The Center for the Humanities at Temple is sponsoring the following courses:
Spring 2008
- "The Bible in Early Modern England: Revolutions Textual, Religious, and Political"
Instructor: Patty Crouch (CHAT Graduate Fellow)
Course Description: Historian Jonathan Rose has argued that "[i]t is perfectly legitimate to ask how literature has shaped history and made revolutions, how it has socially constructed . . . this, that, and the other. But we cannot begin to answer any of these questions until we know how books (not texts) have been created and reproduced, how books have been disseminated and read, how books have been preserved and destroyed." In this hands-on, interdisciplinary course spanning the fields of literature and literacy, religion, history, the visual arts, and translation theory, we will test Rose's argument. We will consider the place of the Bible as a material object (that is, as a physical book circulating in various forms rather than as a singular, autonomous text) in the "making" of the English Reformation and Civil War.
We will focus on the religious, political, and ideological ends that such material forms served, as well as the reader's role in the construction of meaning. Theoretical questions we will consider include: What role, if any, did the technologies of print play in the religious, political, and cultural changes that took place in early modern English society? How does the form in which a book appears affect its meaning and/or the reader's interaction with the words contained within it? How do practices of reading effect historical change (if at all) and, inversely, how does historical change affect reading practices? Throughout the course, we also will consider how what we learn about the literate technologies of the past can help us understand the radical transformations taking place today because of new electronic technologies of the word such as wikis, hypertext, online archives, and multimedia web content.
Fall 2007
- Anime and the Globalization of Culture
Instructor: Andrew McKevitt (CHAT Graduate Fellow)
Course Description: This interdisciplinary course will use the global phenomenon of Japanese animation, or anime, to explore the origins and processes of cultural globalization since the 1970s. The course will begin by examining contemporary globalization from a historical perspective, focusing on its roots in post-World War II international political and economic transformations. After surveying a variety of theoretical and empirical frameworks for understanding cultural globalization, students will examine the history of anime in Japan by viewing several representative anime texts. The course will culminate in an exploration of the ways that anime and globalization have transformed local and national cultures in the United States.
Previous CHAT-sponsored courses:
Spring 2007
Nietzsche and Foucault: Crossing Boundaries
H390: Honors Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies
Instructor: Saul Tobias (CHAT Humanities Fellow)
Are boundaries (for example, between the rational and the irrational, the normal and the abnormal, the moral and the immoral) necessary structures which order our experience of the world? Or are boundaries obstacles to political change, intellectual discovery, and artistic expression? Does the boundary between the humanities and social sciences (think Anderson and Gladfelter) reflect a natural division of knowledge, or is this a divide we should try to overcome in our efforts to understand the world and, hopefully, change it?
In this course, we will examine the relation between boundaries as necessary intellectual structures and boundaries as mechanisms of social and political control. Our starting point will be the provocative ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984), two thinkers whose work ranged across philosophy, literature, history, religion, and the social sciences. Topics to be discussed include the relation between knowledge and power; morality and social control; and the connection between thought, creativity and political resistance.
This class will take the form of an intensive, interdisciplinary seminar where both humanistic and social-scientific perspectives will be welcomed. The course will include careful study of selections from Nietzsche and Foucault’s most challenging books and essays (including On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, Discipline and Punish, and History of Sexuality); active and intensive discussion; and the use, wherever possible, of relevant film, literature, art, scientific writing, and contemporary journalism.
The American Athlete: The Politics of Identity and Difference
Instructor: Joan Grassbaugh Forry (CHAT Graduate Fellow)
This interdisciplinary course examines the historical, philosophical, and socio-political dimensions of the cultural institution of American sport. This course addresses issues of identity and difference, paying particular attention to race, class, gender, and sexuality as they operate in sport. Through a critical evaluation of values and ethics in American sport, this course also addresses sport’s relationship to social change in American culture. The purpose of this course is to enable students to critically consider the ways in which organized sport affects life in the United States. This course is an upper-level humanities course and will be taught through the Department of Philosophy, and cross-listed with Sociology and American Studies. Flyer. A History of Readers and Reading
Instructor: Katherine Malone (CHAT Graduate Fellow)
Why do we read books? What do books do to us? What do we do to books? How does a book’s meaning change with the reader’s location in history and society? What is “high literature” and why does it usually exclude popular reading? Are internet texts still books? Why are some books, and sometimes reading itself, banned? Intended to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of book history, this course will focus on reading as an activity with personal, political, and ideological consequences. As we explore the different ways of studying readers and reading, we will focus particularly on their relation to religion, gender, social class, and technology. To what extent do these shape our reading practices? Or do our reading practices shape, sustain, and even undermine these institutions?
