Humanities Concentration

This course examines the emergence of the Third World in modern history, the response to and reformulation of the question of modernity among Third World peoples and intellectuals, and the formation of modern global relation, beginning around 1450 to the present, in which Euro-Americans played a central part. This course also explores recent changes in the status and the meaning of the Third World and lays out numerous historical problems that still remain in this increasingly globalizing and interactive world.

The United States of America originated as colonies within the British Empire, and the early founders of the republic openly celebrated the expected emergence of an American empire after the American Revolution. In what ways can the history of the United States be understood through this lens of emerging empire? Might that lens obscure as much as it reveals? What is imperialism, how is it different from colonialism, and what relationship to American cultural development has it had? To explore answers to these and other questions, students will focus on the US experience of empire and compare it to the history of imperialism and colonialism in India, Africa, and elsewhere. Students will read classic and contemporary works in Colonial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and American Cultural History in preparation for group discussions, seminar papers, and independent research. Same as: INTS 489.

The course examines the historical development of educational thought and practice in the West from the early Greeks to the present, focusing on the theme of humanism – its interpretation by the early Greeks, its reformulation in the Christian era, its eclipse and later revival during the Renaissance and its tenuous existence in the age of the modern and pre-modern state (1600-1900). Students will read from the works of such writers as Plato, Dante, Pico Della Mirandola, Erasmus, Vico, Comenius, Pestalozzi, Montessori, and Rousseau.

This course will examine three central questions of the stage: What are the literary and cultural origins of the theater? How does an actor relate to the written word? How can the actor influence the audience? To investigate these questions, the course will provide basic training in theater exercises for motion, speech, and concentration, in-class discussion and performance of plays, and analysis of both Eastern and Western philosophical ideas of the theater.

The goal of this course is to introduce students to some of the great – popular and classical works – written in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Readings include the bawdy tales of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Cervantes; Dante’s great epic poem, Inferno (from “The Divine Comedy,”) Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, More’s Utopia, and Montaigne’s Essays. These timeless pieces have shaped and continue to shape the Western imagination from Shakespeare to James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. Attention is paid to the historical contexts although emphasis will be on genres and forms.

Experimental critical writing is a slippery genre that challenges and breaks down traditional genre distinctions, sidestepping and/or transforming conventional expository protocols. A hybrid form, experimental critical writing challenges disciplinary boundaries and borrows, as it pleases, from various genres – personal essay, historical writing, memoir, non-fiction, drama, diary, autobiography, fiction, reportage, poetry, rant, and manifesto. Exceeding genre and discipline boundaries, experimental critical writing produces new epistemologies not possible within forms bound by conventional constraints. This course will uncover some of the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name “experimental critical writing;” explore emergent “alternative” theoretical and methodological frameworks related to the production of knowledge; blur the boundaries between disciplines, genres, the academic and non-academic; and consider what it means to produce new knowledge as a socially and ethically responsible global citizen.

This is an intensive upper-division course designed for Humanities majors and non-majors who seek to prepare themselves to engage issues of graphic literacy in an increasingly visual global and professional culture. This course will pursue landmarks in the history of cinema and establish analytic vocabularies for interpreting film masterpieces as well as emerging visual technologies. Our curricular emphasis will be upon “film texts” of the highest artistic status. Our analytic emphasis will focus on (i) critical approaches to those texts and (ii) interpretive disputes carried out across the last century’s divergent critical viewpoints, now under siege by aesthetic and conceptual norms that seek consensus (hegemonic unity) in a world only recently opened to multiple cultural perspectives.

Visual rhetoric can be understood as visual argument (or an argument using images). This course encourages students to explore and write about non-traditional forms of rhetoric drawing from a wealth of topics related to film genres, ancient rhetorical genres, and film studies. This is not a film appreciation course but rather a writing and rhetoric course that encourages students to engage with the way in which visual culture communicates and makes arguments. Each week, students will explore and write about a different film genre and its particular concerns. They might, for example, explore arguments about gender and sexuality in the post-war genre of Film Noir. In this case, we students would combine psychological theory with gender studies in their written analyses of films like Double Indemnity or Gilda. Alternately, by exploring the early documentaries of Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov, students might ask how do we understand “realism” and, in the process, how do we understand what is included and what is left out of their versions of reality? Analyses of movies in this course will turn on the fundamental examination of how meaning is created through the power of artistic vision and visual technology.

The goal of this course is twofold: to examine the evolution of Greek philosophy from the earliest known stages and explore the way in which philosophical and literary issues permeated and continues to permeate the work of contemporary thinkers and writers; and to provide a take on the antique world.

