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). This sequence 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.

14000-14100-14200. Reading Cultures: Collection, Travel, Exchange. This sequence introduces methods of literary, visual, and social analysis by addressing 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. Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. This is a sequential study of periods and communities selected from the history of Judaic civilization, viewed from multiple perspectives (i.e., historical, literary, philosophical, religious, social) and examined in light of the varied ways that civilization is and is not the product of interactions between the Jewish people and surrounding civilizations, nations, and religions. The primary focus is on a close reading of original sources in translation. Specific periods and communities studied may vary from year to year.

20000. Judaic Civilization I: Introduction to Biblical Civilization. (=JWSC 20000, JWSG 31000) This course provides an overall introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), with specific attention to its literary, religious, and ideological contents. The diversity of thought and theology in ancient Israel is explored, along with its notions of text, teaching, and tradition. Revision and reinterpretation is found within the Bible itself. Portions of the earliest post-biblical interpretation (in Philo, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and selected Pseudepigrapha) are also considered. Autumn.

20100. Judaic Civilization II: Rabbinic Judaism from the Mishnah to Maimonides. (=JWSC 20100, JWSG 31100) This course is a study of the primary texts in the development of classical and medieval rabbinic Judaism from roughly 70 C.E. to the twelfth century. The course centers on selections (in translation) from the Mishnah and tannaitic Midrash, the Babylonian Talmud, Geonic and Karaite writing, the Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew literature of Andalusia, and Maimonides's legal and philosophical compositions. Topics include different conceptions of the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation; the origins and development of the Oral Law; relations between Judaism and both Christianity and Islam; sectarianism; rationalist and antirationalist trends in rabbinic thought; and the emergence of secular pursuits in the rabbinic tradition. Winter.

20200. Judaic Civilization III. (=JWSC 20200, JWSG 31200) The third quarter of this sequence focuses on Jewish life and creative achievement in America, the Holocaust and testimonies by survivors, and a brief look at modern Jewish theology. Spring.

21201. History of Bulgarian (=BULG 21200/31200, LGLN 28202/38202) PQ: BULG 21000/31000 (Bulgarian for Reading Knowledge), BULG 21100/31100 (Structure of Bulgarian), or knowledge of another Slavic language recommended but not presupposed. This course is an introduction to the history of Bulgarian. D. Hristova. Spring.

21400. Rhetorical Theories of Legal and Political Reasoning. (=ISHU 22800/32800, LLSO 22400, SOSC 22400) This course uses Plato's Gorgias to raise the question of whether practical thinking is possible and considers responses to this question by such writers as Aristotle, Cicero, and Machiavelli. We study the methods and concepts that each writer uses to defend the cogency of legal, deliberative, or more generally political prudence against explicit or implicit charges that practical thinking is merely a knack or form of cleverness. W. Olmsted. Winter.

21600. Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion. (=FNDL 25500, GNDR 25900) This course considers novels by Jane Austen in terms of how they treat gender, class, socioeconomic circumstances, family structure, and geographical places as constraining and facilitating the agency of characters. In response to change, Austen's characters bridge difference of class, gender, family history, and geographical place to form friendships and marriages that change their self-understandings and capacities for productive social and personal activities. We discuss Austen's representations of evolving selves and how they develop or fail to develop growing powers of agency as they respond to historical and socioeconomic circumstances. W. Olmsted. Winter.

22200. Constitution of Community. (=FNDL 23700, IMET 21100, LLSO 21700) Attention is once again being given to how a "we," a community, establishes itself. This interest often assumes that discussion and deliberation will play a, perhaps the major role, and often coincides with the notion that the organization of the community should be through government by discussion. This course will use one major example of the constitution of a community, the United States. This course is not a repetition of the typical "historical," "legal," or "philosophical" interpretations given and uses made of these events and texts. D. Smigelskis. Winter.

22207. Plato and Rhetoric: Gorgias and Phaedrus. (=FNDL 27411, LLSO 22411) This course offers a close reading of two dialogues that focus on the question of whether rhetoric is merely a kind of cleverness or whether it can persuade persons toward wise actions in a polity. Gorgias examines the problem of the demagogue and searches for knowledgeable persuasion. Phaedrus articulates the natures of eros and prudence as sources of persuasive speech. We analyze relations between rhetoric, eros, knowledge, dialectic, and politics. We also consider questions such as the following: Is self-controlled rhetoric superior to impassioned rhetoric? Whom ought one to consult about politics, the philosopher, or the orator? Texts in English. W. Olmsted. Autumn.

