First-year general education courses engage students in the pleasure and challenge of humanistic works through the close reading of literary, historical, and philosophical texts. These are not survey courses; rather, they work to establish methods for appreciating and analyzing the meaning and power of exemplary texts. The class discussions and the writing assignments are based on textual analysis. The courses concentrate on writing skills by including special tutorial sessions devoted to the students' writing. These courses meet the general education requirements in the interpretation of historical, literary, and philosophical texts.

The 20000-level Collegiate courses in Humanities seek to extend humanistic inquiry beyond the scope of the general education requirements. A few of them also serve as parts of special degree programs. All of these courses are open as electives to students from any Collegiate Division.

Courses: Humanities (huma)

General Education Sequences

11000-11100-11200. Readings in World Literature. This sequence is available as either a two-quarter sequence (Autumn, Winter; or Winter, Spring) or a three-quarter sequence (Autumn, Winter, Spring). This sequence examines the relationship between the individual and society in literary texts from across the globe. Texts studied range from Dante to Toni Morrison, from Flaubert to James Baldwin, from Kafka to Osamu Dazai and Nadine Gordimer. In the first quarter, the class surveys prose works from Plato to the 1980s, in which individuals learn (or struggle) to situate themselves in a society that is often unaccepting of individuality. The theme for this quarter is alienation. In the second quarter, students consider the problem of evil through an analysis of authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Conrad, Dostoevsky, and Lorca. Students wishing to take the third quarter of this sequence in the Spring choose among a selection of topics (such as "Myth and Reason," "Gender and Literature," or "Poetry"). Writing is an important component of this sequence; students work closely with a writing tutor and participate in weekly writing workshops. Autumn, Winter; or Winter, Spring; or Autumn, Winter, Spring.

11500-11600-11700. Philosophical Perspectives on the Humanities. This sequence studies philosophy both as an ongoing series of arguments, mainly, but not exclusively, concerning ethics and knowledge, and as a discipline interacting with and responding to developments in the natural sciences, history, and literature. Papers are assigned throughout the course to help students develop their writing and reasoning skills. Readings may vary slightly from section to section, although the year is organized around several common themes. The Autumn Quarter focuses on Greek conceptions of ethics and epistemology, primarily through analysis of Platonic dialogues, but readings may also come from Aristotle and the Greek dramatists. The Winter Quarter focuses on questions and challenges raised by the intellectual revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with readings from Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Galileo, and Shakespeare. The Spring Quarter focuses on modern moral philosophy, and on the relation of philosophy to literature, with readings from Hume, Kant, and Diderot, among others. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

12000-12100-12200. Greek Thought and Literature. This sequence is available as either a three-quarter sequence (Autumn, Winter, Spring) or a two-quarter sequence (Autumn, Winter). It approaches its subject matter generically and historically. First, it offers an introduction to humanistic inquiry in three broadly defined areas: history, philosophy, and imaginative literature. The works of Herodotus and Thucydides are studied as examples of historiography; the dialogues of Plato exemplify philosophy; and imaginative literature is exemplified by Homer's epic poetry, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes. Second, this sequence offers an introduction to ancient Greek culture as a system of related activities and attitudes. Beginning with Homer, it aims at understanding what ancient works meant to their original authors and audiences and how they reflect the specific conditions of their composition. The course is not conceived of as a prerequisite for a prospective classics major; it is meant to be a course in humanities, sharing with other general education courses in the humanities an interest in exploring the spirit of human greatness. Autumn, Winter; Autumn, Winter, Spring.

12300-12400-12500. Human Being and Citizen. "Who is a knower of such excellence, of a human being and of a citizen?" As both human beings and citizens, we are concerned to discover what it means to be an excellent human being and an excellent citizen, and to learn what a just community is. This course seeks to explore these questions and related matters, and to examine critically our opinions about them. To this end, we read closely and discuss critically seminal works of the Western tradition, selected partly because they richly reveal the central questions and partly because, read together, they force us to consider different and competing ways of asking and answering questions about human and civic excellence. The diverse and even competing excellencies of which we are capable, to which we are drawn, and among which we may have to choose, make it impossible for us to approach these great writings as detached or indifferent spectators, especially as these books are both the originators and the most exacting critics of our common opinions: opinions by which we explicitly or implicitly guide our lives. Thus we seek not only an understanding of certain enduring questions, but also a deeper appreciation of who we are, here and now, all in the service of a more thoughtful consideration of our lives as human beings and citizens. This course also aims to cultivate the liberating skills of careful reading, writing, speaking, and listening. The syllabus is slightly revised each Spring for the next academic year. The reading list that follows was used in 2003-04. Autumn: Plato, Apology; Homer, Iliad; Genesis; Plato "Symposium." Winter: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Augustine "Confessions"; Shakespeare, The Tempest. Spring: Selected lyric poems and/or American documents; Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals; Melville, Moby Dick. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

