Provides the students with an opportunity to critically engage in analysis of the genesis of the myths claiming 'veracity' and 'historicity' of the selected tales from The Arabian Nights and a range of other sources that use themes from the Arabian Nights.
Explores the contours of Christian-Muslim-Jewish co-existence in medieval Spain, focusing on religious and social themes. Topics include conversion, cross-traditional intellectual stimuli, sacred violence and positive images of the religious other.
A study of the sources, contexts, expressions, and inter-relationships of the idea of 'Frontiers' in 'The West'. Social, literary, philosophical, and religious works and their interactions with the arts (painting, sculpture, music, architecture, film, and popular culture) are examined from a variety of critical perspectives. What transformations occur when one cultural reproduction influences other mediums? […]
The course moves from the close reading of great works of the literary imagination to examine the roles that the author and the reader play in the process of textual interpretation. The effects of digital media on reading and textual meaning are a central concern. Prerequisites: 78 credits and permission of the coordinator of Humanities.
The course explores challenges to creative expression presented by political and cultural boundaries and legal, moral, and religious laws/codes. We will study classics of modern European fiction grappling with, among others, gender/racial/cultural discrimination and economic inequality to examine the productive tensions between creativity and ethic, aesthetic, and other social norms. Course credit exclusion: AP HUMA […]
Introduces students to the canon of European utopian fiction in historical context. Emphasis will be on literary utopias and their social, cultural, and philosophical backgrounds.
Examines the development of Confucianism in historical, philosophical and socio-political contexts across China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam with particular attention paid to the tradition's implications for both East Asian modernity and global culture. Note: Internet access is required.
Many works by 20th-century Japanese authors and filmmakers are based on ancient texts like Noh plays, ghost stories and Buddhist fables and folk tales. This course studies those classical antecedents and their modern interpretations within a cultural-historical perspective. Course Credit Exclusion: AP HUMA 4416 6.00
This fourth-year seminar combines creative textsnovels, music, films and other visual artsalongside slave narratives, nonfiction and theoretical works in a critical examination of questions of Transatlantic slavery, the imagination, and the idea of freedom.
This course is about photographs, cinema, and the archival evidence of the African Diaspora in North America, Latin America, and Europe. Self-images provide a means of challenging negative stereotypes and assumptions about black people. We seek to understand how photographs and cinema became media for envisioning freedom, and the attachments we form through our engagement […]