This course will explore the culture, counterculture, and art of the long decade of the 1960s. Our focus will center on youthful artists in the United States, beginning with Abstract Expressionism and ending with Performance art and what critic Lucy Lippard called the “dematerialization of the art object.” Social history, semiotic analysis, literary and film theory, and art history will inform class discussions. Themes include the Cold War and Beat culture, the rise of Minimalism and Pop Art, psychedelic experience, the prominence of advertising and the marketing of “cool,” student movements, censorship, Rock music culture, the Vietnam War, and hippie communal spirituality. 

Please note that this course meets in Oro Valley!

Water is the most important resource associated with ecological and human well-being, economic productivity, and security. Stresses are placed on the Earth’s water resources by climate change, population growth, conflicts, and other social changes. Achieving a sustainable use of water may be the most critical issue of natural resource management now facing many societies. This course addresses the science and technology underlying sustainable water use. We will discuss water use within energy generation, domestic supplies, and agriculture while highlighting water use and modification along entire production and supply chains. Water use within agriculture, for example, accounts for more than 70% of the world’s freshwater use. We will also examine multi-disciplinary case studies that highlight specific challenges, successes, and failures in water use and management around the world today.

This course will focus on Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, a collection of putatively “true” stories inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron. Composed in the 1540s, the entertaining Heptaméron is puzzling on several counts. That the Queen of Navarre, sister of King Francis I and a woman known for her piety, would pen such racy tales—about adultery, trickery, clergy abuse, and murder—is surprising in and of itself. We will explore this conundrum throughout the course. In particular, we will examine realistic elements within the stories, which offer glimpses of everyday Renaissance life; the moral complexities and shifting perspectives that make the Heptaméron’s “meaning” elusive; the marginalized viewpoints of women and servants, which Marguerite uses as vehicles of revelation that contest the status quo; and the religious and sociopolitical implications of the narratives within the context of Reformation-era France.

In this course, we will focus on learning to read three of Faulkner’s most celebrated novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). “Learning to read,” means learning to analyze, interpret, and enjoy. We will ask ourselves such questions as:  What do these texts contribute to our understanding of American Literature? What contributions have they made to the novel as a genre? How are we to tease out the meaning and deployment of time, history, race, and the south in these prodigious texts? We will engage the novels as close readers, pondering carefully and in depth the words on the page as well as the plot lines, characters, and cultural concerns expressed therein. First time readers and devout Faulkner fans are equally welcome!

The city has been the motor of progress in modernity and the crucible of many of the social movements that have contested the darker underside of the modern. This seminar will explore how cities came to reside at the center of the modern project, how they have been transformed over time, and what those transformations might mean. It will also examine how the work of artists, most importantly film makers, react to the urban process, and how their creations contribute to understanding the complex dynamic that forms the culture and politics of cities.

The class will focus on a variety of cities as well as important films about them to show how the city passes from backdrop to protagonist of the changes in the urban process. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which the content and form of film reveal the authors’ views, and we will work through the techniques necessary to decipher the creative process. This will allow all of those in the class to hone their analytic skills as urbanists as well as film viewers.

In the 1800s the newly created United States of America was seized by what was labeled “Manifest Destiny”--a deep-seated drive to expand from coast to coast. This drive encountered several obstacles, ranging from the challenges presented by geography and travel to the fact that large segments of land were already claimed by America’s indigenous people. The impulse toward a unified continent was also derailed by the Civil War and the division between the states. The military played a significant role in conquering the West and, obviously, in the Civil War. This course will explore how the actions of four nineteenth-century generals--Grenville Dodge, Joseph K. Barnes, Richard Henry Pratt, and Ely Parker--would help shape the face of modern Native America.

Faust is alive and well. His emanations appear in literature, art, music, film, and cyberspace. Not only Adam and Eve but also Faust ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So he has excited the human imagination for centuries. But who was this mysterious alchemist or learned academician who dared transgress the borders of accepted knowledge and revel in the world of darkness that the Church condemned and warned against?

We will look for him on the Internet, in Marlowe’s Tragical History of Dr. Johann Faust, and in Gounod’s Faust opera, Liszt’s “Faust” symphony, and Wagner’s Faust overture. The main focus of the seminar is on those Fausts entrenched in German culture. Therefore, a significant part of the seminar is devoted to discussions of Goethe’s Faust. And we will look carefully at the novel Doctor Faust, Mann’s devastating criticism of the rise of Nazi Germany.

This course addresses the twentieth-century genocide that was the Holocaust, the attempted annihilation of European Jews and other designated racial and political opponents led by the Third Reich in Germany. We will review the horrific events of the Holocaust and explore the current scholarly understanding of this history: What does it mean to remember the Holocaust today?