13500-13600-13700. Introduction to the Humanities. This sequence emphasizes writing, both as an object of study and as a practice. As we study the texts of the course, we will pay special attention to the nature and effects of different writing structures and styles: How does the written form of a text influence the way that we interpret it? The texts raise enduring humanistic issues, such as the nature of justice, the scope of freedom, and the stability of knowledge. As we consider these questions we will consider how our views are shaped by the very language used to ask and to answer.

This sequence also emphasizes writing as practice. Over the course of the year, students will average one writing assignment per week, and we will discuss these assignments in seminar groups of five or six. The writing workload is significant: this is not a course in remedial writing; rather it is a course for students who are particularly interested in writing or who want to become particularly proficient writers.

Readings for this course are selected not thematically or chronologically but to serve the focus on writing. In the Autumn Quarter we will read two of Plato's Dialogues, The Declaration of Independence, selections from The Peloponnesian War, and Henry IV. In the Winter Quarter we will read further selections from The Peloponnesian War, short fiction by Bierce and Conrad, and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. In the Spring we will read Descartes's Meditations, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and selections from radical feminist prose. Autumn, Winter, Spring. Not offered 2004-05.

14000-14100-14200. Reading Cultures: Collection, Travel, Exchange. Introducing students to methods of literary, visual, and social analysis, this course addresses the formation and transformation of cultures across a broad chronological and geographic field. Our objects of study range from the Renaissance epic to contemporary film, the fairy tale to the museum. Hardly presuming that we know definitively what "culture" means, we examine paradigms of reading within which the very idea of culture emerged and changed. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

14000. Reading Cultures: Collection. This quarter focuses on the way both objects and stories are selected and rearranged to produce cultural identities. We examine exhibition practices of the past and present, including the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the University's own Oriental Institute. We read Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Arabian Nights, and collections of African-American folk tales. We conclude by considering modernist modes of fragmentation and reconstellation in Cubism, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.

14100. Reading Cultures: Travel. Focusing on the literary conventions of cross-cultural encounter, this quarter concentrates on how individual subjects are formed and transformed through narrative. We investigate both the longing to travel and the trails of displacement. We read several forms of travel literature, from the Renaissance to the present, including Columbus's Diario, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, and contemporary tourist literature.

14200. Reading Cultures: Exchange. This quarter works toward understanding the relation (in the modern and post-modern periods) between economic development and processes of cultural transformation. We examine literary and visual texts that celebrate and criticize modernization and urbanization. Beginning with Baudelaire's response to Paris in his prose poems, we then concentrate on novels that address economic, social, and cultural change in the 1930s, including Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt and Richard Wright's Native Son. As the quarter concludes, students develop projects that investigate the urban fabric of Chicago itself.

16000-16100-16200. Media Aesthetics: Image, Sound, Text. This three-quarter sequence introduces students to the skills, materials, and relationships of the various disciplines of the Humanities, including literary and language study, philosophy, rhetoric, history, and the arts. Its particular emphasis falls on issues in aesthetics and especially on the problem of "the medium." For the purposes of this course, we construe "aesthetics" rather broadly: as a study in sensory perception, as a study in value, as a study in the stylistic and formal properties of artistic products. "Medium," too, will be understood along a spectrum of meanings that range (in Aristotle's terms) from the "material cause" of art (stone for sculpture, sounds for music, words for poetry) to the "instrumental cause" (the apparatus of writing or printing, film, the broadcast media, the Internet). Of course, all experience of the arts involves a medium; our aim is to call particular attention to that involvement.

