Texts & Ideas | 2021-2022

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Literature and Automatic Invention  
Prof. Cipani (Italian Studies)        [Syllabus]
Italian poet and futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti once described the ideal creative process as the unforeseen result of a “seemingly severed hand that writes.” The idea of using automatic procedures for literary purposes is not unique to Marinetti’s era. This course aims at outlining a tradition of text-generating methods across genres and time. We will encounter two broad groups of ‘text machines’. The first works on the assumption that certain mental states lead to a hidden repository of higher content. Psychic automatisms, dreams, trance-like states, inner dictation, and glossolalic runs are all means to explore an unconscious ‘other side’ — and often, a hypothetical superior realm mirrored in the hidden self. This ‘inherited automaton’ relies on the mind’s own automatic action. The second type foregrounds a procedural framework of made-up rules and constraints — the construction of a formal apparatus, sometimes very elaborate, of admissible elements and combinations. By running the wheels of such prosthetic automaton, the author seeks to obtain surprising stylistic and narrative results, all the while putting the text in communication with its countless dynamic possibilities.  Along with the various contributions to each of these ideal directions — the inner and the outer automaton — the course explores attempts to articulate connections between them. Readings include: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, William James The Hidden Self, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Freud’s The Creative Writer and Daydreaming, Henry James’s The Jolly Corner, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, Breton’s Soluble Fish, J.L. Borges’ Library of Babel, Stanislaw Lem’s The First Sally, John Cage’s Composition as Process, Italo Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Utopias and Dystopias 
Prof. Becker (Classics)     [Syllabus]           
TBA

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Meaning
Prof. Barker (Linguistics)     [Syllabus]              
What is meaning? What has it, and how do the things that have it get it? How has our conception of meaning developed over the centuries? And how do our attitudes towards meaning shape who we think we are? The creation of meaning is one of the supreme activities of the human race. We study the meaning of texts, primarily, but not always, texts involving language, in two different ways: by engaging with philosophers and linguists who have introduced influential ways to think about meaning, from Aristotle to Francis Bacon to Wittgenstein to David Lewis; and by showing how these various conceptions of meaning provide new ways of interpreting important texts, from prehistoric cave paintings to music to comics and computer programs. Finally, we confront the implications of deep learning and neural nets (Siri, Alexa, and the like) for our conception of ourselves. Does the fact that these machines can answer questions accurately mean that the human race no longer has a monopoly on meaning?

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—The Meaning of Life 
Prof. Moss (Philosophy)     [Syllabus]
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote that everyone agrees that there is one ultimate goal in life: living well. What people disagree about, he added, is what living well is.  And indeed, from the Buddha in ancient China to psychologists and novelists today, thinkers have had radically different views of what will make a person’s life go well. Should you aim above all for pleasure, physical and emotional? For inner peace?  Communion with God? Connection with others?  Exercising your strengths in the service of something meaningful? We consider these and other answers by reading and discussing works of religion, philosophy, psychology, and literature. Readings and author include: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Epicurus, Epictetus, Bhagavad Gita, Pali Canon, Ecclesiastes, excerpts from contemporary philosophical and psychological works, Gilgamesh, Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Dostoeyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Chopin’s The Awakening, Lu Xun’s Real Story of Ah Q, Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s.”

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—The Birth of the Human
Prof. Geroulanos (History)     [Syllabus]      
We consider the history of a complex and highly popular fantasy that the idea that humanity and modernity can be traced to a prehistoric moment when “the human” was born out of the animal. Supposedly a moment when humanity can be glimpsed at its most basic, today it is most often identified with a movement “out of Africa,” but also with claims about the origin of language, nationalist theories of a communal purity, theories of representation in cave art, and theories about tool use and human posture. This obsession with reconstituting prehistory is closely tied to modern colonialism and racism, postwar universalism, and even anticolonialism, and also speaks ways that European and American intellectuals and scientists produce knowledge about humanity. Because their analytical tools and priorities project this highly speculative moment of a “cradle of humanity” backwards in time, it has often been synonymous, even identical, with the way thinkers have defined humanity, and suffers from ideological and usually fantastical components. Readings include: Genesis, Tacitus’ Germania, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Montaigne’s “On Cannibals,” Condorcet’s Outline of a Historical View of the Progress of Mankind, Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Darwin’s Origin of Species, Wagner’s Artwork of the Future, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Bataille’s Cradle of Humanity.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Long History of Cybernetics
Prof. Weatherby (German Studies)     [Syllabus] 
Derived from the Greek word for “steersman,” “cybernetics" was an interdisciplinary movement of engineers and management experts, philosophers and scientists, who developed the hardware and terminology of the digital world we live in today. Its goal was to recast the full range of scientific and philosophical knowledge with the aim of studying and guiding organized systems—animals, machines, social bodies. Its leading figures drew on a long history of mostly Western philosophical and scientific thought, and their work generated and was inspired by a new kind of literature called “science fiction.” This course is an introduction to this discipline and its deep intellectual roots. We will proceed thematically, starting with the key terms “communication” and “control,” and treating such topics as the computer, the system, the animal, intelligence, and emergence. Readings will include early and second-wave cyberneticians like Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Ross Ashby, as well as John von Neumann, Heinz von Foerster, and Humberta Maturana and Francisco Varela. We will construe their concerns in terms of a long intellectual history stretching back to Plato, Kant, and Peirce, among others, complementing these readings with science fiction from Isaac Asimov to Octavia Butler, from Samuel R. Delany to Ursula Le Guin to Neal Stephenson.  