We will investigate the power (and danger) attributed to literacy in a variety of cultures and eras by reading texts such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader 1837-1914, Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, a current New York Times bestseller (TBA), and essays by Jonathan Franzen and others. Since the history of a book depends not only on how we read it, but also on how it has been read, students will conduct library research to learn how books were received by real readers in different places and times. This is a seminar-style course and will require intensive reading and active discussion. Students will present their work and take turns leading class discussion. In addition to the research-based final paper, students will write weekly response papers and several short essays.
Other Previous CHAT-sponsored courses:
American Sacred Space: Contentions and Constructions
Instructor: Matt Hunter
Americans have great imagination for the material world. We imagine our destiny in terms of places we haven’t been, and construct the memories of places we have been. We build monuments to our heroes, our achievements and our tragedies. We worship. Far from being stagnant symbols of various monolithic faiths, sacred spaces are places of dynamic tension, conflict and divergent interpretation for Americans and others. This dynamism makes American sacred space a fascinating topic for academic study. Conflicting histories, aesthetic sensibilities, loyalties and values all manifest themselves spatially. Frequently, spaces are designated “sacred” and more commonly they are simply treated with the sort of decorum that is reserved for the things we explicitly call “sacred.” Sometimes sacred space is only revealed when Americans sense that “desecration” has occurred. Sacred spaces may be, but are not always, overtly “religious.” Landscapes and cityscapes, parks, sports stadiums, mural sites, museums, concerts, court-rooms, eating establishments, areas of a home, political centers and many other kinds of places and spaces can be sacred for particular groups of Americans. Americans are a people driven to sacralize spaces and places through a variety of strategies and for a variety of reasons. In constructing sacred spaces or sacralizing “ordinary” spaces Americans may be telling others who they are, were, or think they should be. Acts of desecrating and sacralizing in the material world BOTH reveal the power and significance of spaces and places in the American imagination.
What to expect: In this course we will examine religious, national and other-traditional* sacred spaces. Students will especially consider the sacred spaces in their own locality of Philadelphia. We will look at different disciplinary approaches to the concept of sacred space including geography, sociology and art history. We will also ask: what is meant by “sacred,” “space” and what makes a sacred space particularly “American” besides its location on American soil? We will also inquire into how the sacred is produced, recognized and maintained or and how its power is accepted or resisted in the spaces that Americans recognize or designate as “sacred?” This course will demand analytical reading skills, application of sacred space theory to new spaces, development of interviewing skills, writing and close observation on fieldtrips/site visits. While it will be impossible to “cover” even most of the possible forms of sacred space this semester, I hope this will be a beginning for you and that you will take advantage of opportunities within the course to look at sacred spaces that especially interest you.
*An awkward term. All Sacred Space belongs to a “tradition” of some kind. We could also argue that national sacred space is “religious.” Categories are a schema whose usefulness we may judge later.
Philosophy 233: Problems in Aesthetics: Pragmatist Aesthetics & Asian Religions (Asian Studies 303)
Instructor: Scott Stroud
Aesthetics and religion have often been separated in scholarly examination. The American pragmatist tradition, however, has frequently linked the two areas and drawn upon the aesthetic elements in religious experience as well as the religious quality of moving aesthetic activities. This course will explore this disciplinary nexus between aesthetics and religion by using the guiding paradigm of pragmatist aesthetics as explored by traditional and contemporary pragmatists. Of particular interest will be pragmatism’s affinities with and relation to Asian religious traditions such as Hinduism, Zen/Ch’an Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. The course begins with some background on the study of aesthetics, as well as on some major themes in Asian religious/philosophical traditions.