22208. The Idea of Rome in the Age of Revolution. (=CLCV 26100) This course concentrates on the influence of Roman republican political ideology during the English, French, and American revolutions. We read seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts (e.g., Federalist Papers, Montesquieu, Rousseau) alongside classical authors (e.g., Polybius, Livy, Tacitus) to gain a better understanding of the ways in which these ancient sources were adapted and appropriated by early modern political thinkers. S. Deeley. Winter.

22600. Introduction to Russian Literature I: From the Beginnings to 1850. (=ISHU 22600/32600, RUSS 25500/35500) This course is a survey of major writers and works from the mysterious "Igor Tale" to the middle of the nineteenth century. Major figures covered are Derzhavin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, and Turgenev. Texts in English. L. Steiner. Autumn.

22700. Augustine's Confessions. (=FNDL 20900, RLST 25100) This course is a close reading of Augustine's work, with particular attention to the phenomenon of conversion. M. Lilla. Winter.

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. This two-quarter interdisciplinary sequence is designed as an introduction to theories and critical practices in the study of feminism, gender, and sexuality. Both classic texts and recent conceptualizations of these contested fields are examined. Problems and cases from a variety of cultures and historical periods are considered, and the course pursues their differing implications in local, national, and global contexts. Both quarters also engage questions of aesthetics and representation, asking how stereotypes, generic conventions, and other modes of circulated fantasy have contributed to constraining and emancipating people through their gender or sexuality.

22800. Problems in the Study of Gender. This course addresses the production of particularly gendered norms and practices. Using a variety of historical and theoretical materials, it addresses how sexual difference operates in various contexts (e.g., nation, race, class formation; work, the family, migration, imperialism, postcolonial relations). S. Michaels, Autumn; E. Hadley, Spring.

22900. Problems in the Study of Sexuality. This course focuses on histories and theories of sexuality: gay, lesbian, heterosexual, and otherwise. This exploration involves looking at a range of materials from anthropology to the law and from practices of sex to practices of science. 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. This three-quarter sequence deals with the history of the Jews over a wide geographical and historical range. First-quarter work is concerned with the rise of early rabbinic Judaism and development of the Jewish communities in Palestine and the Eastern and Western diasporas during the first several centuries C.E. Topics include the legal status of the Jews in the Roman world, the rise of rabbinic Judaism, the rabbinic literature of Palestine in that context, the spread of rabbinic Judaism, the rise and decline of competing centers of Jewish hegemony, the introduction of Hebrew language and culture beyond the confines of their original home, and the impact of the birth of Islam on the political and cultural status of the Jews. An attempt is made to evaluate the main characteristics of Jewish belief and social concepts in the formative periods of Judaism as it developed beyond its original geographical boundaries. Second-quarter work is concerned with the Jews under Islam, both in Eastern and Western Caliphates. Third-quarter work is concerned with the Jews of Western Europe from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. N. Golb. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

23300. The Brothers Karamazov. (=FNDL 27000, RUSS 24300) PQ: Consent of instructor. This course is a close reading and discussion of the primary text: Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in English translation (Norton Critical Edition). Students are asked to prepare one background reading in advance: Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. The emphasis is on moral, intellectual, and religious issues, as well as, to a lesser extent, on novelistic technique. N. Ingham. Winter.

23900. Liberating Narratives. (=IMET 31800, LLSO 21800) Some reflective autobiographies written in mid-career are featured. The primary texts are Maxine Hong Kingston's The Women Warrior, Bill Bradley's Life on the Run, and James Watson's The Double Helix. Each exemplifies how some people have used various resources and strategies to increase their ability to act without simultaneously diminishing the similar abilities of others in situations which require overcoming systemically oppressive obstacles. This is in part accomplished through examples of how a flourishing in certain types of activities has been achieved and the kinds of satisfactions involved. D. Smigelskis. Spring.

