Texts and Ideas | 2012-2013
Note: Previously listed as Conversations of the WestNote: ** indicates an example syllabus
* indicates a preliminary syllabus
Spring 2013 schedule remains tentative.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—The Idea of Home
Prof. Rust (English) syllabus
A consideration of the numerous ways we use the word “home” in our daily lives reveals much about our concept of home: homeland, home plate, home turf, homeroom, hometown, homestead, and home field, for instance, all suggest that a home is first and foremost a place. The house icon we press in our browser windows in order to get back to our “home page” reveals how closely we equate home with a particular kind of place: a house. A house that is a home suggests safety, protection from the “cold cruel world” outside. But that very sense of enclosed safety, a central feature of our idea of home, has the potential of generating a range of secondary perceptions that can make the idea of home an instrument of violence, aggression, greed, and envy rather than ideals of love and care. Reading: Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Antigone, Plato’s Symposium, Vergil’s Aeneid, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Eugenides’ Middlesex.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—Hatred, Anger, and Enmity
Prof. Konstan (Classics) syllabus
We are taught that love is divine and hate a crime, that we should overcome anger, forswear resentment and vengeance, and forgive enemies. But have we perhaps neglected the propriety and even necessity of the so-called negative sentiments? Is it possible that resentment, hatred, and vengeance may be justified, and that some actions are unforgivable? Examining hatreds and antagonisms in context, looking at philosophical, theological, political and religious analyses and also literary representations, our aim is not to condemn these sentiments out of hand as pathologies, but to consider their function and history. Readings: Genesis; Matthew; Euripides’ Medea and Hecuba; Aristotle’s Rhetoric; Seneca’s On Anger, Medea, and Thyestes; Lactantius’ On the Anger of God and On the Deaths of the Persecutors; selections from Aquinas; Montaigne’s "On Cannibalism"; Las Casas’ Destruction of the Indies; Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus; Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge; Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality; Freud’s Civilizations and Its Discontents; Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits; Derrida’s On Forgiveness; Diamond’s "Vengence is Ours."
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—Nature
Prof. Appuhn (History) syllabus
What is nature? Is it something external to us as human beings, or are we part of it? Are there particular ethical, religious, economic, or political considerations that should structure or determine our relationship with nature? How has the concept of nature been articulated by thinkers in the Western tradition from Plato to Earth First! founder Dave Foreman? Examining such questions in historical and cultural perspective, we consider competing ideas about humanity’s relationship to nature through seminal works theorizing the relationship between the individual and nature, society and nature, and the definition of nature. Readings: Plato’s Timaeus; Hebrew and Christian Scriptures; Descartes’ Discourse on Method; Hobbes’ Leviathan; Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality; Leopold’s Sand County Almanac; Carson’s Silent Spring; Foreman’s Rewilding America; essays by Cronon, Thomas, Walker, and Worster; selections from Aquinas, Francis Bacon, Marx, Thoreau, and Emerson.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—Animal Humans
Prof. Lezra (Comparative Literature) syllabus
"One might go so far as to define man as a creature that has failed in its effort to keep its animalness…" So writes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. What sort of animal were we? Where, how, and by whom has the line between the human and the animal been drawn? With what consequences for our "human" understanding of the world? Of concepts like the "soul," "society," politics, the family? Is the line between the human and the animal drawn differently in different genres--in literary works, theological treatises, natural histories, paintings, films? We come at these questions from different angles, following them from antiquity to early modern responses to these questions, and in essays by contemporary philosophers and advocates. Readings: Genesis, Numbers, Euripides' Bacchae, Plato's Phaedrus, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Apuleius' Golden Ass, Marie de France' Bisclavret, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Montaigne's "Apology in Defense of Raymond Sebond, Machiavelli's Prince, H. G. Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau and Island of Lost Souls, Derrida's "The Animal that therefore I am," selections from Boccaccio, Peter Singer, Giorgio Agamben, Donna Haraway.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—Materialism
Prof. Shaw (English) syllabus