The Holocaust continues to be relevant, and not only for surviving victims and perpetrators. We will consider how and why the Holocaust has been remembered in the United States and abroad, whether in museums and schools or popular culture and the Internet. We will also discuss in particular how visual evidence of atrocities has been circulated to provide testimony and promote popular awareness of the crime of genocide.

By studying literature and cinema, students in this course will learn about various African cultures, traditions, and institutions. The class will show how French-speaking African writers and film-makers use literature and films to build narratives concerning African cultures and societies. At the same time, their work offers a counternarrative to persistent images of life in Africa. Our focus will be on West Africa, which forms a cultural entity, and three themes that correspond to three historical periods: first, “Ancient Africa,” with an emphasis on storytelling and oral traditions; second, “The Clash of Cultures,” which deals with the colonization of Africa and its consequences; and third, “African Women and the Role of Women in Contemporary Society.”  We will look at how these themes are explored in articles, fiction, and poetry, using films to illustrate the cultural elements discussed in the written material. The course ends with a traditional cultural “performance.”

Perennially fascinating, ancient Greek mythology has inspired and continues to inform creative activity from “highbrow” literature to popular media. This course will explore major mythological events and characters beginning with the creation tale, which features a succession of generations of gods embroiled in gender and generational conflict. We will examine the gods’ importance in ancient Greek ritual and cultural life and then hero tales—Herakles, Oedipus, the Trojan War cycle, and more. By appreciating the diversity and complexities of ancient Greek mythological tales, we can move beyond the merely entertaining stories to learn that these myths touch on virtually every aspect of human relationships and activities. The stories reveal ancient Greek thinking on profound human issues, and these insights will in turn illuminate our contemporary values and beliefs.

This seminar focuses on the six poets (one recently rediscovered) who most defined  English Romanticism in poetry and verse drama between 1798 and 1824. It emphasizes their philosophical, emotional, and stylistic tugs-of-war, despite their quite different politics: first, between proposals for revolutions in social organization and how individuals relate to the wider world (they all knew the American and French revolutions of the 1770s-90s), and second, retrogressive longings for earlier orders of being and poetic styles whose revivals promised a better world than the emerging one of rapid social changes and aggressive industrialism. Each class examines their most progressive and simultaneously regressive tendencies, the special paradoxes that still make these poets so revealing about the post-Enlightenment dawning of the modern world. The six poets are: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Robinson, Byron, Keats, and Shelley.

The short story has held a prominent place in Latin American literature for at least 200 years, but it is only within the past few decades that it has become widely known in translation. The course will use the short story as a vehicle to introduce some of Latin America’s best-known writers, including Nobel Laureates Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), as well as Jorge.Luis Borges (Argentina) and Isabel Allende (Chile and the U.S.). The course will draw on their short stories and those of a few younger writers, including outstanding U.S. Latino and Latina writers. It will focus on the cultural, artistic, social, and political dimensions of a wide variety of this fascinating literary form.

Many of Shakespeare’s most powerful, intelligent, and subversive characters are female. How were such vividly complex roles constructed in a culture that legally defined women as property on the grounds of their intellectual and moral inferiority? Given the early modern imperatives of feminine silence, chastity, and obedience, how is it that women impel Shakespeare’s plots, orchestrate conflicts, and—in many instances— impose “resolutions”?

This course will address the social and historical contexts of Shakespeare's women and how the playwright both generates and subverts his culture’s assumptions about gender. While examining the extraordinary vitality of his female characters, we will ask: What is their relation to the state, the family, the church, political economy, and desire? In short, what is their relation to order and disorder?

Each class will focus on a different play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello.

Can a movie probe more deeply into theology than other works? Can it show the strengths and weaknesses of religious thought more directly, more dramatically? This seminar probes theology and film, examining movies with strong Christian themes. We will use film criticism and literary and art theories to look at and interpret movies that address the spiritual dimensions of life. The class will study classic directors like Buñuel, Pasolini, and Zeffirelli, tease out new meaning from familiar texts such as A Man for All Seasons and The Matrix, and make brief forays into many less familiar works and genres: Gladiator to Battlestar Galactica, an episode of Yes, Prime Minister, and one from the standup comedy of “executive transvestite” Eddie Izzard. Thoughtful analysis of a movie opens discussion up to multiple meanings, and we will think through films that question, explore, and compare ideas.

The first great work of Western literature, Homer’s phenomenal epic The Iliad, sings of the Trojan War, its horrors and its glories. To the ancient Greeks war was a fact of life. Proving oneself in battle was fundamental to becoming a man. Despite modern Western beliefs that we can resolve conflicts diplomatically, war still confronts us. Today, facing an implacably savage enemy leaves many conflicted about the morality of warfare.

Greek warfare differed from modern practices: unquestioningly accepting that war was necessary; promoting the material gains of war; glorifying the warrior; and especially the concept of a “beautiful death.” Appreciating the range of ancient Greek views about war will broaden students’ perspective on contemporary issues, and the portrayals of these views through the intensified dramatics of the plays we will read will vibrantly engage students.