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Objectivity
Prof. Gitelman (English)      [Sylalbus]   
Bias. Spin. Propaganda. Hype. Fake news. These are familiar pejoratives for citizens of the twenty-first century, and by implication they privilege the same alternative: objectivity. Objectivity is a concept—or an ideal—that frames our understanding of pursuits as diverse as politics, journalism, and science, realms in which we hope to be able to discern the right, the true, and the real. But what is objectivity? Whose discernment counts as objective? How can we tell? Questions like these ask us to consider not only what we know but also how, while the conditions of evolving, possessing, and assessing knowledge turn out to be remarkably available to cultural and historical change. We consider the origins and character of objectivity within and against the Western intellectual tradition by considering selected episodes in its emergence, both ancient and modern, asking how thinkers have thought about knowing. What are or have been the available routes to certainty? What standards exist or have existed for knowledge about the past, about the self or about others, and about the world around us? Is it possible that the twenty-first century will involve new forms of objectivity? Are algorithms objective? Readings: Matthew, Thucydides, Plato’s Protagoras and Meno, Descartes’ Discourse on Method, selections from Montaigne, Bird’s Sheppard Lee, Agee and Evan’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Justice and Injustice in Biblical Narrative and Western Thought
Prof. Weiler (Law)      [Syllabus]
Issues of justice and injustice and other normative concerns. Each week pairs a core reading from the Hebrew Bible or the Christian New Testament with another work in the Western tradition to explore a broad range of complex normative issues. Often God will be “on trial”: Was the Deluge genocide? Is Abraham guilty of attempted murder and child abuse? Was Jesus guilty as charged? Was Socrates? The themes are all of relevance to contemporary issues: communal responsibility vs. individual autonomy, ecological crisis, ethics vs. religion, freedom of speech and thought, genocide, rule of law and civil disobedience, the Other, punishment and retribution, religious intolerance, sanctity of human life, sex and gender. Readings include: Aristophanes’ Clouds; Plato’s Apology; Xenophon’s Apology; Sophocles’ Antigone; selections from Hebrew Bible, Christian New Testament, Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas, Luther, Kant, Kierkegaard, Mill, Thoreau, Kafka, Camus.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Exile and Belonging in Ancient and Modern Literature
Prof. Waters (Irish Studies)      
We consider issues of place and displacement, exile and belonging, individuality and community, and citizen and state, as these are manifest in works of classical and modern literature. Reading widely in a variety of literary forms, we ask how different cultures and societies have created forms of identity through inclusion and exclusion, paying particular attention to enduring philosophical, psychological, and political structures that shape our theme across more than twenty-five centuries. Readings: Exodus, Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Padraig O’Conaire’s Exile, Inaam Kachachi’s American Granddaughter, Moshin Hamid’s Exit West.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Discovery and Recognition in Narrative, Film, and Drama
Prof. Kennedy (Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies)     [Syllabus]    
Across all cultures, stories are fashioned to withhold information at first, holding our attention through suspense. They then produce disclosures at crucial moments of denouement. This dynamic movement from ignorance to knowledge, which creates meaning, is deemed essential in the Poetics of Aristotle, especially when it takes the form of the the recognition of something previously unknown. It exists in all literatures independently of Aristotle’s prescriptions. This sort of discovery is essential to both high literature and low, across genres, epochs, and artistic media. Tracing an arc from the ancient world to the present day, we then see how the epistemology of modern storytelling, across cultures, disturbs the familiar patterns of clear and comforting revelation associated (often mistakenly, in fact) with classic genres. Reading: Aristotle’s Poetics; Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Oedipus; Genesis; Mark, Luke, John; Shakespeare’s King Lear; Arabian Nights; Kalidasa; Recognitions of Shakuntala; Voltaire’s Candide; Dickens’ Great Expectations; Auster’s City of Glass, Mahfouz’ Search; Barnes’ Sense of an Ending, excerpts from The Qur’an.  Films: Reed’s Third Man, Axel’s Babette’s Feast, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Altman’s Gosford Park, Nolan’s Memento.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—The Making of the Human in Early China
Prof. Zhang (Comparative Literature)     [Syllabus]      
Humans are animals of meaning. We constantly seek meaning from inputs we are exposed to. Among these interpretive activities, the most human-specific is the use of language. We study how philosophers and linguists think about how humans use language to encode meaning, create meaning, interpret meaning, do with meaning, and reflect on meaning. We also study how various kinds of media, from pictures and comics to music and computer programs, provide new ways of encoding and interpreting meaning as well as new perspectives on studying meaning. In particular, we discuss the implications of deep learning and neural networks: can machines achieve human-like intelligence and deprive humans of the monopoly of meaning-related activities? Readings include: Aristotle, Frege, Wittgenstein, David Lewis, Montague. 

