Humanities 221/222

Spring 2026 Syllabus

Books

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Knopf Doubleday)
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Grove)
• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (Harper Collins)
• Aime Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review)
• Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove (Knopf)
• Sigmund Freud, Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (Norton)
• Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Touchstone)
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harcourt)

Lectures

A weekly panel conversation/lecture series will be held on Mondays from 10-10:50 a.m. A recording of these conversations will be available on our course Moodle page for students who are unable to attend.

Schedule

Week 1 (Jan. 26-30)

1. The Great Exhibition of 1851: Objects and Empire
   • William Whewell, "The General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science" (e-reserve) 
   • Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (Commerce and Culture: e-reserves)
   • Selections from Karl Marx, Capital in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx and Engels Reader, pp. 302-329. 
   • Image Gallery
2. Photography
   • Joel Snyder,  Res ipsa loquitur, Things that talk: object lessons from art and science, pp. 194-221, 403-406, Zone Books, 2004
   • Hist. of Photography ppt
   • Photography handout

Week 2 (Feb. 2-6)

1. Baudelaire and Parisian Life
   •  Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, ("To the Reader," "The Albatross," "Correspondences," "A Hymn to Beauty," "A Carcass," "Invitation to the Voyage," "Spleen (IV)," "The Sun," "To a Woman Passing By," "The Swan”) (e-reserve).
   • Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," (e-reserve)
2. The Paris Commune
   • Gay Gullickson, “Synopsis,” The Unruly Women of Paris, e-reserve. 
   • Lissagaray, “Paris on the Eve of Death,” in History of the Paris Commune, trans. Evelyn Marx, e-reserve.
   • Louise Michel, The Red Virgin, pp. 56-80 and Selected Poetry (e-reserve).

Week 3 (Feb. 9-13)

1. Freud
   • Selections from The Freud Reader (instructor selections)
2. Kafka
   • Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis,” e-reserves. 
   • Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” e-reserves

Week 4 (Feb. 16-20)

1. Art and Abstraction
   • Reading TBD
   • Image Gallery
   • Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone, e-reserve.

Week 5 (Feb. 23-27)

1. The Literature of World War I
   • Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, selections.
   • Poetry of World War I
   • Ernst Junger, “Fire: War As Inner Experience.” e-reserves.

Week 6 (Mar. 2-6)

1. Postwar Literature
   • Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Week 7 (Mar. 9-13)

1. The Russian Revolution
   • Background of Russian Revolution (e-reserves)
   • Vladimir Lenin, Lenin Anthology, excerpts
   • Alexandra Kollontai, "Love and the New Morality" 
   • Alexandra Kollontai, “Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle”

Week 8 (Mar. 17)

1. Art, Film, and Mass Culture
   • Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera
   • Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (e-reserves)
   • Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (e-reserve)

Spring Break

Week 9 (Mar. 30-Apr. 3)

• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, pp. xv-xxii, 1-8, 39-77, 121-142, 159-189. 
• Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

Week 10 (Apr. 6-10)

• Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
• UN Convention on Genocide  (e-reserve)
• UN Declaration of Human Rights (e-reserve)
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Week 11 (Apr. 13-17)

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, selections

Week 12 (Apr. 20-24)

• Aime Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (excerpts, e-reserves)

Week 13 (Apr. 27-May 1)

• Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove

Course outcomes

Hum 222 is a course that can be used to satisfy Group I or Group II requirements. After completing the course students will be better able to:

• Understand how language or other modes of expression (symbols, images, sounds, etc.) work , make an argument, present a vision, convey a feeling, and/or convey an idea;
• Analyze and interpret a text, whether a literary or philosophical text, or a work of the visual or performing arts;
• Evaluate arguments about texts;
• Analyze social, political or economic institutions, cultural formations, languages, structures, and/or processes;
• Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social change and/or the relationship between individual and society; 
• Evaluate data and/or sources.