The vehicle of communication conditions aesthetic experience--mediates between producers and receivers--and thus our larger questions will include some of the following: What is the relation between media and kinds of art? What constitutes a medium? Can artistic media be distinguished in a rigorous and systematic way from non-artistic media? What, for instance, is the relation between artistic and non-artistic use of photography? Of painting or drawing? Of language? What is the relation between the media and human sensations and perceptions? Do the human senses alter in response to changes in the available media? Do we learn new ways of seeing and hearing from inventions like drawing, painting, photography, the phonograph, cinema, and video? What happens to objects when we adapt or "translate" them into other media: written narratives into film narratives or architecture into photography?

This is not a course in "media studies" as that term has come to be more narrowly understood in contemporary society. We will consider works of philosophy, criticism, and theory, ancient and modern: Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Benjamin, and Woolf. We will range across historical eras and moments to consider aesthetic objects of many kinds: films, paintings, photographs, novels, songs, poems, sonatas, plays, and operas. In some instances, we will be asking questions about how the aesthetic object is situated within cultural history. More often, though, we will be asking questions aimed at fostering sensitivity to, and analysis of, the sensory, cognitive, and emotional shaping of the aesthetic experience, and how that shape is shaped by the medium in which it occurs.

Each quarter of the three-quarter sequence will array a mix of objects and media for examination but will also carry a particular thematic emphasis. The Autumn Quarter will focus on seeing, especially on the problems that arise when objects and texts seem to offer themselves as "reflections" or "imitations" of the world (e.g., Velàzquez's Las Meninas, Plato's allegory of the cave, Aristotle's Poetics, Hitchock's Vertigo, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and Cindy Sherman's photographs). The Winter Quarter will focus on hearing, with particular emphasis on how sounds are "composed" for effect in various ways--in this quarter we will attend to issues of musical form, to the prosodic analysis of poetry, to representations of composed sound in fiction and cinema, to philosophical discussions of hearing, and to the analyses of sound composition in such writers as diverse as Poe and Adorno. The Spring Quarter will focus on reading and the questions routinely associated with the aesthetic object considered as a "text" to be "interpreted" (e.g., Plato's Phaedrus, Genesis, Hamlet, Welles's Citizen Kane, Woolf's To the Lighthouse). Autumn, Winter, Spring.

Collegiate Courses

20000-20100-20200. Judaic Civilization I, II, III. It is recommended that students begin with the first course in the sequence. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. For course description, see Jewish Studies.

20000. Judaic Civilization I: Introduction to Biblical Civilization. (=JWSC 20000, JWSG 31000) Autumn.

20100. Judaic Civilization II: Rabbinic Judaism from the Mishnah to Maimonides. (=JWSC 20100, JWSG 31100) Winter.

20200. Judaic Civilization III. (=JWSC 20200, JWSG 31200) Spring.

20800. Milton's Paradise Lost. (=FNDL 21900, GNDR 21600, RLST 26400) For course description, see Fundamentals. W. Olmsted. Autumn, 2004.

21001. Bulgarian for Reading Knowledge. (=BULG 21000/31000, LGLN 28200/38200) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Bulgarian). D. Hristova. Spring, 2005.

21301. Topics in Bulgarian Linguistics. (=BULG 21300/31300, LING 28250/38250) SOSL 21000/31000 or knowledge of another Slavic language helpful but not required. For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Bulgarian). D. Hristova. Spring, 2006.

21400. Rhetorical Theories of Legal and Political Reasoning. (=ISHU 22800/32800, LLSO 22400, SOSC 22400) For course description, see Law, Letters, and Society. W. Olmsted. Winter, 2005.

21600. Austen: Emma and Pride and Prejudice. (=FNDL 25500, GNDR 25900, IMET 32400, ISHU 22300/32300, LLSO 22400) For course description, see Fundamentals. W. Olmsted. Winter, 2005.

22200. Constitution of Community. (=FNDL 23700, IMET 21100, LLSO 21700) For course description, see Law, Letters, and Society. D. Smigelskis. Winter, 2006.

22400. Kinds and Arts of Storytelling. (=IMET 32900, LLSO 22900) For course description, see Law, Letters, and Society. D. Smigelskis. Winter, 2005.

