Master of Arts
in Liberal Studies
Graduate Seminars
2008-09 Evening and Summer Graduate Courses
The following courses are offered through the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program for the 2008-09 academic year. All MALS courses must enroll a minimum of five students to be offered. Most enroll between six and twelve students and all are capped at 15 students. The MALS degree paper, MALS 670, is a one-unit, one-semester course, and may be written any term.
Fall 2008
LIBERAL STUDIES 587
Plagues and their Meanings: Epidemic Disease in Medieval and
Renaissance Europe
This course examines epidemic diseases in Europe during the Middle
Ages and Renaissance, beginning with the Black Death of 1348. In
particular, it examines the variety of ways that people understood and
coped with disease, as well as the effects of epidemics on the European
population, politics, economy, and religion during this period of
enormous change. Through learned medical treatises, literature, art
works, and other materials, the course will investigate issues such as
changing scientific ideas about health and disease; the supposed New
World origins of the syphilis epidemic in Europe (“the French
disease”); and the putative role of epidemics as a cause of the
Reformation and the birth of “modern” Europe. Conference.
Ralph Drayton. Wednesdays, 5:30–7 p.m.
CREATIVE WRITING 545
Craft Studio: American Culture
America is again at war with a tenet. Hurricane Katrina destroyed
entire communities and uncovered communities already destroyed. Gay and
Lesbian people are denied the right to marry. Affirmative Action is
under attack. Ford closes five auto plants. The Global Economy. Global
Warming. Enron. Oprah and Obama. Proust wrote, “Any mental activity is
easy if it need not take reality into account.” Indeed, many beginning
writers shy away from incorporating into their creative writing the
more serious aspects of American cultural terrain not because they are
uninterested but because incorporating American culture, iconography,
and politics into any piece of personal writing is a daunting technical
challenge. In this course we will focus on utilizing traditional
writing tools such as metaphor and symbolism to create worldly,
contextual, and poignant creative nonfiction. Further we will focus our
attentions on the following topics: Race and Ethnicity, Current Events,
and War. By course end students will have written and had workshopped
three pieces of creative nonfiction. Students should expect to read
books of poetry, excerpts from memoirs, literary criticism and essays
related to our topics. Our primary focus will be to understand how
successful cultural writing is constructed and then, frankly, to
imitate. Conference.
Crystal Williams. Wednesdays, 7:30–9 p.m.
HISTORY 565
Animals: An Intellectual and Cultural History
In this class we will trace the history of the relation between man and animal, principally as it has emerged in Western thought and culture. What does it mean to be an animal? How have our answers to this question figured in the development of our moral, political and religious traditions? How have we made recourse to the notion of animality to make sense of what it means to be human? What could it possibly mean for an animal to be free? What is the historical and conceptual relation between animal liberation and human liberation? How have these issues played out in practices such as zookeeping, husbandry, slaughter, sex, consumption, companionship, ritual, jurisprudence, or dressing your dog in silly little sweaters? These are some of the foremost questions broached by the burgeoning academic field of “animal studies,” and we will address them by means of primary source readings (complemented by secondary readings and the occasional film) that span the time from the ancients to our day. The narrative of the course proceeds as follows: from ancient arguments about animality and the soul, to the reception of these arguments in medieval philosophy and theology, to the status of animals in early-modern and enlightenment philosophy, science and jurisprudence (“animal trials”), to the birth of modern approaches to animal rights, and finally to some recent attempts to use the human/animal divide to reconsider the history of Western ethics and politics. By the end of the course, you will never look at Fluffy in quite the same way again. Conference.
Benjamin Lazier. Tuesdays, 7:30–9 p.m.
Spring 2009
LITERATURE 523
Church and State in Early Modern Spanish Culture
This course examines the relationship between politics and culture
in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. More specifically, the
organizing theme is the convergence of absolutist monarchical power and
religious authority, as formulated or contested in various cultural
productions: poems, religious and secular plays, novellas, conduct
manuals, pictorial emblems, and paintings. The course will analyze the
construction of and resistance to a theocratic imperial order from
different theoretical perspectives. We will discuss the idea of early
modern culture as an instrument of ideological state control in the
light of Marxist criticism; consider the expression of dissent and
subjectivity through new historicist approaches; examine the ritual
aspects of baroque arts and letters in the framework of Gadamerian
hermeneutics; review scholarship in the history of the book as a basis
for the discussion of the links between symbolic representation and
concrete social practices; and, study the interconnectedness of visual
and written works in the light of response theory approaches to elite
and popular art. Conference.Ariadna Garcia-Bryce. Tuesdays, 7:30–9 p.m.
