MALS Course Descriptions
Classics 527
- Women in the Ancient World
Half course for one semester. This course examines the female
experience in ancient Greece and Rome from 3500 BCE to 300 CE. We
will begin by briefly considering main themes in women's history
and the applicability of gender as a category of historical
analysis to the study of the ancient world. We then will turn to a
close analysis of the available literary, documentary, and
archaeological evidence that illuminates ancient attitudes toward
women, women's daily lives, the female lifecycle, and the various
practical and symbolic roles that women played in both Greece and
Rome. The course emphasizes the coincidences and conflicts between
literary images of women and the realities of their everyday
experience recoverable through documentary and archaeological
evidence. Conference. Offered summer 2006.
History 561
- Inquisition and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Half course for one semester. This course will trace the rise,
spread and decline of one of Europe's most infamous legal and
religious institutions-the Inquisition. We will explore how
medieval inquisitions defined and punished religious dissent; the
rise of the Spanish inquisition and its persecution of religious
and ethnic minorities (especially Jews and Muslims); and the
development of the Roman and Italian inquisitions and their
prosecution of Protestantism as well as moral and sexual
"deviance." We also will examine how the Inquisition functioned as
a legal and religious institution. Finally, we will discuss the
Inquisition's posthumous reputation, most notably the "black
legend," as well as recent revisionist scholarship emphasizing the
Inquisition’s overriding concern with penance and reconciliation
rather than persecution and punishment. Conference. Offered fall
2005.
Liberal Studies 524
- Cultures in Contact: The American Frontier
Full course for one semester. In this course we will investigate
the ways nineteenth century American texts use cultural encounters
to formulate notions of America and Americans. In this sense, the
class is an update of literary histories that postulate the
frontier as the distinguishing feature of American culture;
however, the texts we will be reading also critique the frontier
model as a viable way of understanding cultural contacts. The
course will take a cultural studies approach-we will read the
literature in the context of the art, history, politics, ritual
objects, newspapers, architecture, and artifacts that surrounded
these writers and inhabit their works. Conference. Offered summer
2006.
Liberal Studies 553
- Literary and Visual Culture in Eighteenth Century Britain
Half course for one semester. This course is designed to introduce
students to the literary and visual cultures of eighteenth-century
Britain and their interconnections. We will read prose by Defoe,
Johnson Walpole, and Austen, drama by Gay, poetry by Pope, Swift,
Gray, Goldsmith, Collier and Duck, and discussions of aesthetics by
Burke and Reynolds. We also will look in some depth at the work of
the artists Hogarth, Stubbs, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Kauffman and
Wright of Derby, as well as at the role of patrons such as Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu. Through these readings and viewings the class
will investigate topics including the growth of early tourism and
its literature; the diverse meanings and representations of the
rural landscape in poetry, painting and philosophy; the aesthetics
of the sublime; and the development of a national English/ imperial
British identity in the period. Conference. Offered spring 2006.
Liberal Studies 561
- The Soviet Experience
Half course for one semester. This course will explore the history
of Soviet society, literature and culture from a specific
perspective: reviewing Soviet efforts to organize the lives and
experiences of ordinary people. Course topics will cover
conceptions of time and space (reforms of the calendar,
organization of industrial time, city and house planning, and
communal living), sexuality and gender, living through Stalinist
terror, forms of resistance to terror, the notion of Homo
Sovieticus, and the fall of the Soviet Union. The texts will
include works of art (literature and film), historical and critical
writings, and documents (architectural designs, legal codes,
personal letters, diaries and memoirs). Assignments will include
extensive reading, oral presentations, and several brief papers.
Conference. Offered fall 2005.
Liberal Studies 588
- Railways and Modernity
Half course for one semester. The intimate link between
transportation, communication, and social imagination is nowhere
more exulted than with the oft-claimed causal effects attributed to
recent technological developments-particularly air travel and the
Internet-for global integration. We will explore this relation
between mobility and (post)modernity through an examination of an
earlier historical period of travel and spatial cohesion associated
with the railway, with particular focus on the United States,
Britain, France, India, West Africa and Cuba. The course will
explore how the growth of railway systems from the mid-19th through
the mid-20th century contributed to colonial expansion,
urbanization, national integration, and the spread of world
capitalism. We will look at representations of the railway journey
as a salient trope for the speed and uncertainty of modern life.
Conference. Offered spring 2006.
Literature 542
- Argentina: Literature and Society
Half course for one semester. This course provides an introduction
to the literature and culture of Argentina from the Independence to
the present. In the framework of an Argentinean cultural history,
the course reflects on the relationship between aesthetics and
politics. A series of nineteenth and twentieth-century texts, both
fictional and non-fictional, will serve to trace the trajectory
from a political use of literature to the emergence of an
autonomous intellectual sphere. The course is organized around the
following topics: civilization and barbarism; gauchos, frontiers,
and the desert; the Generation of 1880 and immigration; Peronism
and Anti-peronism; militarism and democracy. Conference. Offered
spring 2006.
Literature/Mathematics 563
- Thomas Mann and the Discourse of Science in the Early Twentieth Century
Half course for one semester. This course introduces an
experimental approach to two major novels by Thomas Mann, The
Magic Mountain (1924) and Doctor Faustus (1947), by
placing these works in the context of the discourse of science in
the early-twentieth century. We will explore how and to what end
The Magic Mountain incorporates into its fictional universe
diverse reflections on new scientific and pseudo-scientific
paradigms, ranging from the discovery of X-rays, Freud, and cell
biology to the occult. Mann’s experimental reconstruction of the
Faust myth during the Third Reich, Doctor Faustus, reveals a
multi-layered narrative, ranging from mathematics to the theory of
modern music. Selected texts by Adorno and discussion of
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music will complement our reading of the
novel. We will aim at understanding how mathematics, music, and
form function within the intricate body of this work. Conference.
Offered fall 2005.
MALS 670
- Degree Paper
Full course for one semester.
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