This seminar examines the relations between culture and power in nineteenth-century France through the study of masterpieces of realist fiction. The realist novel is a cultural artefact specific to the nineteenth century, a genre born with the modern democratic nation-state at a time when (relative) freedom of expression allowed for the emergence of a public sphere. The four novels studied in this course also have in common that they are romans d’éducation (or Bildungsroman) thematically focused on young men’s struggles to succeed in a democratized society, i.e., to reap the revolutionary promise of freedom, fraternity, and equality. By giving voice and shape to the sociopolitical aspirations of the French people, the novel responded to the needs of an increasingly large reading public that faced the same dilemmas and recognized itself in it.

This seminar begins by putting Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist into their social and literary contexts. We will then spend two meetings on each work. Though in different genres—the short story and the education novel—they are companion pieces in significant ways. Dubliners illustrates the oppression of Irish Catholics by British Protestants and by Irish Catholics themselves through the strictures of the institutionalized Church. A Portrait tells the tale of an individual who refuses to submit to either authority, and who seeks artistic freedom to write. The seminar will explore these themes through an examination of the works' range of styles and overall narrative structures. The ultimate aim will be to understand how Dubliners and A Portrait provide a “moral history” of Ireland, and how the writer can in Joyce's words “forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race.”

What's really in the Bible? As opposed to what we've been told by well-meaning but often not well-informed parents, clergy, and others? This course provides an innovative look at many instructive and amusing aspects of this most consequential book in Western culture. It examines clichés and received wisdom about the text, with a view to replacing widely accepted readings with students’ own more informed and insightful revisionings of the book. Not your average Bible reading class, this course aims to explore many controversial and contested passages, and to explode preconceived and ill-considered views about them.

For instance, did you know that Moses and Aaron were born of incest? That Abraham allowed his wife--who was his half-sister--to serve in the harems of two kings? That God tried, after browbeating Moses into leading the exodus, to kill him--with no warning or explanation?

And there are more surprises:

• The sin of Onan had nothing to do with masturbation, but was instead his refusal to impregnate his brother’s widow.
• Judah, ancestor of the greatest tribe of Israel, ordered his daughter-in-law to be burnt for harlotry, but desisted when he was exposed as one of her customers.
• David said that his love for Jonathan, Saul’s son, was “passing the love of women.”
• After becoming king, David committed adultery and then murder to cover it up.
• Solomon had his older brother, the rightful heir to the throne, executed on a trumped-up charge involving yet another concubine of David.
• Even in the New Testament Jesus says, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother.”

The course will examine explanations for these and other Biblical “problems” with the help of recent scholarship. To see the Bible in its depth and complexity, we will look at its blunt, earthy vigor and surprising treatments of God as a character in these stories: hence the focus on texts that are shocking, lurid, or simply inexplicable.

We will begin with the complex of legends about Moses and the possible historical reality behind his story. Then we will go back to the legends of Genesis, dominated by fratricidal conflict. Next, we follow the linked themes of warriors versus shepherds through several books, including the insistence that God is the true warrior-king and that human kingship is an affront to him. Finally, we arrive at David, who is the great ambiguous figure in the Bible. Additionally, we will explore why the Bible had such a formative effect on Western culture, one that transcends all the religious formulations that sought to embody it.

If you are open-minded and can tolerate my love of digressions (which I share with Holden Caulfield) and of sarcasm (my college major), you are welcome. Bring a Bible: any translation will do.

In 2013 we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Perhaps no other composer so changed the course of music history through the way he reconceived the nature of opera and the way he stretched the boundaries of tonality. Many composers who followed found themselves swept up in these new approaches to form and harmony.
 
Four classes will consider Wagner in terms of both biography and music. The first two will provide an overview of Wagner’s life, including his background and education, his practical experience in the opera house (emphasizing his years as Kapellmeister in Dresden), and the creation and establishment of the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. In addition, these sessions will briefly discuss his first operas and will look at the distinctive features of the operas written before his banishment from Germany (The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, and Lohengrin).
 
The third and fourth classes will focus on Wagner’s musical techniques, including his radical new approach in the four operas that make up The Ring Cycle. The course closes with a look at Tristan and Isolde, The Meistersingers, and Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal.

This course explores the work of speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler, recipient of the Hugo and Nebula awards and a MacArthur “genius.” Credited with influencing the field of Afrofuturist studies, Butler rendered a dystopian vision of the world, one rooted in her own experiences as a Black woman in twentieth-century America. Like all good literature, her work says something important about the period in which she wrote. It was also eerily prescient and can serve as a lens turned on our current moment of political instability, climate change, inequality, social disorder, and the Movement for Black Lives. The course will incorporate original texts alongside supplemental materials and will focus on the recurring themes of race, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, reproduction, social hierarchies, and varied meanings of human. There has never been a more apt and rewarding time to reexamine Octavia Butler’s award-winning work and to reimagine human futures. 