This is an introduction to literary genres and to the art of critical reading. The course will survey important examples of lyric poetry, short narratives, essays, novels, and drama. The main objective is to help students gain confidence and insight as they read difficult literary masterpieces, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as help in grappling with the intense poetic strategies of poets such as John Keats and W. B. Yeats. The course will survey a variety of critical approaches to literary texts and it will also focus on the student’s growth as a critical writer. Lit 140 serves as a prerequisite for higher courses in literature.

This introductory course offers a rigorous initiation to the “close reading” of literary texts and critical essays as well as to in depth interpretive activity. While it serves as a prerequisite for advanced courses in literature and humanities, it serves no less as preparation for critical reading in all intellectual disciplines in which difficult texts, complex writing and both research and scholarly rigor are in play. Lit 155 serves as a prerequisite for higher courses in literature.

This course explores powerful and complex major work from the remarkable period of North American literary maturity, an era often called the “American Renaissance:” Melville’s Moby Dick; Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Emerson’s Essays; Henry Adams’ Education; Thoreau’s Walden; and Emily Dickinson’s elegant poetry, and other texts.

This course examines major texts of literature in North America’s 20th century cultural upheaval: the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens; novels by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner and Joseph Heller; dramatic texts by Eugene O’Neil alongside studies in the relationship between art and the rise of cinema with its competing but often derivative narrative and imagistic techniques.

This course will survey the major works, genres, and themes of Chinese and Japanese pre-modern literature, focusing on literature of the Tang/Song dynasties and the Nara/Heian eras (c. 700-1200 AD). Students will study the works of individual poets and essayists, their contributions to the classic anthologies, and excerpts from the major novels and prose narratives of the premodern age. The course will also examine foundational critical theories within Asian literature, such as the genesis of poetry, the relationship between images and ideographic meaning, and the roles of fiction and diaries within society.

This course will survey the principal works, authors, and themes of Chinese and Japanese medieval literature, focusing on literature of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties and the Kamakura, Muromachi and Edo eras (~1100-1800CE.)The course will look at the three dominant genres of poetic anthology, personal narrative and staged drama, with particular attention paid to the conflicts between elegance and earthiness, worldliness and reclusiveness, and the changing perspectives towards gender and personal identity.

Students taking this course will read and discuss texts from various Asian countries but will focus primarily on works from China and Japan. The literature dealt with in class will be drawn from various periods, nations, and genres in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This course explores various aspects of the literatures that have developed in Latin America. The works read in class may be drawn from indigenous sources as well as from the Spanish and Portuguese traditions. All works are read in translation.

The essay is everywhere: a newspaper, a YouTube Channel and a college app. Invented by Montaigne in the Early Modern Europe, the essay has risen to be a dominant cultural form. What did Montaigne want the essay to be? Has the essay become a victim of its success? We will consider four epochs in the history of the essay: Antiquity (Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius); Renaissance and Early Modern (Montaigne and Thomas Browne); Romanticism (Rousseau and Hazlitt); and Contemporary (Joseph Brodsky, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, James Baldwin, Zadie Smith, etc.) The class culminates in the examination of the cross-media forms of the essay (photo-essays of Lee Friedlander, essay films of Orson Wells and Chris Marker, and online video-essays).

From Heraclitus on, the concept of nature has proven to be unique in its ability to expand imagination, stimulate thought, and articulate disagreement. This class will place major texts in the traditions of natural philosophy, pastoral, and cultural critique alongside contemporary interventions, including arguments for the ecology without nature. Our goal is to rethink nature in response to the technological mastery of all life made possible by the advancement of science. The texts to be studied include Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Lucretius, Virgil, Rousseau, Diderot, Thoreau, Darwin, Dennett and Will Self. Same as ENVST 230.

This class examines the styles of comedy from Aristophanes to Samuel Beckett and contemporary stand-up. We begin by clarifying distinctions fundamental to comic representation of action (such as invective, humor, grotesque, wit mock, irony, sarcasm, deadpan, etc.) Then we undertake a journey through different worlds of comedy (the comedy of errors, satire, grotesque, nonsense, and black humor). Throughout our readings, we will consider the following alternatives: Does comedy subvert or reinforce existing social norms? Does it unmask or justify inequality? Is laughter a servant of hegemony or an agent of emancipation? In each of our readings, we will work to identify the potential of comedy to sketch sociological commentary, supply models of selfhood and offer incentive to political action. Primary texts will be supplemented by reading in the theory of comedy (Hegel, Baudelaire, Bergson, Freud).