We start our discussion of pragmatist aesthetics and its connection with Asian religions with John Dewey’s Art as Experience, as it serves as the first extended pragmatist discussion of art. After confronting Dewey’s thought on its own terms, we will examine two recent appropriations of Dewey’s thought in aesthetics and how they see pragmatism connecting to some significant themes in Asian religious traditions. First, we will read Crispin Sartwell’s The Art of Living, and see how he builds a theory of art from Dewey as well as from multicultural sources. The course will conclude with the students completing the dialectal circle by asking the simple but important question—what can pragmatist aesthetics learn from their own experience of religion and/or popular art? To truly be a pragmatist theory, pragmatist aesthetics must be open to insights from the data of art and experience. To assist in this experiential aspect to this course, we will watch the critically acclaimed film, The Thin Red Line, and discuss what it can tell us about general issues of theory and how our concrete experience (of art) can be improved.
Imagining Open Spaces
Instructor: Jonathan Skinner, Humanities Fellow
This interdisciplinary seminar explores the history, ecology, sociology, politics and aesthetics of green open space in North American cities, focusing on the case study of Philadelphia’s own Fairmount Park. The history of Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s firm, and its involvement in the development of urban parks throughout North America, as well as the contested legacy of these parks, forms a core part of this course. We will consider class and race, in relation to Olmsted’s hygienic agenda, his “Southern” landscape aesthetics (along with Jens Jensen’s “nativist” landscape movement and some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s influential ideas) and the catalytic role Olmsted’s parks would play in the mid twentieth-century civil rights movement, as documented by Austin Allen in the film “Claiming Open Spaces.” We will also look at the poetry of open spaces—the “Sunday in the Park” section of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson; the on-foot, projective geographies of Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems; Ian Hamilton Finlay’s polemical poetry garden, Little Sparta —and at the interventions of contemporary artists and composers: Robert Smithson’s land art, Cecilia Vicuña’s “precarios” or ephemeral street installations; Hildegard Westerkamp’s soundscape compositions; Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “maintenance art.” Concepts from ecology (recent thinking about microclimates, island biogeography and the issue of “invasive species”) and sociology will help ground our discussion in bioregional contexts, as we survey some of the discourse around urban landscaping: including Jane Jacobs’s writings on urbanism, Michel De Certeau’s theory of walking, the example of Peter Latz’s post-industrial Landschaftspark, utopian proposals for the footprint of the World Trade Center in NYC, and Henri Lefebvre’s thinking on space. The seminar involves discussion, lectures, field trips, a screening and a guest speaker or two, and demands active participation: students will be asked to pursue a project, involving onsite investigation, that essays a creative and/or critical intervention in spaces at once social and natural.
English 635: Epistemologies& Technologies of the Renaissance
Instructor: Shannon Miller
This interdisciplinary seminar will highlight ways of knowing developed during the Renaissance, a period that was
discovering new worlds, new modes of apprehending the world, and which needed to create new discourses to represent these
discoveries to itself. It was also the moment of the invention of the printing press (in the West), a new technology that enabled the dissemination of such newly formed or evolving discourses. This class will thus undertake an overview of the history of the book in conjunction with exploring discourses--sometimes textual, sometimes visual--that the Renaissance constructed or re-
designed to represent the work, its peoples, its emerging practices, and the human body. We will also be considering
how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England turned to the bible and to prophesy to access truth, and evaluate how these
discourses compare to an emergent discourse of science. Likely texts at the center of class discussions will include: changing mapping technologies; travel narratives of the "new world"; Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica; the prophesies of Eleanor Davies; scientific writings of Margaret Cavendish; and key texts by John Locke (the end point of the seminar). In conjunction with these wide-ranging topics, we will be examining some key canonical texts, most likely Hamlet and Paradise Lost, to see how these texts engage new ways of seeing the world. We will balance and interlace classes on these specific texts with trips to area libraries to consult their diverse and rich early modern collections. Such visits may include: The Free Library's
collection of Books of Hours; Bryn Mawr's collection of early printed books; the College of Physicians' anatomy collection;
Swarthmore's collections of early Quaker and other prophetic writings; the Rosenbach; the University of Pennsylvania; the
Library Company of Philadelphia. Approximately half of our sessions will take place off-site: students should be sure
that their schedules will allow some time for travel back to campus. Required work for the course will include: class
participation; one or two presentations; small writing assignments; a final research paper or project. If students have questions about the logistics of the class (in terms of travel to library sites or other issues), please contact the instructor at smiller@temple.edu.
|