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 402, Texts and Ideas: Antiquity & the Renaissance
Prof. Gilman (English)         [Syllabus]  
The "Renaissance" understands itself as an age bearing witness to the "rebirth" of classical antiquity. In art, philosophy, and literature it also assumes the task of reconciling the cultural inheritance of Greece and Rome with the Christian tradition (itself entering into a moment of crisis as allegiances split between the Catholic church and the "reformed" church of Luther and Calvin). Our first task is to look at antiquity; our second, to explore the ways in which European culture between 1400 and 1700 invents the modern by making itself conversant with the past. Readings: Homer's Odyssey; Sophocles' Antigone; Plato's Phaedo and Symposium; Vergil's Aeneid; Genesis, Exodus, Job, Luke, Acts, John; Augustine's Confessions; Castiglione's Book of the Courtier; Machiavelli's Prince; Erasmus's Praise of Folly; Montaigne's Essays; More's Utopia; Shakespeare's Tempest. 

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 403, Texts and Ideas: Antiquity & the Enlightenment
Prof. Rubenstein (Hebrew & Judaic Studies)           [Syllabus]
Beginning with the collision of the "Judeo-Christian" and Hellenistic traditions and their encounter in the Christian Scriptures and Augustine, we see Enlightenment thinkers grapple with the fusion of these traditions they had inherited, subjecting both to serious criticism and revising them as a new tradition—science and technology—rises to prominence. Reading from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Sophocles, Plato, Augustine, Montesquieu, Pope, Voltaire, and Rousseau.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 404, Texts and Ideas: Antiquity & the 19th Century
Prof. Renzi (Classics)
         [Syllabus]
Contemporary moral psychology: where it came from, where it’s brought us, how we might move beyond it. Readings: Book of J; Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah; Matthew, Galatians; Gospel of Mary; Euripides' Medea; Aristophanes' Clouds; Plato's Apology and Republic; Xenophon's Apology; Augustine's Confessions; Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto; Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality; Freud's "Case of Miss Lucy R." and Civilization and Its Discontents.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 404, Texts and Ideas: Antiquity & the 19th Century
Prof. Levene (Classics)           [Syllabus]
Every society places demands on individuals:  it could not do otherwise and still remain a society. But what happens when those demands are inconsistent? Can—or should—an individual determine the right course of action by reason alone? Or should one simply obey—but then, whom should one obey? What happens when people’s moral judgements differ from the expectations of those around them? How can one maintain a society in the face of such conflicts? From the first moments of Western literature those questions are explored; they became all the more insistent in the unprecedented political, social, intellectual and economic upheavals of the 19th century. One effect was the increasingly central role given to art, seen as the dynamic force able to create a cohesive society. Our study includes Richard Wagner’s remarkable music-drama The Ring of the Nibelung, perhaps the most significant and influential art-work of the era (studied primarily as a text, though there will be opportunities to hear the music as well). Other readings include selections from the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian New Testament, Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Antigone, Plato’s Gorgias, Vergil’s Aeneid, poetry by (among others) Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, Wagner’s Art and Revolution, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—What Is A Good Human Life?
Prof. Jauernig (Philosophy)    [Syllabus]
Two of the most fundamental questions that are addressed, more or less explicitly, in many of the arts, the humanities, and the sciences are the questions of what it means to be human, and of how to live a good human life. Indeed, these questions arise naturally for every one of us who approaches life in a reflective way and thinks about how to make the best of it. We read and discuss important works of literature and philosophy from the ancient world up to the present that speak to these questions in some way or another. In some, our questions are tackled in a fairly straightforward manner; in others, they are addressed more indirectly, through the presentation of a particular way of life or individual lived experiences. We examine these writings with the goal of broadening and deepening our understanding of possible answers to our questions in the hope that this will bring us closer to answering them for ourselves. Readings: Plato’s Apology and Symposium, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Montaigne’s Essays, Brecht’s Life of Galileo, Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Woolf’s Room of One’s Own, Morrison’s Bluest Eye, Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Coetzee’s Lives of Animals.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Doubles & Masks
Prof. Watson (Core)         [Syllabus]
Among the more significant activities of human beings is that of giving shape to fears and desires through art. All cultures participate in this form of emotional exteriorization, including creating through myth and literature “doubles” and through sculpting in textures and words various types of “masks.”  Focusing on doubles and masks in several different cultures, we chart the meaning and impact of the archetypal masked figures of the commedia dell’arte in French and Italian theatre, the explosion of the “carnivalesque”  in South American magical realism, the obsessive concern with the grotesque (the monstrous mask) in French romanticism and Victorian novels,  animal doubles in fairy tales, and aspects of zombification and ghostly doubles in North American literature and ethnographic film.   Readings:  Sophocles’ Oedipus, Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, Molière’s Imaginary Invalid, García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Freud’s Uncanny, Rank’s Double, Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Beloved, Mouawad’s Scorched.  Films:  Modern Times (1936), Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956, 1996), Les Maître Fous (1955), La Belle et la Bête/Beauty and the Beast (1946, 1991).

