University Bulletin (2021-2022)

COML/HUM 21a Renaissance Literary Masterpieces
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Introduces students to some of the greatest works written in Europe during the Renaissance. Readings will include works by Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Luther, Erasmus, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Rabelais, and Cervantes. All readings will be in English. Usually taught every third year.
Ramie Targoff

HUM 10a The Western Canon
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May not be taken by students who have taken NEJS 18a in prior years.
Foundational texts of the Western canon: the Bible, Homer, Vergil, and Dante. Thematic emphases and supplementary texts vary from year to year.
Staff

HUM 89a Humanities Internship
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May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 89a in prior years.
Open to students who will be working in appropriate internship work in the business, political, publishing, entertainment, gaming, media, education, or non-profit sector either during the summer or in the fall. Any kind of productive work related in one or another way to the humanities would be appropriate, for example working for publishers, the press, journals, libraries and other research institutions (on- or off-campus), advertising agencies, political candidates or office-holders, literary agents, the hospitality industry, or business communication in general. The work would involve creative and analytic attention to language, expression, meaning, or context, and could range from drafting press releases to analyzing policies and mission statements, to considering philosophical and ethical aspects of the work that the intern is part of. Usually offered every year.
William Flesch

HUM/UWS 1a Tragedy: Love and Death in the Creative Imagination
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Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.
How do you turn catastrophe into art - and why? This first-year seminar in the humanities addresses such elemental questions, especially those centering on love and death. How does literature catch hold of catastrophic experiences and make them intelligible or even beautiful? Should misery even be beautiful? By exploring the tragic tradition in literature across many eras, cultures, genres, and languages, this course looks for basic patterns. Usually offered every year.
John Burt and Stephen Dowden

HUM/UWS 2a Crime and Punishment: Justice and Criminality from Plato to Serial
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Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows. Formerly offered as COML/HOI 103a.
Examines concepts of criminality, justice, and punishment in Western humanist traditions. We will trace conversations about jurisprudence in literature, philosophy, political theory, and legal studies. Topics include democracy and the origins of justice, narrating criminality, and the aesthetic force mobilized by criminal trials. This course also involves observing local courtroom proceedings and doing research in historical archives about significant criminal prosecutions. Usually offered every year.
Eugene Sheppard and David Sherman

HUM/UWS 3a Drawing upon Literature
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Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows. Studio fee: $75 per semester. Formerly offered as FA/RECS 118b.
An interdisciplinary team-taught course bringing together the practice of studio art and the study of literature. Students use Russian fiction and poetry (and some critical theory) as source material for the creation of visual images: drawings in various media, watercolors, prints, and photographs. The nature of narrative, as it crosses disciplines, will be a focus of our curriculum. We will read works of fiction by such writers as Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel and Nabokov to consider the role of artists as major literary characters, and how works of art function as iconography. Usually offered every year.
Susan Lichtman and Robin Feuer Miller

HUM/UWS 4a Epic Literature
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Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.
Zeroes in on the most foundational of “foundational” texts. This course will study the evolution of the epic, beginning with its solemn ancient origins, in Gilgamesh, following through with the panoramic martial epics of Greece and Rome, and then investigating how Dante, a Christian Medieval poet, adapts his “pagan” predecessors to tell the story of his voyage through Hell, in The Inferno. At the end we will turn to Milton’s engagement with the entire tradition - in his epic treatment of the story of the Fall - and then to the 18th-century “mock-heroics” that parodied them all. The course will necessarily touch on wide-ranging interdisciplinary aspects of history, anthropology, comparative religion, philosophy and myth. But it will focus on intertextuality: it will scrutinize the ways in which later authors reframed, reshaped, honored and challenged the work of their predecessors. Usually offered every year.
Laura Quinney

HUM/UWS 5a Nobel Laureates in Literature
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Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.
Examines a diverse array of writing by Nobel Prize winners. Asks how Laureates exemplify values of idealism and excellence. Interrogates controversies related to prizes. Usually offered every second year.
Caren Irr

HUM/UWS 6a Knowing Yourself: Thinking about Identity from Ancient Greece to Modern Europe
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Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.
How do we know who we are? What does it mean to say “I am me” and “you are you”? How do shifting cultural values and new ideas impact what shapes the way we see ourselves and others and what we believe about the relationship between the individual and their community?
This course looks at the development of ideas of the self in European thought, starting with early representations in Ancient Greece and moving through the intellectual history of Post-structuralism. While this course is centered around the concept of the self in European thought, it does not present an uncritical view of the very concept of “Europe” in the examination of individual and group identities. We will start with the exploration of self and society in Homer’s Odyssey and then move through literary and philosophical reflections on what it means to be a person in what was once called the “western tradition”. (To be clear, this course will engage in examining the notion of the “western tradition critically”). This course will pay special attention to the way that challenges to ‘traditional’ notions of identity have contributed to a dynamic and at times violent debate about personhood, focusing especially on social forces like religion, race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, disability, and capitalism. Usually offered every year.
Joel Christensen and Rajesh Sampath