We initiate a year of exploring Homer by reading his scintillating epic poem presenting a few days near the Trojan War’s end: The Iliad. While the poem highlights battle and military matters, human complexities also emerge: conflict between military and domestic realms; women as war prizes or prized family members; the role of gods; concepts of heroism; ways of warfare; the oral tradition; creation of poetry; and more. The aim is to appreciate from multiple perspectives The Iliad’s exquisite poetry and its multilayered ideas about war, peace, and related themes. A greater understanding of Greek thinking, pivotal in the development of Western culture, provides valuable insights into our own views about these complex social issues and why this remarkable ancient poem continues to influence our contemporary ideas and creativity.

Alexander Hamilton promised that the Constitution would “unite parties for the general welfare,” but Washington perceived that “the baneful effects of the spirit of Party” continued to threaten the republic.  In the centuries since, we have blamed partisans and identified with parties.   Both of our major parties are grab bags of discordant factions, as we will discuss with an eye to how politicians appeal to common aspirations and contradictory assumptions.   As part of our discussions, we will look at the historical evolution of party politics, including campaigns, polls, slogans, conventions, debates, and political rhetoric more generally.  This historical perspective will provide us with opportunities to step back from partisan politics to reflect upon other pivotal moments in the history of American politics.
 
The course will begin by reviewing the political writings that shaped the constitution of the national government, and shared assumptions about the national character.  We will use the writings of Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson to explore the morals and mores of representative self-governance.   Our Constitution was meant to form a harmonious balance among competing factions.  Factionalism was traditionally seen to arise from the heated rhetoric of demagogues who undermined the common good by inflaming self-interest.  Those anxieties deepened with the populist politics of the Jacksonian era.  The emergence of the first political parties in the early nineteenth century will provide us with a frame of reference for reflecting upon the traditional republican assumption that deliberations upon our shared values can enable us to achieve the common good.
 
The election of Andrew Jackson will provide the first of several pivotal campaigns that we will use to explore the evolution of party politics.  We will trace that evolution by examining how differing demographical groups have shaped the ideologies of political parties, including not only the entrance of women and minorities into the political process, but also how class, education, and regional differences have shaped who and what gets represented in our political deliberations.  We will use these factors to assess the development of particular aspects of political campaigns, including advertising, opinion polls, rhetorical appeals such as ethos and pathos, and campaign themes that attempt to represent who we are and what we value.
 
These historical points of reference will be used to frame discussions of the political campaigns of 2012.  Each week we will focus on a particular aspect of the campaigns, such as primaries, ads and slogans, opinion polls of demographic groups, and representations of issues such as taxation, education, and war.  We will frame these aspects of the campaign by drawing historical parallels with previous pivotal elections.  For example, we will examine how current candidates represent current international conflicts, financial crises, regulatory priorities, and taxation, and then we will look to other elections where wars abroad and woes at home figured into debates about who will best represent our shared needs and aspirations.

Science fiction is a modern art form closely tied to advances in science and technology. It generates an imaginary space where a new development in science can be imaginatively tested for its possible effects on humanity. Some scenarios are cautionary, while others are hopeful and exhilarating. When combined with the fantasy genre, these stories set the imagination free to soar. This seminar will examine a series of great science fiction and fantasy narratives, including novels, short stories, movies, and TV shows. Whether the topic is robotics, artificial intelligence, space exploration, alien languages, enhanced intelligence, surveillance, time travel, or the future of gender, each of the works we consider will have a particular take on an alternate reality that humans may inhabit. 

Superman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, Batman, Captain America, Green Lantern, Iron Man, Black Widow--the list of America’s superheroes is long. Comic books, TV, and cinema have long built up the appeal of superheroes, and they remain popular. Embodiments of cultural meanings, social practices, and political imaginaries, superheroes tell us stories about ourselves. Historically, representations of superheroes have been connected to national security and the Cold War, changing gender roles, racial stereotypes, and environmental issues. In this course we attend to gender, race, and sex as they play out in the bodies, lives, and storylines of America’s superheroes. We ask: What can Wonder Woman’s history tell us about gender and sex in the 20th century? How do Batman and Superman differently represent masculinity? And what do superheroes reveal about national identity, cultural memory, and collective hope? 

England during the reign of Victoria is famous for industrial, scientific, and technological advances, as well as sexual repression. But it was also an era when the ghost story – and its extensions in longer fictions during one of the heydays of the English novel – flourished in print just as old traditions about the spirit world were being called into question by the many supposed “progresses” of the day. This seminar sets out to explain both the wide range of ghost stories during the time before and after Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in 1843 (which will be included) and the many ways that “ghostliness” was incorporated into seemingly “realistic” Victorian fictions from Dickens to Henry James, partly through their reworkings of the earlier “Gothic” tradition in fiction and drama.