Why is materialism a dirty word? Through what logic has it come to be associated with crass monetary gain and excessive bodily pleasure? When did these associations begin, and why? What other senses of materialism (as a philosophy of the everyday, and as a critical corrective to idealism) lurk underneath these pejorative, immediate associations? How might they be activated? We examine conflicts between Christian idealism and a range of materialist philosophies, including Epicureanism, experimentalism and Marxism. Materialists became infamous for directing their attention at bodies rather than souls, at terrestrial matter rather than divine will, and at the letter rather than the spirit of scripture. We follow their lead and pay close attention to a range of texts and objects, but in doing so we also consider just how various materialisms could be, how their realist correctives operated at different scales and in different contexts: from the atomic to the economic, from the corporeal to the textual. Readings: Lucretius, Vergil’s Georgics, 1 Corinthians, Machiavelli’s Prince, More’s Utopia, selections from Montaigne, Shakespeare, Bacon, Diderot, Wordsworth, Poe, Balzac, Marx, Nietzsche and Whitman.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—The Renaissance, New Worlds and Old
Prof. Tylus (Italian Studies) syllabus
Early modern men and women found themselves at the intersection of colliding ideas about the worlds they lived in. They both looked back to antiquity and the Bible, and ahead to new and unpredictable changes regarding religion, geography, and science. A Janus-faced moment, the Renaissance was rooted in the past and anticipatory in many ways of our own time. As we see from ancient texts, such anxiety about the unknown was not entirely new. As we move from the city of Ur (in modern-day Iraq) in 3000 b.c.e. to early modern Mexico in 1700, from a story about a powerful king facing his own mortality to poems by a mestiza nun, we read a variety of texts about borders, journeys, literal and figurative exile, and how one might best leave one’s mark on the world. We also consider the relationship between the literature and art of the period, and one assignment will be based on a direct study of a sculpture or painting at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Readings: selections from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad, Vergil’s Aeneid, Tornabuoni’s Sacred Narratives, Columbus’s Four Voyages, Leon-Portilla’s Broken Spears, Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated, Shakespeare's Tempest, excerpts from Sappho, Petrarch, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 403 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the Enlightenment
Prof. Goldwyn (French) syllabus
Focuses on voyage, discovery, errantry, and exile in key ancient and Enlightenment texts and how these stories transformed and shaped understanding of the world, the "other," and the self. We examine the way the Enlightenment thinkers revisited, reinterpreted, redefined, and, at times, rejected their intellectual and cultural legacy. Readings: Euripides' Medea; Genesis, Exodus, Job, Luke, and Acts; Plato's Symposium; Vergil's Aeneid; Augustine's Confessions; Voltaire's Candide; Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville; and Graffigny's Letters from a Peruvian Woman.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 403 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the Enlightenment
Prof. Rubenstein (Hebrew & Judaic Studies) syllabus
Beginning with the collision of the "Judeo-Christian" and Hellenistic traditions and their encounter in the Christian Scriptures and Augustine, we see Enlightenment thinkers grapple with the fusion of these traditions they had inherited, subjecting both to serious criticism and revising them as a new tradition—science and technology—rises to prominence. Reading from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Sophocles, Plato, Augustine, Montesquieu, Pope, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 404 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the 19th Century
Prof. Corradi (Sociology) syllabus**
A guide to the intellectual heritage distinctive to the West, with special attention to the nature of the person, freedom, rationality, democracy, and the social order. The works we study continue to shape the way people understand themselves and the world. They are 'classic' in the sense that they have not finished saying what they have to say. We situate them in historical context, looking for ways in which later authors responded to themes introduced by earlier ones. From the particularity of the West, these themes show a vocation for universality. Readings include: Genesis, Exodus, Luke, Corinthians; Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone; Plato's Apology and Republic; Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; Pericles' Funeral Oration; Epictetus' Discourses; Augustine's Confessions; Tocqueville's Democracy in America; Mill's On Liberty; Darwin's Origins of the Species; Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto; Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality; Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 404 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the 19th Century
Prof. Ulfers (German) syllabus
A conversation between two paradigms informing Western culture: the dominant, optimistic one, revolving around notions of historical progress toward absolute knowledge and utopian visions of the world and society; and the subterranean, pessimistic one, which looks on the former as a human construct or fiction that must come to naught. Readings: works from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, Plato, and Sophocles; Augustine's Confessions; selections from Darwin; Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto; Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy; Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; Kafka's Metamorphosis; Mann's Death in Venice.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 404 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the 19th Century
Prof. Baker (English) syllabus