22600. Introduction to Russian Literature I: From the Beginnings to 1850. (=ISHU 22600/32600, RUSS 25500/35500) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian). A. L. Crone, Autumn, 2004; L. Steiner, Autumn, 2005.

22700. Augustine's Confessions. (=FNDL 27600, RLST 25100) For course description, see Fundamentals. W. Olmsted. Autumn, 2005.

22800-22900. Problems in Gender Studies. (=ENGL 10200-10300, GNDR 10100-10200, SOSC 28200-28300) PQ: Second-year standing or higher. Completion of the general education requirement in social sciences or humanities, or the equivalent. May be taken in sequence or individually. For course description, see Gender Studies. 22800: S. Michaels, Autumn; E. Hadley, Spring. 22900: S. Michaels, Winter.

23000-23100-23200. Medieval Jewish History I, II, III. (=JWSC 23000-23100-23200, JWSG 38100-38200-38300, NEHC 20411-20412-20413) PQ: Consent of instructor. This sequence does not meet the general education requirement in civilization studies. For course description, see Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Near Eastern History and Civilization). N. Golb. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

23110. Recent Ethical Reflections. (=LLSO 23110) For course description, see Law, Letters, and Society. D. Smigelskis. Spring, 2005.

23201. Marxism and Modernism. (=CMLT 21200, ISHU 23201/33201, RUSS 23200/33200) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian). R. Bird. Spring, 2006.

23300. The Brothers Karamazov. (=FNDL 26201, RUSS 24300) For course description, see Fundamentals. S. Meredith. Winter, 2005.

23500. The Radicalism of Job and Ecclesiastes. (=FNDL 24600) H. Moltz. Spring.

23701. Constitutionalisms. (=IMET 37200, LLSO 22700) For course description, see Law, Letters, and Society. D. Smigelskis. Winter, 2005.

23900. Liberating Narratives. (=IMET 31800, LLSO 21800) For course description, see Law, Letters, and Society. D. Smigelskis. Spring, 2006.

24000. Introduction to Russian Literature II: 1850 to 1900. (=ISHU 22400/32400, RUSS 25600/35600) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian). L. Steiner, Winter, 2005; N. Ingham, Winter, 2006.

24100. Introduction to Russian Literature III: Twentieth-Century Russian Literature. (=ISHU 23100/33100, RUSS 25700/35700) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian). R. Bird. Spring.

24400. Russian Culture. (=ISHU 21900, RUSS 24400) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian). Spring.

24800. Dostoevsky. (=RUSS 27500/37500) N. Ingham. Winter, 2005.

24900. Happiness. (=GNDR 25200, PHIL 21400, PLSC 22700) For course description, see Philosophy. B. Schultz. Spring.

25001. Wandering Women. (=ENGL 25501) What are the semantics of a sidewalk? What does it mean to walk-to be free to choose one's own way? This course engages the conjunctions of mobility, urbanity, and female subjectivity. We explore the relationships between depictions of female sexuality and activities such as shopping, prostitution, tourism, and flâneurie. Texts and authors include Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha," Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and Dorothy Parker. We also read a few critical texts to (dis)orient ourselves, including Michel de Certeau and Georg Simmel. J. Burstein. Autumn, 2004.

25100. Web Design: Aesthetics and Languages. (=CMSC 10000, ISHU 29600) As a complement to courses in criticism, aesthetics, cultural studies, or Web programming, this course explores Web design as a liberal art of technology. Good multimedia design is based on our sensory intelligences. Yet, on the Web it requires syntheses of natural languages and artificial languages; of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and, of course, mastery of the subject matter. What design principles communicate information, narratives, and explanations? We examine and create design environments in print and electronic media, with a focus on the Internet. M. Browning. Winter, 2006.

25201. Human Intelligences: Animal to AI. (=ISHU 25201) Human intelligence, ignorance, and fallacies are explained not only in terms of different human capabilities (e.g., verbal, spatial, kinesthetic) but also in relation to identities of our culturally developed subordinates (animals), superiors (angels), and competitors (robots). As we characterize humanity in terms of what we think we're not (animals, angels) and in terms of what we create (spy intelligence, artificial intelligence), we people our worlds with comparative conceptions of intelligence in which the relations of our minds, bodies, and emotions are configured reciprocally by prevailing models (e.g., machines, spiritualities, atoms/neural nets). Beginning with the early modern separation of mind and body, this course explores mechanical, spiritual, functional, and atomistic designs of intelligences in conjunction with practicing kinds of bodymindfulness either directly or second-hand (e.g., weight-lifting, martial arts, yoga, robots). M. Browning. Winter, 2005.