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Revulsion, Nausea, and Disgust
Prof. Samalin (English)       [Syllabus]
We explore the peculiarly central role disgust has played in modern thought and writing, from the grotesque satires of François Rabelais and Jonathan Swift, through Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist Nausea, and on to Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Tracking the different meanings and values attached to the experience of disgust at different historical moments, we analyze how the roles played by our most seemingly reflexive, hard-wired forms of sensory and emotional response can change and evolve. At the same time, we contrast our literary readings with philosophical, sociological, psychoanalytic, and scientific texts, starting with the aesthetic theory of the Enlightenment and Charles Darwin’s speculations on the evolution of vomiting, and moving on to more recent psychological accounts of revulsion. Prerequisite: strong stomach. Readings include: Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Darwin’s Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Zola’s Belly of Paris, Sartre’s Nausea, Clarice Lispector’s Passion According to G.H., Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Mixed Constitutions
Prof. Monson (Classics)       [Syllabus]    
The American constitution is based on a system of checks-and-balances, where executive, judicial, and legislature powers are divided into separate branches of government. Where does this system come from? Had it been tried before? What historical forces could topple it? We examine the historical models that inspired or admonished the framers of the constitution. The concept of the “mixed constitution,” combining aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, goes back to Athens in the fourth century BCE. We trace its evolution from there through the Roman Republic, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the English Civil War, to the American Revolution. The theory of the mixed constitution began as a critique of radical democracy, especially by Plato and Aristotle, but it is better known through the work of Harrington, Montesquieu, and Madison as a form of opposition to monarchical tyranny. Through the ages people with quite different ideological perspectives have engaged with one another’s writings on the mixed constitution to find a solution to a timeless problem: how to balance the competing interests that make up complex societies in order to steer between tyranny and anarchy. This dialogue remains an important part of our intellectual heritage. Reading: Plato’s Statesman, Aristotle’s Politics, Cicero’s Republic and Laws, Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, excerpts from Augustine, Bodin, Harrington, The Federalist.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Utopias and Dystopias 
Prof. Mann (English)         [Syllabus]
A “utopia” is an imaginary world, a fantastical “no-place” that claims to convey important truths about the real world. We survey the literary genre of utopia from the 16th to the 21st century, focusing on attempts to invent new worlds through fiction. Beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, we explore utopia’s emergence in response to European political upheaval and colonial exploitation, then examine how British and American writers transform utopian visions in the 18th and 19th centuries. Finally, we consider how utopia is re-worked in 20th-century science fiction, particularly in its seemingly paradoxical emphasis on both fantasy and realism. Topics include the politics of gender and race, the relationship between animal and machine, the predicament of an alien in a strange land, the purpose of technology in a perfect society, and the textual forms characteristic of utopian fiction. Readings include More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Cavendish’s Blazing World, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Butler’s Erewhon, Griggs' Imperium in Imperio, Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau, Huxley’s Brave New World, Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Utopias and Dystopias 
Prof. Kotsonis (History/Russian & Slavic Studies)       [Syllabus]
Considers how writers and other artists over the past two millennia have imagined perfect and just societies and, more recently, how they imagined perfectly unjust and nightmarish societies and implied what would restore them. Readings: Plato’s Republic, Xenophon’s Anabasis, More’s Utopia, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Wells’ Time Machine, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Sinclair’s The Jungle, Zamiatin’s We, Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984.  Films: Starship Troopers, Demolition Man.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—The Body in Philosophy 