Examines Western conceptions of the relation between humans and the natural world. Considers how 19th-century thinkers embraced, revised, and overturned ancient ideas about creation, natural order, the distinction between humans and animals, and the risks and rewards of probing nature's mysteries. Readings: Homer's Odyssey, Hebrew and Christian scripture, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Shelley's Frankenstein, Darwin's Origin of Species, and works by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Emerson, Goethe, and Nietzsche.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 404 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the 19th Century
Prof. Renzi (MAP) syllabus
Contemporary moral psychology: where it came from, where it’s brought us, how we might move beyond it. Readings: Rosenberg and Bloom's Book of J; Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Daniel; Matthew, Galatians; Gospel of Mary; Euripides' Medea; Aristophanes' Clouds; Plato's Symposium and Gogias; Xenophon's Apology; Augustine's Confessions; Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality; Freud's "Case of Miss Lucy R." and Civilization and Its Discontents; Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 412 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the Renaissance—Writing Intensive
Prof. Gerety (Collegiate Professor) syllabus
A writing-intensive version of Texts and Ideas offered in conjunction with selected sections of EXPOS-UA 1, Writing the Essay. Recommended for students regardless of intended major who seek a deeper engagement with the texts and more attention to writing about them than the regular versions of these courses can provide. While readings and assignments are shared between the lecture and the writing workshops, there are no recitations for this lecture; student must therefore be prepared to do substantial independent work without the support of a recitation section. Open to new CAS first-year students only.
What is the soul? Is it the conscious self or something more? Does our identity persist beyond death? What is the relation between the soul and good and evil? Some say that Socrates 'discovered' the human soul, but the idea that we have souls that outlast our bodies is as old as humanity. Our understanding of the nature of our souls often dictates the way we feel we should live. We will explore ideas from Homer and Heraclitus through Socrates himself and then on to Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament (including the Gnostics), Augustine, and Vergil. We look for the elements that make up personal identity and value in the ancient world, both religious and secular, and see how much these change from Homer's world to that of Augustine and the Roman Empire. We then turn to Dante, who provides a bridge to some of the great thinkers and artists of the Renaissance--most notably Shakespeare and DaVinci but also Montaigne and Villon. In all of these, the permanence and even presence of our souls seem more uncertain, more threatened by death and obliteration, than in Plato or Paul, and this threat reaches our morality and values as well. In this way, the Renaissance marks the beginning of the world in which all of us must now find our way.
FALL 2012 MAP-UA 414 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the 19th Century—Writing Intensive
Prof. Renzi (MAP) syllabus
A writing-intensive version of Texts and Ideas offered in conjunction with selected sections of EXPOS-UA 1, Writing the Essay. Recommended for students regardless of intended major who seek a deeper engagement with the texts and more attention to writing about them than the regular versions of these courses can provide. While readings and assignments are shared between the lecture and the writing workshops, there are no recitations for this lecture; student must therefore be prepared to do substantial independent work without the support of a recitation section. Open to new CAS first-year students only.
Contemporary moral psychology: where it came from, where it’s brought us, how we might move beyond it. Readings: Rosenberg and Bloom's Book of J; Genesis, Exodus, Job; Matthew, Galatians; Gospel of Mary; Euripides' Medea; Aristophanes' Clouds; Plato's Apology and Republic; Xenophon's Apology; Augustine's Confessions; Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, Freud's "Case of Miss Lucy R." and Civilization and Its Discontents; Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—Freedom and Oppression
Prof. Kunhardt (Collegiate Professor) syllabus*
Examines the human quest for freedom—freedom from slavery, from sexual oppression, and from the shackling of the mind—as these three came to a crisis in nineteenth century America. We begin with a critical reading of formative biblical texts and ideas; touch down on the passionate thought-world of the American founders; and culminate in a close look at mid-nineteenth century reform efforts, and the ideas of freedom that animated them. Exploring the dawn of biblical humanism, the embrace of the secular, and efforts to widen the circles of inclusion, we pay particular attention to the writings of Abraham Lincoln and his generation, as he and others, both allies and critics, worked to eradicate slavery from American society. Why did the Bible condone slavery, helping Americans justify continuing the practice? In what ways are competing ideas of freedom to be judged? How is the idea of freedom related to that of human equality? Readings: Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, Isaiah, Matthew, Luke; and works by Paine, Jefferson, Madison, Garrison, Douglass, Sumner, Stanton, Anthony, Rose, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Parker, Mill, Ingersoll, Lincoln.