25301. Utopias. (=ARTH 22804, BPRO 25300, COVA 25301, ENGL 25302, ISHU 25350) PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. For course description, see Big Problems. L. Berlant, R. Zorach. Spring, 2005.

25400. Kinds of Sophisticated Lawyering. (IMET 32700, LLSO 23000) For course description, see Law, Letters, and Society. D. Smigelskis. Spring, 2005.

25500. Writing Creative Nonfiction. (=ENGL 12204/32204, ISHU 21404) PQ: Consent of instructor. For course description, see English Language and Literature. Winter, 2005.

25501. Latin(o) American Short Story: The Monster Is Alive. (=SPAN 21400) PQ: SPAN 20300 or consent of instructor. For course description, see Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish). H. García. Winter, 2005.

25502. "The Literature of Destruction": Narratives of Apocalypse in Modern Jewish and Russian Literary Traditions. (=CMLT 21100, JWSC 22900, RUSS 22900) The Holocaust of European Jewry in World War II and the construction of the totalitarian Gulag system in the Soviet Union invite comparative analysis. In this course, literary responses to the Holocaust and the Gulag are studied in the context of Russian and Jewish apocalyptic literary traditions, which linked national catastrophes with the end of time. Considering the sacred significance that both Russian and Jewish civilizations ascribe to the literary Word, as well as the place which the written responses to catastrophes hold in the two traditions, this course analyzes the central features of Russian and Jewish texts of destruction by reading biblical texts, excerpts from old Russian epics, and major works of modern Russian and Jewish prose and poetry. Texts in English and the original. M.Grinberg. Winter.

 

25503. Chekhov: Text, Stage, Screen. (=RUSS 27701) The purpose of this course is twofold. Most importantly it introduces students to the major works and the general artistic principles of Anton Chekhov. In addition to this, the course provokes a discussion of the relationship between Chekhov's texts and their various adaptations on stage and on screen, from the most traditional to the most innovative, thus furthering our understanding of the dimensions of Chekhov's art and of its influence on modern culture. R. Lapushin. Autumn, 2004.

25504. 55th Street. (=ARTH 29004) A main thoroughfare through the neighborhood of Hyde Park and the larger city, 55th Street serves not only a cross-section of the neighborhood, but also of Chicago and, more generally, American urban history. Each seminar session starts with a close architectural analysis of a building or space along 55th Street and then enlarge upon it to explore movements and debates in American architectural and urban history from the City Beautiful Movement to globalization. This course aims to defamiliarize an everyday environment; one which has become so habitual it is traveled, crossed, and shopped without reflection. A. Stephenson. Spring, 2005.

25505. Science Fiction Film. (=CMST 15101) This course approaches science fiction cinema from multiple perspectives, introducing political, aesthetic, feminist, and historical approaches to studies of film genre. Areas of focus include formal analysis within the context of genre study, the aesthetics of special effects, national variations in science fiction (e.g., comparisons of American, German, Canadian and Soviet films), the production of fan cultures, and science fiction's relationship to other genres. We will also reflect on the notion of film as a reflection of technological, social, and historical change via science fiction's responses to the Cold War, feminist and anti-racist social movements, postmodernism, and environmentalism. Films shown include Metropolis, Blade Runner, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, The Terminator, Starship Troopers and Trekkies. A. Whitney. Winter, 2005.

26103. Literatures of the South Slavs I: From the Beginning to the Enlightenment (863 to 1804). (=SOSL 26100/36100) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (South Slavic). B. Rakic. Autumn, 2004.

26200. On Love: Text and Context. (=BPRO 26100, HUDV 24100, ISHU 26201) PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. For course description, see Human Development. H. Sinaiko, D. Orlinsky. Winter, 2005.

26203. Literatures of the South Slavs II: From Romanticism to the Moderna (1904 to 1914). (=SOSL 26200/36200) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (South Slavic). B. Rakic. Winter, 2005.