24000. Introduction to Russian Literature II: 1850 to 1900. (=ISHU 22400/32400, RUSS 25600/35600) This course is a survey covering the second half of the nineteenth century. Major figures studied are Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Chekhov. Representative works are read for their literary value and against their historical, cultural, and intellectual background. Texts in English. N. Ingham. Winter.

24100. Introduction to Russian Literature III: Twentieth-Century Russian Literature. (=ISHU 23100/33100, RUSS 25700/35700) This is a survey of major writers, works, and movements from 1900 to the present day. Special attention is paid to the development of modernism and post-modernism in Russian literary culture. Writers include Bely, Bunin, Platonov, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and Pelevin. All readings in English. Class discussion encouraged. R. Bird. Spring.

24102. On Love: Cultural and Psychological Perspectives. (=BPRO 26103, HUDV 24103, ISHU 24102) PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. This course explores the nature of love and love relationships from humanistic and social scientific perspectives. Readings and presentations include classic philosophic and literary works (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare) and modern writers (e.g., Freud, Tillich, DeRougemont). We focus first on the qualities that characterize the phenomenon of love in general. Then, more specifically, we examine psychological, social, and cultural aspects of romantic love. Lectures and class discussions may be supplemented by cinematic materials. D. Orlinsky, K. Mitova. Winter.

24400. Russian Culture. (=ISHU 21900, RUSS 24400) This course takes a detailed look at aspects of Russian culture not usually examined in Russian literature courses. Specific topics vary from year to year and are chosen from areas such as the visual arts and architecture, iconography, film, religion, music, dance, opera, the folk arts, and memoiristic writing, in addition to literature. For more information, consult the departmental office in Winter Quarter. Texts in English. Spring.

24700. Hegel's Philosophy of Right. (=FNDL 23000, IMET 36900, LLSO 27500) The course will first focus on "translating" (becoming more familiar with) what is to many the peculiar language of Hegel, a language which has set and still sets the most important boundaries and questions for many thinkers, not merely about politics but also about economics, sociology, and jurisprudence. More importantly, the possible continuing plausibility and relevance of particular arguments and especially the general strategies of Hegel's broad argument will also be explored as far as time and student interest permit. Furthermore, once some comfort with the language is attained, various strategies will be used to guard against the possible bewitchment by what will probably be for many a somewhat new language of thought. D. Smigelskis. Spring.

24900. Happiness. (=GNDR 25200, PHIL 21400, PLSC 22700) From Plato to the present, notions of happiness have been at the core of heated debates in ethics and politics. Is happiness the ultimate good for human beings (the essence of the good life), or does morality somehow precede it? Can happiness be achieved by all human beings or only by a fortunate few? These are some of the questions that this course engages, with the help of both classic and contemporary texts from philosophy, literature, and the social sciences. This course includes various video presentations and other materials stressing visual culture. B. Schultz. Spring.

25300. Writing Argument. (=CRWR 26000, ENGL 11400/31400, ISHU 21403) This a pragmatic course in the rhetoric of arguments, meaning that we won't be asking whether an argument is internally valid but rather why it is more or less successful in persuading readers. By "pragmatic," we mean that we focus mainly on the arguments of students. We use arguments from politics, academics, and the professions to develop an analysis of argument, but the main goal is for students to use this analysis to enhance their ability to write arguments that succeed with their readers. In the final weeks of the course, we look at arguments that class members have chosen for discussion, as well as at competing theories. K. Cochran. Winter.

25350. Utopias. (=ARTH 22804, BPRO 25300, ENGL 25302, ISHU 25350) PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. We live in a post-utopian world—so some people would argue, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But what does it mean to say that the end of one experiment in reorganizing human relations toward the good life equals the end of all such experimentation? This course surveys significant moments in utopian practice, choosing case studies from among Plato's Republic, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, national experiments, utopian communities, socialism, technophily, new social movements, radical conservatism, and fundamentalisms. We focus on literature and art, including music, painting, architecture and urbanism, and film and digital media. L. Berlant, R. Zorach. Not offered 2005-06; will be offered 2006-07.

