art historical reception of African-American art.

As an icon in American culture, the house is an object rich with social significance. Houses can tell us about the economic development of America, the structure of the American family, the relationship of work to home, and the development of the American city. We will look at the diverse housing types Americans have developed to express their social goals, such as southern plantations, urban row houses, rural villas, model homes, residential hotels, tenements, the post-war suburban home, housing projects, and New Urbanism houses.

This course provides an introduction to modern architecture starting with its nineteenth-century roots and continuing to the present day. We will explore the impact of technological, economic, political, and social change on architecture, as well as study major figures of modern architecture like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Since its introduction in 1839, photography has been an important visual medium. This course will examine changing technical processes and their aesthetic implications; debates about the nature of photography; photography’s relationship to other artistic media; and different contexts in which photography has been used, like art, science, social sciences, colonialism, social advocacy, print media, and postmodernism.

Topics vary from year to year. May be repeated under different course titles for credit.