According to George Kennan, the Great War was “the seminal event of the Twentieth Century.” The war triggered both the Russian Revolution and the Irish Rebellion, and ended by toppling monarchies and destroying empires.

But perhaps the “shock of the new” that most surprised was the horror of modern, mechanized warfare. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front are probably the most famous postwar texts, but they are only two of many brilliant literary works the war produced and that we will read. English poets like Wilfred Owen reshaped the way we perceive not only war but language itself.  And authors like Ernest Hemingway in In Our Time, and Humphrey Cobb in The Paths of Glory have brought the war into more recent books and films.

The Great War created a new kind of literature, ranging from pulp fiction to radical experimentations with form. This literary revolution occurred on both sides of the Atlantic and profoundly affected what we today call modernism.

Travels in Consciousness, taught by Norman Austin, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Classics,  will explore the history of consciousness as reflected in a variety of texts. Readings will range widely, from Bronze Age Greece to American authors of the Twentieth Century.  By “consciousness” is meant the ways in which individuals conceive of themselves and their world; it has to do not only with thought but also with feeling, volition, and behavior. So regarded consciousness constitutes individual identity and defines the human condition.  After an introductory presentation at the first meeting, the seminar will address itself to Homer’s Odyssey and Plato’s Phaedo, works that display two principal approaches to consciousness from antiquity: the poetic and the philosophical. Discussion of the Homeric consciousness will embrace such topics as fate, the gods, and the “self.” Plato’s dialogue will be studied as the seminal statement of the Platonic theory of the soul, which was adapted to become the foundation of Christian theology. The seminar will then leap forward to the English Renaissance and examine Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as a dramatization of the tragediesinherent in the Platonic-Christian concept of the soul.  Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and T. S. Eliot’s “The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” will be studied as poems sounding the death knell in the 19th century of the Christian concept of the soul and the breakdown in the early 20th  century of the old forms and ideas that had dominated Western consciousness since antiquity.  Selections will also be read from Emily Dickinson’s poems and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as indicators of the birth of a new definitively American and post-Christian idea of the soul. The seminar will then move back in time to study the consciousness of a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Empress of Japan at Kyoto, circa 1000 CE, the setting of Sei Shonagon’s memoir, Pillow Book. The seminar will conclude withToni Morrison’s Sula, a novel written by a modern African-American woman, which reflects a search for a new vocabulary in which to represent consciousness of the modern age.

This seminar will examine the social movements that came to the fore in the year that began with the Tet Offensive and ended with the launch around the moon. The first three classes will examine the antiwar, civil rights, and women’s movements using images and texts to consider what the ‘60s came to represent. In our last class we will consider how the divisions between the counterculture and “moral majority” led to the election of Richard Nixon—and to the antigovernment sentiments that have spread from left to right in recent decades. In the last class we will also examine the environmental movement as a final case to reflect upon how our political consciousness has evolved over the last half-century as guerilla wars have continued to rage on the evening news, minorities and women have struggled to claim their rights, and our sense of self has become ever more mediated.    

The human brain, guiding our every thought and action, is as complex as anything we know. Its almost unimaginable complexity arises from minute interconnections between tens of billions of nerve cells. If we could map every connection among the cells, we still would have only a rough foundation for understanding brain function, because those connections are changing every moment of our lives. They are recording our experiences, our emotions, our plans for the future, and they are constantly repairing disruption and injury. Evidence is mounting that intellectual challenge, social engagement, and regular physical activity can have a profound positive impact on our lives as we age. Why? Because they influence the ongoing alterations, or “plasticity,” in our ever-changing brains. This course examines the recent revolution in our views of brain function that gives us a new way to grasp how our brains work.

There Is Nothing Like a Dame! celebrates the women of Broadway who wrote the scripts, composed the songs, penned the lyrics, designed, directed, choreographed, and starred in classics of the American musical theater.
 
The seminar introduces the women of the Golden Age of musical theater who paved the way for the women now working on new musicals for the millennium. Revel in archival performances by the great ladies of Broadway past and cheer for the new divas of the Great White Way who are creating musical memories for a new generation of theatergoers.
 
There Is Nothing Like a Dame! also goes behind the curtain to explore the contributions of women to the American musical. Fighting social and theatrical sexism, the great women of Broadway created a musical heritage that endures today. That great dame Ethel Merman said it best when she belted out “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better!”

I have put in [Ulysses] so many enigmas and  puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.  James Joyce
                                                                                                                           
While most of the great avant-garde art works of the early 20thcentury rest securely within the canon of modernist classics, Ulysses (1922) continues to challenge and, as the author had hoped, puzzle us. We are still struggling to become Joyce’s contemporaries.
 
This seminar will continue the effort through a critical reading of the novel. After an introduction to some pertinent contexts, we shall proceed through several of the 18 episodes each meeting.
 