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—Mortal and Immortal Questions
Professor Mitsis (Classics) syllabus
Some basic questions about the ways people view their lives in relation to death, including contrasting views of the afterlife and how those views influence human action and relations. Comparisons from different eras and analysis of a wide range of fundamental human attitudes about life and death in the context of different religious beliefs, types of political organization, and attitudes toward scientific knowledge. Some of the material is mythic (that is, presenting traditional accounts of gods and heroes) considered for both how they work as aesthetic objects and what they tell us about the values of the cultures that produced them. Also included are texts that either present human experience without direct reference to the divine or explicitly reject it. How do such works address questions of human mortality and in what different ways do they treat the possibility of human happiness, productive social relations, and the possibility of knowledge? Readings: Ramayana; Homer’s Iliad; Aeschylus’ Oresteia; Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone; Euripides’ Alcestis, Bacchae, and Medea; Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things; Epictetus’ Handbook; Mark, Matthew, 1 Corinthians, Romans; Augustine’s Confessions; d’Holbach’s Good Sense; Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; Mill’s On Liberty; Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto; Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality; Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych and Hadji Mura; Proust’s Swann’s Way; Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—Paranoid Narratives
Prof. Sanders (Comparative Literature) syllabus
It’s no secret that we live in an age of paranoia. What began life in the nineteenth century as a psychiatric diagnosis may now be the predominant form taken by our experience of politics and technology. We explore the evolution of ideas about paranoia through a careful reading of key texts, with special focus on narrative: Could there be something about the structure of narrative—its “voices” and its “speakers,” its drive for explanation of origins—that is paranoid, or gives rise to paranoia? Tracing psychoanalytic theories of paranoia (Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein), and attending no less to their narrative structure, we address this question and others by reading key autobiographical and fictional works from Europe and Africa, such as Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Head’s A Question of Power, Marks’ Not Either an Experimental Doll, Coetzee’s Disgrace, as well as political writings and documents by Richard Hofstadter, Michel Foucault, Julian Assange (Wikileaks), South African AIDS denialists, and Rwandan génocidaires.
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—On Liberation
Prof. Watson (English) syllabus
What is liberation? What is the political form that allows for maximum freedom, and how is it to be achieved? How have the concepts of freedom, slavery and oppression been articulated by thinkers from Plato to Gandhi? We examine these enduring questions through a wide historical and cultural lens, aiming to understand and map out competing ideas around the conditions for freedom (and unfreedom). To this end, we read seminal works theorizing the relationship between the individual and the collective, ideas of sovereignty, the ideal state and the revolutionary nation, and arguments for violence and non-violence. While grounded in Western thought on the topic, we also pay attention to how the struggles and theorizations of the non-West (the Haitian Revolution, the Algerian and Indian independence struggles, postcolonialism and the Tricontinental) have shaped our inquiry into the nature and promise of liberation. Reading: Epictetus’ Handbook, Plato’s Republic, Equiano’s Life, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Mill’s On Liberty, selections from Marx, James’ Black Jacobins, Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 402 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the Renaissance
Prof. Gilman (English) syllabus
The "Renaissance" understands itself as an age bearing witness to the "rebirth" of classical antiquity. In art, philosophy, and literature it also assumes the task of reconciling the cultural inheritance of Greece and Rome with the Christian tradition (itself entering into a moment of crisis as allegiances split between the Catholic church and the "reformed" church of Luther and Calvin). Our first task is to look at antiquity; our second, to explore the ways in which European culture between 1400 and 1700 invents the modern by making itself conversant with the past. Readings: Homer's Odyssey; Sophocles' Antigone; Plato's Phaedo and Symposium; Vergil's Aeneid; Genesis, Exodus, Job, Luke, Acts, John; Augustine's Confessions; Castiglione's Book of the Courtier; Machiavelli's Prince; Erasmus's Praise of Folly; Montaigne's Essays; More's Utopia; Shakespeare's Tempest
