Master of Arts in Liberal Studies
Graduate Seminars
2011-12 Evening and Summer Graduate Courses
The following courses are offered through the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program for the 2011-12 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 2011
LITERATURE 533
"But the Law. . . Without the Law it's all darkness:" Constructions of Jewishness in Cinema
The aim of this course is to examine constructions of Jewishness—conceptual, polemical, visual, literary, historical, and mythological—in cinema. In contrast with other more conventional identity models centered on “ethnic” film and representations of Jews on screen, we shall devise a broader theoretical framework and situate the films under study within a larger corpus of Jewish modernist and post-modernist creative endeavors. In drawing on rich critical traditions of delineating Jewish poetics and discourses, we shall ask whether one can speak of a special cinematic Jewish language and if so, how one would arrive at defining it. Topics to be discussed include 1) negotiation and reversal of sacred and scriptural paradigms within a secular artistic realm; 2) responses to catastrophe, including the Holocaust; 3) uses of memory, biographic, collective, and canonical; 4) interrelationship between Jewish and Christian paradigms; and 5) intertextual relationship between film and text in light of the auteur theory. In analyzing these topics, we shall investigate the films’ cultural, intellectual and historical contexts, from the pre-war New York Yiddish culture to the French New Wave to Soviet Jewish politics to the history of Hollywood to the tension between Zionism and traditional Judaism within the Israeli imagination. We shall watch and discuss films by Maurice Schwartz, Edgar Ulmer, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alexander Askoldov, Woody Allen, Amos Gitai, the Cohen Brothers, Paul Mazursky, and Sidney Lumet among others. Conference.
Marat Grinberg, Assistant Professor of Russian and Humanities.
Tuesdays, 5:30–7 p.m.
LIBERAL STUDIES 571
The American Civil War in History and Memory
This course will examine how collective memory and popular culture have shaped public representations of the American Civil War from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will not cover the history of the war itself but rather the cultural and social responses it inspired for subsequent generations. Students will read the theoretical literature on history and memory and recent scholarship on commemorations and representations of the Civil War in art, literature, film, parades and other public rituals. The objectives of this course are to explore aspects of public history, a field that examines how popular audiences experience and engage with representations of the past. We will ask how these representations attempted to resolve the issues that provoked the Civil War: political standing of slaves and ex-slaves, conflict between regional interests, and the cultural and political construction of American national identities. We also will ask how the politics of memory enhance, obscure and complicate our understanding of the past. Conference.
Tamara Venit-Shelton, Assistant Professor of History.
Wednesdays, 5:30–7 p.m.
POLITICAL SCIENCE 593
Liberalism and its Critics
This is a course in and about political theory—as a philosophical endeavor, an academic discipline, and a political exercise. We will engage the works of prominent (primarily) Anglo-American liberal thinkers and their critics. “Liberalism” refers to a loose family of political theories and practices, allied by varying commitments to equality, individualism, toleration, rights, limited government, rule of law, consent, and free markets. Like all political theory, these works address the question, how should we live together? Liberals are particularly concerned with the question of what defines a just political system among naturally free and equal human beings. Who decides, and how? They and their critics consider, as we shall with and against them, how we should resolve conflicts between freedom and equality, freedom and stability, the individual and community, public and private commitments, religion and the state. How does a just political system balance the need for independence with the fact of human interdependence? How should it negotiate disagreement between incommensurable moral and political doctrines? We will consider what grounds different varieties of liberalism (religion, reason, power, pragmatics) and the relationship between liberalism and democracy, multiculturalism, capitalism, science and the political status quo. Conference.
Tamara MEtz, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Humanities.
Wednesdays, 7:30–9 p.m.