Weekly reading will average 80-some pages of the densely allusive narrative. The instructor will provide commentary and read crucial passages aloud. Ulysses is one of the most technically accomplished novels, and approaching it through listening is perhaps the surest way of becoming Joyce’s contemporary.

This course tracks the downward spiral of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire, starting from around 146 BC when Rome first firmly established herself as the world power and continuing through the Battle of Actium of 31 BC, where Octavian established his sole reign as ruler of the Mediterranean.

The main focus will be on primary ancient texts. We will read contemporary authors like Cicero (his orations and his personal letters), the historian Sallust and the campaign accounts of Julius Caesar. We will also read the later biographer Plutarch, whose Lives draw out timeless moral lessons about leadership. Finally, we will look at the poems of Catullus, who knew (and mocked) many of the key players of the day. Our main modern book, Scullard's From the Gracchi to Nero is a well known introduction to the time period. We may also look at contemporary portrayals of the late Roman Republic in modern popular fiction and film. This class will raise comparisons between the late Roman Republic and our own recent political history and will raise the questions as to whether such a study is useful in navigating our own current political situation…and if it is, how should we apply it?

Mike Lippman is a Lecturer in the Classics Department at the University of Arizona. His primary field of research is ancient drama, particularly Greek comedy. He has been involved in many modern reproductions of ancient plays as translator, actor, co director, and dramaturg. He also is particularly interested in the interplay of ancient political thought and its modern usage. He teaches classes on Sparta and Athens that not only explore antiquity but present the fascinating social experiments these societies represent.

Contemporary Russia continues to search for a post-Soviet national identity:  what Russians refer to as their country’s “national idea.”  The return to the presidency of Vladimir Putin signifies that the country’s most historically significant leader since Stalin reassumes the decisive role as Russia continues to wrestle with its identity, sociopolitical goals, and position in the world community.  We focus on political system and institution building, elites, and socioeconomic change as we consider an emergent 21st -century Russian “national idea.”  The core concept of the “Russian soul” helps us focus on a new identity.

Contemporary Russia exhibits continuing revitalization and normalization, and we analyze these as we consider the priorities of the governing team and the preferences of the broader society.  Our group efforts to understand Russia’s evolution include not only political-institutional factors but fundamental cultural-historical elements.  Our judgments about a 21st -century national identity are set against the over 1,000-year history and experience of a sovereign Russia.
 

Explore ancient Greek plays as dynamic examples of live theater and discover the often-spectacular performance aspects that rival opera, Busby Berkeley musicals or Cirque de Soleil. In this course, we will examine the role of the chorus and the choral odes, which form the musical framework for the plays and whose musical stylings are incredibly diverse and creative. We will encounter memorable characters presented in highly dramatic scenes that are performed to the audience’s delight, horror, and edification. Addressing significant issues of the day, ancient Greek drama continues to resonate today, proving their perpetual timeliness and emerging as dynamic, living entities with much to offer a contemporary audience. Basing the thematic interpretation on the performance aspects results in a rich, multi-textured appreciation of the plays. 

This course traces the often-changing experiences American Indians had from just before the War for Independence to the twentieth century. It will focus on how they dealt with the expanding nation and its pioneer citizens. Their tactics varied from contact, cooperation, and competition to conflict with the newcomers. Major differences in how the two races saw their lands and resources explain the violence that resulted. The U.S. lacked any consistent policy for its treatment of the tribes; and even when its goals seemed humane, their implementation could be disastrous. When military operations ended, most of the survivors lived on reservations until after World War II. Since then, educated tribal leaders, changing federal laws, waning anti-Indian prejudice, and increasing cultural pride have brought major changes to their situation in the general society.

This course examines modern histories of collective memories through the institutions and technologies that facilitate recall, such as museums, photography, and visual culture. We will consider moments of tension when history and memory appear to be at odds, when competing interests in the meanings of the past have created social conflict, or when silences about the past are broken. Case studies may include: the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian in 1995; appeals for apologies for past atrocities, such as slavery, human trafficking, or genocide; or lynching photographs in the “Without Sanctuary” exhibit of 2002. While the course emphasizes how societies come to terms with painful or shameful memories, we will also focus on the ways in which visual sources, particularly photographs, have shaped discourses of memory. By learning from scratch how to “read” historical photographs, we will interrogate the ways in which iconic images, snapshots, and “Kodak moments” have become integral to thinking about collective memory.

Few composers have been as prolific in so many genres as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In this course we will survey a portion of this vast output from the unique perspective of specialists in the field, all professors at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music. The first session will be led by Jay Rosenblatt and will offer an overview of Mozart’s life, covering such topics as his years as a child prodigy, his difficulties with the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, and his final decade in Vienna. He will also introduce the class to the stylistic characteristics of Mozart’s music. For the subsequent sessions, Kristin Dauphinais, Professor of Voice, will discuss the three operas Mozart wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte; Bruce Chamberlain, Director of Choral Activities, will examine Mozart’s sacred music; and Tannis Gibson, Professor of Piano, will introduce us to Mozart’s piano concertos and works for solo piano.