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 403 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the Enlightenment
Prof. Chazan (Hebrew & Judaic Studies) syllabus
Focuses on the understanding of knowledge and truth in antiquity and the Enlightenment. Divergent perspectives on knowledge and truth have important implications for society and the individual. They lead to alternative notions of how society should be ordered, who should exercise power in society, the goals of individual endeavor, and the nature of individual fulfillment. Key texts from antiquity and the Enlightenment will be read and analyzed with these issues uppermost in mind. Readings: Genesis, Exodus, Luke, Acts, Galatians; Sophocles' Antigone; Euripides' Bacchae; Plato's Apology and Symposium; Augustine's Confessions; Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus; Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration; Lessing's Nathan the Wise; Montesquieu's Persian Letters; Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation; Paine's Age of Reason.
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 403 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the Enlightenment
Prof. Deneys-Tunney (French) syllabus
The Enlightenment was a Europe-wide movement, which concerned all aspects of culture of the time: philosophy and literature, the arts (painting, music, architecture), as well as politics and society as a whole. The Enlightenment defined itself as a new birth, a subversive movement that would free mankind of all its prejudices--philosophical, religious, political, sexual, racial. In doing so, the Enlightenment appears today to be indeed the beginning of our modernity, as it invented key concepts that define or frame our contemporary representations of ourselves and the world around us: the concept of the subject or subjectivity, of nature, of origins, of equality, of critical philosophy and democracy, of pleasure, of sexuality, of happiness. It is a unique moment in history, where philosophy aims not only at interpreting the world but also at changing it to make it a better place for mankind. It culminates at the end of the 18th century in France with the French Revolution, which declared for the first time in human history that all men are born free and equal. Readings: Genesis, Plato's Symposium and Phedrus, Epicurus' Maxims and letters, Descartes' Discourse on Method, Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality and Rêveries, Diderot's Indiscreet Jewels and Jacques the Fatalist, Voltaire's Candide and Zadig, Marivaux's Dispute and Double Unfaithfulness, Kant's "What is Enlightenment?"
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 403 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the Enlightenment
Prof. Garrett (Philosophy)
All animals live, but only human beings consider how to live; and only reflective human beings deliberate among different ways to decide how to live. Should one look for guidance to tradition, to religion, to the state, to nature, to feeling, to reason? Versions of this question were raised and addressed repeatedly and with urgency in both Antiquity and the Enlightenment. We examine some of the most important and influential attempts to answer it and some of the dialogue that such attempts have had with one another. Readings include Hebrew and Christian scriptures, Greek tragedy and philosophy, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Wollstonecraft.
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 404 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the 19th Century
Prof. Baker (English) syllabus
Examines Western conceptions of the relation between humans and the natural world. Considers how 19th-century thinkers embraced, revised, and overturned ancient ideas about creation, natural order, the distinction between humans and animals, and the risks and rewards of probing nature's mysteries. Readings: Homer's Odyssey, Hebrew and Christian scripture, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Shelley's Frankenstein, Darwin's Origin of Species, and works by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Emerson, Goethe, and Nietzsche.
SPRING 2013 MAP-UA 404 Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the 19th Century
Prof. Renzi (MAP) syllabus
Contemporary moral psychology: where it came from, where it’s brought us, how we might move beyond it. Readings: Rosenberg and Bloom's Book of J; Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Daniel; Matthew, Galatians; Gospel of Mary; Euripides' Medea; Aristophanes' Clouds; Plato's Symposium and Gogias; Xenophon's Apology; Augustine's Confessions; Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality; Freud's "Case of Miss Lucy R." and Civilization and Its Discontents; Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.
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