LIBERAL STUDIES 559
Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology
This course explores the nature of slavery in both Archaic and Classical Greek society and Republican and Imperial Roman society. Through close examination of the literature, art and archaeological remains from these periods, we examine the processes which led to the exploitation of slave labor in both societies, how slavery functioned within the ancient economy and in ancient political systems, whether it had any racial basis, and how it was judged socially, morally, legally, and philosophically. We will particularly consider both the Greeks’ and Romans’ conception of the relationship between women, children, and slaves and their construction of a nexus of qualities that they labeled “slavish” and unfitting for the free male citizen. Throughout this course we will compare these two slave societies and later examples of slave societies, particularly that of the United States before the Civil War, in order to understand what was unique about slavery in the ancient world. The course also considers modern historiography on ancient slavery and how our modern perspective affects our understanding of slavery in two societies removed both in time and space from our own.
Works read will include, among many others, the Odyssey, Euripides’ Hecuba, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, a number of fourth-century orations (Lysias and Demosthenes), selections from Aristotle’s Politics, Josephus’ Jewish War, and Petronius’ Satyricon. We also will read a number of modern scholarly articles that examine in these primary works the representations of the experience of and attitudes toward slaves. Close attention, moreover, will be given to the artistic portrayals of slaves in painting and sculpture. Conference.
Ellen Millender. Wednesdays, 7:30–9 p.m.
HISTORY 508
The First World War
This course uses the First World War to examine how twentieth-century Western societies have experienced modern war: the inter-relationships between armed forces and their states and societies, and the nature of civil-military relations, economy and technology, values and ideologies, etc. The War in Europe and the United States will be examined as the first experience of “total war”: modern industrialized warfare and “war economies,” the “militarization” of mass society, and the cultural climate of modern warfare and its memorialization. The course approaches the War from a variety of perspectives: the new kind of warfare in the trenches and how armies and soldiers reacted to it; the new economic challenges on the newly-conceived “home front”; how European culture contributed to the wartime atmosphere, and in turn the War’s effect on European culture. The course material has clear implications for our contemporary experience of war, especially on the “home front.” Conference.
Edward Segel. Thursdays, 7:30–9 p.m.
Summer 2009
LIBERAL STUDIES 522
Ancient Epics: the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid
This course will explore four ancient epics in their literary and historical contexts. We will begin with a brief exploration of the nature and genre of epic poetry. We will then read and discuss the Epic of Gilgamesh, along with modern articles that discuss its Near Eastern literary and historical contexts. We next move to Homer, reading and discussing the Iliad and the Odyssey, along with relevant works of modern scholarship that discuss their Greek context. We conclude with a reading of Virgil's Aeneid, again informed by modern scholarship on the poem and its place in Roman culture. Throughout the semester we will be comparing the four epics, exploring questions including the following: What is epic poetry? What are its major characteristics, and what is the major literary and cultural work it does? How are epics of different cultures similar and different? What is the relationship of epic to oral and written cultures? What is the relationship of epic to writing? What are the major themes of these four epics? How do the conceptions of the hero, fate, the gods, and the nature of human existence differ in these epics? Conference.
Walter Englert. Mondays–Thursdays, two hours per day for six weeks, starting in June.
ENGLISH 538
Cinema and the Senses
Some of the most exciting interdisciplinary research in film studies to develop over the past decade has been the topic of cine-synaesthesia: the ways in which cinema evokes the senses of touch, taste, smell, time, movement, and propioception (our sense of our bodies in space) in addition to hearing and sight. The aim of this course is to think about an ecology of the human senses in and through cinema, elaborating on concepts of synaesthesia, ornamentation, and epic memory as they operate in films from different cultural and historical contexts. In addition to reading recent work from film scholars, we will investigate research on this topic in other disciplines such as neurophysiology, philosophy, painting and music. Some of our primary questions will be, how do films help recharge the human senses, enhancing their sensitivity and capacity for enriching the faculty of human memory? How is it possible for certain filmmakers to resist the standardization of the film image, despite working within the commodity form of industrial cinema? What is the relation between cinema’s capacity to affect our senses and its capacity to invent memory?Readings will include portions of Harrison and Baron-Cohen’s Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings; Laura Marks’ The Skin of the Film; Vivian Sobchack’s Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture; Jenefer Robinson’s Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music and Art; Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image; Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion, essays by Scriabin and Kandinsky, and essays by scholars who examine both primary works and literature, both scientific and critical, that attempts to account for synaesthetic experience. Films may include a selection of the following: Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, experimental films by pioneers such as Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, and by contemporary artists including Chris Marker, Michael Snow, and Guy Maddin. Conference.
Rebecca Gordon. Meets for 3 hours weekly for 7 weeks, starting in June.
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