26302. Literatures of the South Slavs III: Keeping Up with the World (1918 to the Present). (=SOSL 26300/36300) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (South Slavic). B. Rakic. Spring, 2005.

26450. Evil. PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. (=BPRO 26400, ISHU 26450) For course description, see Big Problems. M. Ehre, H. Moltz. Spring, 2005.

26600. Antonioni's Films: Reality and Ambiguity. (=ARTH 28904, BPRO 26600, CMST 26801) PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. For course description, see Big Problems. Y. Tsivian, B. Winstein. Winter, 2005.

26901/36901. Narratives of Suspense in European and Russian Literature and Cinema. (=CMLT 22100, CMST 25102/35102, ISHU 26901/36901, SLAV 26900/36900) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (General Slavic). R. Bird. Winter, 2006.

27203. Turgenev. (=ISHU 27202/37202, RUSS 27200/37200) N. Ingham. Autumn, 2005.

27300. Writing Description. (=ENGL 11701) For course description, see English Language and Literature. K. Cochran, T. Weiner. Spring, 2005.

27306. Fundamentals of Structuralism. (=SLAV 29400/39400) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (General Slavic). D. Hristova. Winter, 2005.

27400. Language, Power, and Identity in Southeastern Europe: A Linguistics View of the Balkan Crisis. (=ANTH 27400/37400, LING 27200/37200, SLAV 23000/33000) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (General Slavic). V. Friedman. Winter, 2006.

27600. Creation and Creativity. (=ANTH 27610, BPRO 27600, ISHU 27650, SOSC 286021) PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. For course description, see Big Problems. P. Friedrich, K. Mitova. Spring, 2005.

27601. Tolstoy. (=RUSS 27600/37600) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian). N. Ingham. Spring.

27700. Ideology as Literary Challenge: South Slavic Literature since World War II. (=SOSL 27500/37500) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (South Slavic). B. Rakic. Spring, 2005.

28400. Comparative Fairy Tale: The Brothers Grimm, H. C. Anderson, and Asbjørnsen and Moe. (=CMLT 21600, GRMN 28500, NORW 28500, SCAN 28500) For course description, see Germanic Studies (Norwegian). K. Kenny. Winter.

 

28901. Opera: Its Divas, Queens, and Enchantresses. (=MUSI 25005) Issues of gender and sexuality permeate nearly every facet of opera production. Recently, scholars of music and other academic disciplines have begun to explore these issues from a variety of critical perspectives including gender studies, performance practice, and reception studies. The goal of this course is to investigate the history of opera from a sample of these new vantage points. Ultimately, we aim to grasp how gender and sexuality have affected the way musicians, authors, filmmakers, and others (from the seventeenth century to the present) have understood and created their images of the art form. Assignments are drawn from musicological writings as well as essays from other disciplines. Films of and about operas also play an integral role in class discussions. H. Poriss. Winter, 2005.

 

28902. Jews and the Radical Enlightenment. (=CMLT 27400, JWSC 24700, RLST 25003) In this course the relationship between the Jews and irreligion is explored. The subject is introduced through the work of Uriel da Costa, Spinoza, Abraham Miguel Cardoso, Solomon Maimon, John Toland, Joseph Perl, and Moses Mendelssohn, among others. The focus is the contribution of heterodoxy and outright irreligion to the development of the Enlightenment. Also examined is the response of the religious authorities to the unprecedented secularisation. We address disputes over the divine authorship of the Bible, discussions concerning miracles, publications and translations of the Scripture, debates about the admittance of Jews to universities and private institutions (e.g., clubs, societies, lodges of Freemasonry), and introductions of secular subjects into the traditional Jewish curriculum. P. Maciejko. Winter, 2005.

29300/39300. Russian Historical Syntax. (=LING 29300/39300, RUSS 21800/31800) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian). D. Hristova. Autumn, 2004.

29501. Russian Fairy Tales. (=RUSS 29501/39501) For course description, see Slavic Languages and Literatures (Russian). D. Hristova. Spring, 2006.

29700. Reading Course. PQ: Consent of instructor and senior adviser. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. Autumn, Winter, Spring.