Prof. Bianchi (Comparative Literature)      [Syllabus]
What is a body, and how has the body been understood in the history of Western thought? In one sense a body is the most natural and self-evident thing in the world, in another it is the object of the most intense scrutiny and fashioning. Philosophy has often elevated soul, spirit, or mind at the expense of the body; but in more recent thought the body has come to center stage. We trace this devaluation of the body in the Western tradition and examine some of the ways it has returned in 20th and 21st century philosophical thought. How has the body been constituted in relation to its others—mind/spirit/soul? How does the body appear as an entity both natural and technological? How do bodies come to bear psychical, social, political and philosophical significance insofar as they are sexed, gendered, raced, abled and disabled, desiring and desired, bearers of ideality or sites of disgust? How are bodies fashioned and produced by personal, cultural and political practices such as dieting, body modification, imprisonment and torture, and medicine? Reading include Plato’s Phaedo, Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, Descartes’ Meditations, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Young’s Throwing Like a Girl, Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Butler’s Bodies That Matter, and works by Elaine Scarry, Cressida Heyes, and Tobin Siebers.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Unbelief in Western Thought
Prof. Guillory (English)         [Syllabus]
For most of the Western tradition, people have believed in gods or God. Not until the nineteenth century was it socially or intellectually acceptable to express disbelief publicly, as in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s notorious assertion, “God is dead.” Yet the expression of unbelief can be traced to the founding moments of Western philosophy, most famously with the execution of Socrates by the Athenian state for supposedly teaching atheism to his disciples. Beginning with the account of Socrates’ trail in Plato’s Apology, we examine what Nietzsche calls the “shadow” of Western thought, the condition of unbelief. How and why have people come to doubt the existence of God? What kinds of arguments have thinkers made in defense of unbelief? Can human society exist without religious belief? Or is it true, as a character declares in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, that “without God, everything is permitted.” Readings from Plato, Lucretius, Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, Montaigne, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Pascal, Hume, Diderot, Sade, Shelley, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Death and the Afterlife
Prof. Reed (Hebrew & Judaic Studies)
Concepts of death and the afterlife in the Western tradition, examined through a focus on ancient beliefs and practices and their medieval and modern reception. Tracing the development of ancient Jewish and Christian traditions in relation to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Persian, Greek, and Roman traditions, we explore the beginnings of Western ideas about heaven, hell, resurrection, the soul, the cosmos, and the End of Time. Literary reflections on death are paired with material data for burial and related ritual practices. Students read a variety of premodern sources and also consider whether and how ancient traditions shaped modern ideas about death, the self, and the human condition. Readings include Gilgamesh, Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament, Biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, Talmud, Plato’s Phaedo, Josephus’ Jewish War, Origen’s Against Celsus, Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, Tertullian’s Resurrection of the Flesh, Dante’s Inferno, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Zombie Preparedness.”

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 404, Texts and Ideas: Antiquity & the 19th Century

Prof. Renzi (College Core Curriculum)
       [Syllabus] 
Contemporary moral psychology: where it came from, where it’s brought us, how we might move beyond it. Readings: Book of J; Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah; Matthew, Galatians; Gospel of Mary; Euripides' Medea; Aristophanes' Clouds; Plato's Apology and Republic; Xenophon's Apology; Augustine's Confessions; Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto; Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality; Freud's "Case of Miss Lucy R." and Civilization and Its Discontents.