What’s the value of a good argument?  That question is not merely rhetorical.  For the sake of argument, we will reassess the classical opposition of rhetoric and philosophy that was first established by Plato.  Ironically, it was not Socrates’s student but a student of the Sophists who founded the humanities upon a skepticism about received truths.  In our first class we will explore the sophistic art of deliberating upon the uncertainties of civic life, and in our second we will read Plato’s highly rhetorical attacks on rhetoric.  Then we will turn to the Aristotelian works that first formalized the interrelated arts of rhetoric, politics, and ethics.  We will conclude by reviewing the Ciceronian and Christian legacies of classical rhetoric.  Throughout the course, we will explore the values of argument and the arts for putting them into action.

China’s rise may be the single most transformative event of the contemporary world. Many have called attention to the economic and political impact of China’s rise, but what of China’s cultural renaissance? What does it bode for the future? The reinvention of China’s cultural identity is being shaped in terms of its past, but which past is being held up as the model —Communism, Confucianism, Legalism? This course looks at current engagements with China’s past with an eye toward exploring the factors shaping China’s future. It introduces the traditional lenses of Chinese thought —Confucianism, Legalism, Daoism, and Buddhism— and reflects on their potential relevance for contemporary China. In short, the course has two aims: to introduce key aspects of China’s traditional cultures and to look at ways in which these key aspects are contributing to contemporary debates in China over its future direction.

Stereotypes of dictators, machismo, endemic drug violence, and staunch Catholicism are often applied to Latin America. Countries as different as Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil are lumped together despite varying ethnicities and economics. How can we tell the difference between the myths and the realities? How can a little island like Cuba so enrage the United States? This ten-week course approaches these questions topically. Lectures and selected readings explore topics such as the decline of Catholicism, democracy, the role of Jews and Muslim immigrants in shaping this region, U.S.-Latin American relations, charismatic leaders, the history of drug production, and women in the future of Latin America. Military regimes and guerrilla movements will also be covered. The aim of this course is to inform, share opinions, entertain, and help people understand news and politics from an informed perspective.

Dante’s 700-year-old masterpiece the Divine Comedy still attracts great attention. For centuries readers have been drawn to his vivid description of the afterlife. This course will explore the first portion of the Divine Comedy, Inferno, in its entirety. The class will focus on the organization of his hell, from lesser to greater sins, the numerous historical personages and references in it, and its implicit theology. We will also look at Dante’s narrative, discussing how the actions of his characters and their respective punishments depict the true nature of the sins.

The purpose of Dante’s voyage is not about merely observing the torments of the damned, but rather about gaining knowledge of the true nature of evil. While many contemporary readers might disagree with the categories of Dante’s sins, the question of evil is as relevant today as it was in the fourteenth century.

"Gothic" literature, theater, and (more recently) films have been a part of Western culture for over 250 years and have presented us, in disguise, with heightened -- and sometimes lurid and monstrous -- symbols of what really haunts us as a culture in our individual, social, and cultural sub-conscious.

This course will look at how the Gothic began as a literary form in the 1760's, how and why it has changed as a mode of fiction over time, and the ways in which it draws out repressed levels of belief and feeling in our culture. By the end, we will try to answer a basic question: What is this "Gothic" phenomenon really about, and why does it keep appearing (like a ghost or vampire) in different forms right down to today?

Join anthropologist/classical archaeologist David Soren in a survey of the art and archaeology of ancient Rome. This course will highlight the major wonders of the Roman world from the 8th century B.C. to the 6th century A.D., including the historical truth behind Rome's alleged founders Romulus and Remus, the frightening demonology of the Etruscans, the remarkable seven-terraced sanctuary of Praeneste, and the unique construction of the Pantheon. Dr. Soren has recently been assigned to direct a miniseries on ancient Rome, and he will discuss highlights of his project throughout Italy. The course will proceed chronologically from the founding of Rome through the Roman Republic and Empire, and will also explore the latest evidence regarding the fall of the Roman Empire, including his own work on the role played by Plasmodium falciparum malaria and the new University of Arizona research into ancient climate change and what has been termed the decennial decimations.
 

Science and technology enhance our understanding of cultural history by uniting scholars across disciplines in order to expand art historical perspectives and preserve cultural masterpieces. This course begins with an overview of the campus collections and the basic tenets of museum collections care. Guest presentations by scholars from across the University of Arizona will examine the studies of art production, materials science, and cutting-edge dating and imaging methods. In conclusion, we will review the latest in conservation technology and the issues surrounding the collecting and preservation of contemporary art today.

