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A foundation for education:
the humanities program at Reed
Humanities 220
Humanities 220 is the most popular of the upper-level humanities electives; in general about 40 percent of graduating students have taken this course. The first semester starts with the Enlightenment in France at the end of the seventeenth century, then goes on to the French Revolution; English, French, and German romanticism; the rise of capitalism and Marx’s critique; and Victorian fiction in the context of the Industrial Revolution. The second semester usually begins in mid nineteenth-century Europe and covers the period of First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of Nazism and the Second World War. Students read literary texts that may include Madame Bovary by Flaubert, A Doll’s House by Ibsen, Moll Flanders by Defoe, Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky, The Wasteland by Eliot, and Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf, and they have watched films such as Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin and the 1934 Triumph of the Will, by Leni Riefenstahl. They have also watched parts of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, the nine-hour 1985 film about the Holocaust.
English
professor Roger Porter, chair of Humanities 220, notes with admiration,
“When people outside Reed ask me what our students are like, I often
tell them that several years ago when Hegel was not on the Humanities
220 syllabus a delegation of sophomores came to me in high indignation:
‘How can we understand Marx,’ they asked, ‘if Hegel is
not on the reading list?’ They demanded that we put that most challenging
philosopher on the syllabus, and the next year we were happy to comply.
In the meantime the protesting students were reading and discussing Hegel
on their own!”
Humanities 230
The youngest (only six years old) and smallest of the humanities courses,
Humanities 230 explores the foundations of Chinese civilization. Faculty
members from five departments with expertise in China are involved in
Chinese humanities: anthropology, art history, Chinese literature and
language, history, and religion. This is (as far as the faculty can tell)
the only specifically yearlong, multidisciplinary Chinese humanities course
taught in any college or university in the U.S.
One semester is spent on the classical period in China, the Chin and Han dynasties (206 B.C.E–220 C.E.), which connects to Humanities 110; the second semester focuses on the Song dynasty, China’s medieval and early renaissance period, tying it to Humanities 210. “We try to understand the values and concepts of these two Chinese periods from their works,” says Douglas Fix, professor of history, who chairs the Humanities 230 program. “Their basic conceptions of the world are different from our own. We’re not taking our own questions back to the past: we are trying to evoke their ideas, theories, and values and using their values to help us reflect on our own times.”
Humanities 230 will continue to evolve. Recently the Freeman Foundation gave Reed $172,000 for enhancement of Chinese studies at the college, and Chinese humanities faculty members are conducting a thorough examination of the course as they continue to build on a strong scholarly presence and students’ interest in non-Western culture.