26300. War. (=BPRO 26102) PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. In this course, we ask such questions as: Why do humans go to war? What is the experience of war like? How does war affect the individual and his society? What is a just war? An unjust war? Can we conceive of a world without war? We read and discuss texts such as Homer's The Iliad, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam, and Glen Gray's The Warriors. The readings serve primarily as a starting point for the discussion of the above questions and any other issues raised by the class that are related to war. M. Ehre, H. Sinaiko. Spring.

26600. Antonioni's Films: Reality and Ambiguity. (=ARTH 28904, BPRO 26600, CMST 26801) PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. In this in-depth study of several Antonioni films, our eye is on understanding his view of reality and the elements of ambiguity that pervade all of his films. Together, as a film scholar and physicist, we bring out these aspects of his work together with his unique cinematic contributions. This course introduces students to this poet of the cinema and the relevance of Antonioni's themes to their own studies and their own lives. Y. Tsivian, B. Winstein. Winter. Not offered 2005-06; will be offered 2006-07.

26901/36901. Narratives of Suspense in European and Russian Literature and Cinema. (=CMLT 22100, CMST 25102/35102, ISHU 26901/36901) The phenomenon of suspense is central to narrative and has broad implications for narrative theory. We examine its workings in readings by authors including A. Conan Doyle, R. L. Stevenson, Mary Shelley, Graham Greene, and Samuel Beckett. Special attention is given to suspense as a philosophical issue in the works of Fedor Dostoevsky. Consideration is also given to suspense in the cinema (i.e., Hitchcock, Godard, Bresson). Theoretical readings (i.e., Todorov, Barthes, Ricoeur) comprise a veritable introduction to narrative theory. Class discussion encouraged. R. Bird. Winter.

27400. Language, Power, and Identity in Southeastern Europe: A Linguistics View of the Balkan Crisis. (=ANTH 27400/37400, LING 27200/37200, SLAV 23000/33000) This course familiarizes students with the linguistic histories and structures that have served as bases for the formation of modern Balkan ethnic identities and that are being manipulated to shape current and future events. The course is informed by the instructor's thirty years of linguistic research in the Balkans as well as his experience as an adviser for the United Nations Protection Forces in Former Yugoslavia and as a consultant to the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Crisis Group, and other organizations. Course content may vary in response to ongoing current events. V. Friedman. Winter.

27600. Creation and Creativity. (=ANTH 27610, BPRO 27600, ISHU 27650, SOSC 28601) PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. This seminar explores several creation stories from anthropological, literary, philosophical, and psychological perspectives. We compare the accounts of the beginning in Genesis, Hesiod's Theogony, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Bhagavad Gita, the Maya's Popol Vuh, and other sources (e.g., Native American). We explore the ways cosmic creation has been imagined in world culture. (Are there universals? What is culturally specific?) We also delineate human literary creativity and ask about the relationship between individual creativity and the cultural myths of creation. We consider at least one modern theory of the beginning of the universe. P. Friedrich, K. Mitova. Spring.

27601. Tolstoy. (=RUSS 27600/37600) A close reading of Tolstoy's principal works seen as aesthetic wholes and in the development of his ideological, moral, and aesthetic views. Readings in English. N. Ingham. Spring.

27701. Codes, Cultures, and Media. (=ISHU 27701, LLSO 21502) As organizations of cultural knowledge, codes create not only means of communicating but also infrastructures for communication. In our globally networked societies, digital media and technologies generate new forms of messages for us to encode and decode as well as develop new public and private environments for communications. We compare cultural case studies of earlier electronic media (telegraph, radio, television) with the re-mediating influences of digital media (computers, software, cyberspace, cellphones) on cross-cultural conceptions and practices of property, democracy, and the commons. M. Browning. Winter.

29501. Russian Fairy Tales. (=RUSS 29501/39501) This course serves two purposes: familiarizing the student with the development of the Russian fairy tales literary tradition from the relics of a (single?) pre-Christian belief system to the fairy tales of Pushkin and Zhukovsky, and a general introduction to fairy tales and the major schools (structuralist, psychological, and feminist) of fairy tale criticism. We examine a wide selection of Russian fairy tales, studying the Slavic paganism and traditional Russian folk belief they drew on as well as comparing them to the Western fairy tales. Finally, we explore the continuing influence of the fairy tale in modern Russian film and ballet. D. Hristova. Spring.

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.