Spring 2012
THEATRE 547
New Directions in Twentieth Century Theatre
In the late nineteenth century a number of European playwrights sought to challenge the prevailing concept of theatre as a purveyor of public entertainment. These writers were determined to create a drama of both social and artistic relevance. This reformist movement was marked by the development of a new, psychologically oriented and pictorially realistic, theatre. We will first examine theatrical realism through its incarnation with innovative dramatists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Subsequently we will consider revisionist alternatives to realism with the Epic Theatre and Stylized Realism of the mid-twentieth century, the Absurdist Theatre of the late 50s and beyond, and the Post-Modernist approaches of the past two decades. These later movements, in successfully challenging the realist paradigm, broadened the imaginative possibilities and social relevance of contemporary theatre. Emphasis initially will be placed on European drama, but the work of American playwrights will be given particular emphasis in the decades leading to the twenty-first century. Conference.
Craig Clinton, Professor of Theatre, emeritus.
Tuesdays, 5:30–7 p.m.
LIBERAL STUDIES 553
Literary and Visual Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain
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, poetry by Pope, Swift, Gray, Goldsmith, Collier and Duck, drama by Gay,
and discussions of aesthetics by Burke and Reynolds. We also will look in some depth at the work of the artists Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffman and Wright of Derby, as well as at the role of patrons such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Using the wealth of on-line resources which have recently become available we will also investigate some of the complex social and cultural networks in which these artists and writers worked. Throughout our readings and viewings we will consistently return to the following guiding questions: how are stories narrated, in images as well as in words? what are the major aesthetic categories of this period and how do they operate to construct aesthetic experience? do these categories span literary and visual culture, or are they different in each form? what are their modern legacies? Conference.
Maureen Harkin, Associate Professor of English and Humanities.
Wednesdays, 5:30—7:00 p.m.
HISTORY 508
The VIetnam War
This course will examine different aspects of “America’s longest war:” its historical and diplomatic background; its connection to the Cold War and to indigenous political and social factors in southeast Asia; the development and dynamics of American policy-making; the battlefield experience for Americans and Vietnamese; the traumatic reaction in American society and politics; and historians’ treatments of the war. Conference.
Ed Segel, Professor of History and Humanities, emeritus.
Wednesdays, 7:30–9 p.m.
Summer 2012
LIBERAL STUDIES 519
Britain in the 1940s: Wartime, Literature, and Culture
The 1940s were one of the most transformative decades in British history, encompassing its devastation during the Blitz, its final triumph in the Second World War, its rebuilding of bombed cities afterward, its dismantling of its greatest imperial possessions in the Indian subcontinent, and its transformation to a welfare state. This decade also saw enormous social changes with its retrenchment of class lines and gender roles both during and after the war; finally, it was to prove the first true flowering of British cinema, and the end of the British literary modernist movement. This course will examine Britain’s epochal changes roughly from September 1939 through May 1951 (when the epochal Festival of Britain was celebrated to mark the end of post-war austerity and the nation’s cultural comeback after the war), primarily through its cultural expressions of literature, film and design. The course may include fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Graham Greene, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf; films by Humphrey Jennings, David Lean, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Carol Reed; and art and design by Stanley Spencer and Abram Games. There will be significant readings in secondary historical and cultural texts. Conference.
Jay Dickson, Professor of English and Humanities.
TBA, meets Mondays-Thursdays, 2 hours/day for 6 weeks, starting in June
PSYCHOLOGY 522
Stereotyping and Prejudice
This course provides an analysis of theory and empirical research on stereotyping and prejudice. We will explore a number of themes: the development and causes of intergroup perceptions and antagonism; reasons for the persistence and prevalence of stereotypes and prejudice; ways in which feelings and beliefs about groups influence social perception and interaction; and possible ways to change group stereotypes or reduce prejudice. In examining these issues, we will consider both the ways that individuals perceive themselves as members of groups and the ways that they perceive other groups. The course aims to provide students not only with insights into basic scientific questions about how we categorize others and ourselves but also insights into questions with implications for their own perceptions, interactions, and relationships. Conference.
Kathryn Oleson, Professor of Psychology.
TBA, meets for 3 hours weekly for 7 weeks, starting in June