This course introduces students to the ancient literatures of Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, primarily poetry and drama, from Gilgamesh through Virgil. The course is designed to give students a broad understanding of the major literary works of this period and their historical significance.

Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist of all times. Most recently the sixteenth-century bard has been a great scriptwriter for Kenneth Branagh and Hollywood. This course focuses on a close reading of selected tragedies and comedies. Attention will be paid to the specificity of the English language of the period in order to facilitate reading. Due attention will also be paid to action, character as well as to the heft and swing of the meter and rhyme. The goal of the course is to help students understand the reasons for Shakespeare’s unparalleled success by locating the remarkable achievement of his literary career in the context of the theatrical, literary, social, and political world in which he worked.

This course examines recent trends in literature and/or criticism across cultures from a comparative point of view. The primary emphasis is on examining the way in which both literary texts and critical methods respond to changing points of view about the individual, culture, and history. The works examined in this class changes from year to year, but normally includes major works of drama and fiction.

This course will examine the life, work and influence of Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Tale of Genji (c. 1005-1015 CE), taking into consideration the intellectual and aesthetic heritage of the Heian era as a whole. Students will also investigate the arts and culture of her age, her concept of Yamato-damashii, or “essential Japanness,” and her vision of the role of the author within the “floating world” of human actions.

This class examines the evolution and disintegration of literary dissent in the twentieth-century Europe. We begin by surveying the three forces responsible for the emergence of dissent: the ideology of communism; totalitarianism as the governmental form; and socialist realism as the literary canon. The conceptual backbone of the class is the contrast between individual acts of dissent and the dissident movement. While the individual acts of dissent proceed from rejection or disagreement with the regime, the dissident movement was born out of seduction and subsequent disillusionment in the very idea of the communist state. In the final segment of the class, the students will inquire into the legacy of dissident thought through class presentation and discussion. Readings include texts by H. Arendt, K. Marx, F. Furet, C. Lefort, M. Bulgakov, A. Platonov, Abram Tertz-A. Syniavsky, Solzhenitsyn, Milosz, Havel and others. We will also study films by Alexander Medvedkin, Chris Marker, and Sergei Eisenstein.

In the 21st century the novel continues to thrive as a literary genre nourished by a long and rich history with sustained cross-cultural significance. What factors contribute to the resilience of this literary form? How has the novel become synonymous with modernity itself? What, if any inter-textual dialogue among writers and books may be discerned? This course examines the phenomenon of the novel by evoking these trajectories: its emergence, its ongoing diversification and its global dispersion and reinventions. From year to year the course will stress readings drawn from Anglo-American, European, Post-Colonial and/or Asian spheres. Traditional categories (realism, modernism, postmodernism will be supplemented by local variations and re-orientions Alongside such authors as Dickens, Sterne, Austen, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Conrad, Joyce, Nabokov, Beckett, Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Natsume Soseki, Mo Yan, and others, theoretical texts will frame the novel’s significance in the context of cultural production and the formation as well as erosion of historical consciousness: George Lukacs, Bakhtin, Auerbach, Ian Watt, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, Eto Jun et al.

The purpose of this course is to explore through literary, historical, and political documents the unique way in which French intellectuals were affected by, reacted to, and in some instances voiced their outrage about colonialism and to examine the role some French intellectuals played in the resolution of these conflicts.

This course begins with a brief survey of the history of the main theories of reading as they emerged in the West with Plato and Aristotle. The goal of the course is to help students understand and familiarize themselves with a body of texts written about the role and function of literature within the disciplines. The course includes an examination of the relationship between primary and critical texts in light of movements that took shape in the twentieth century such as Formalism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Cultural Studies. The aim of the course is to equip students with the necessary tools to become sophisticated and demanding readers and to sharpen their critical judgment whether or not they intend to pursue graduate studies in the Humanities.

This is a 1 unit P/NP course where students will select and work with a faculty mentor to complete a proposal for the capstone research project.

All SUA students participate in a capstone research project over the last block and semester of their senior year. This research project is intended to be a culminating experience, drawing upon the skills and expertise that they have developed during their career at SUA. Each student works with a faculty mentor to propose, develop, and carry out a research project. Students meet regularly with their capstone mentor for support and feedback.

Continues Capstone I. All SUA students will participate in a capstone research project over the last block and semester of their senior year. This research project will be a culminating experience, drawing upon the skills and expertise that they have developed during their career at SUA. Each student will work with a faculty mentor to propose, develop and carry out a research project. Students will meet regularly with their capstone mentor for support and feedback.