This course steps back from polls and punditry to reflect on broader historical developments. It considers women in politics, divisions between rich and poor, and ethnic minorities becoming the new majority. To deepen our analyses, we will consider writings on politics and ethics, including some that shaped the founding of the republic as well as recent research on political cognition and moral imagination. That research has brought us back to Hume’s view that “reason is a slave of the passions,” something abundantly apparent in the current campaign. Stepping back from the attack ads, we will reflect on the rhetorical dynamics of American politics, including ongoing shifts in the principal parties, the role of debates as tests of character, the evolution of media and advertising, and other factors that shape how we feel about politics.

Berlin, capital of the Weimar Republic between the two World Wars, was one of the most exciting cities in Europe--the place of the most radical experimentation in the visual and performing arts, in mass entertainment and theater, in literature and architecture. Berlin was a laboratory of modernity. While the cultural stage was vibrant and intoxicating, the celebrated roaring twenties also was haunted by the shell shock of World War I and by economic instability, social upheaval, and political turmoil. This class explores avant-garde movements like Expressionism and Dada, as well as major works like Bertolt Brecht’s innovative play Three Penny Opera and Fritz Lang’s monumental film Metropolis. In this seminar we will consider the period’s challenges to notions of art, vast social changes, and the impact of mass culture and technological developments on twentieth-century sensibilities. And we will come to see why this period still fascinates us today.

This course will give students an understanding of how the Earth’s climate changes naturally, as well as how humans are driving this change. We will explore what is likely to happen in the future, resulting both from natural change and change driven by the human-caused rise of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and other influences. We’ll cover the physical climate system, how it interacts with water, landscapes and ecosystems, and what the options are for dealing with the change, both in terms of adaptation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Although the course will steer clear of the politics of climate change, we will deal with scientific misconceptions and misunderstandings that commonly emerge in the public debate about climate change. Our geographic focus will be global, with a special emphasis on the US, and in particular, the Southwest.

Using a facing-page translation, we will deal with the climax of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  While Inferno depicts sin and evil, and Purgatorio portrays redemption, Paradiso illustrates the possibility of transcendence.  Not only does a blessed soul understand the transcendent universe, but that person also transcends her or his fallen human nature.  In this seminar we will cover the numerous historical personages and references in the work, and discuss its cosmological and theological basis.  Dante’s Paradiso is the culmination of the Comedy, illustrating the perfect nature of the universe, as driven by “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”
 

For over two millennia, Rome has been central in the West’s symbolic landscape and the city is still filled with the glorious hidden treasures of centuries. The humanist epigram Quanta Roma fuit ruina docet—‘Her ruins teach us how great Rome was,’ invites a study of this hidden city through different thematic lenses. We will explore the monuments but also urban design, architecture, sculpture, town planning, religion, politics, street life, and texts. We will embark upon our own Grand Tour through five itineraries, as we discover and discuss individual artists and their works, such as Bernini’s fountains and Borromini’s whirling spaces; intimate chapels and grand frescoes, like those in Santa Prassede or in the Sistine Chapel; quiet piazzas and talking statues; papal anecdotes and neighborhood festivals; and the films and literature that inspire us to experience Rome both as a material place and as an idea.

This spring students of all ages will have the exciting opportunity to learn about and discuss politics with one of the greatest public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky and UA emeritus professor Marv Waterstone will coteach a seven-week class titled “What Is Politics?” that is both a general education course for UA undergraduates and a Humanities Seminar class for community members. Connecting students from multiple generations and political outlooks, this course is sure to stimulate ideas, debate, and dialogue.

The course examines industrial state capitalism as the dominant organizing principle of our economy. Throughout the course students will interrogate the consequences of this orientation, including threats to the human species such as climate change, potential nuclear terrorism, and the expansion of militarism and warfare. These consequences also encompass the less spectacular, but nevertheless devastating, effects of globalization and unfettered capitalism on social inequality. At the heart of the class students will explore possible responses and resistances to these phenomena, and will investigate the achievements and difficulties involved with agitating for progressive change.

What You Need to Know

Where:  Environmental and Natural Resources Building 2 (ENR2), Room N120.  This room is a large auditorium.  It is wheelchair accessible and has an assisted listening system.

Parking: The Sixth Street Garage is immediately east of the classroom building.  The garage is on the south side of the campus between Park and Highland Avenues. The hourly charge is $2 before 5 PM and $1 after 5 PM.

Tuesday Class Overview:  The Tuesday lectures will be conducted by Professor Waterstone and will present a theoretical, conceptual, and historical contextualization of the week's topic.

Thursday Class Overview:  Professor Chomsky will use concrete examples (mostly drawn from the news to provide "real life" lenses) to illustrate the concepts articulated on Tuesday, after which there will be a Q & A with Professor Chomsky and a UA faculty expert on that particular topic.

Reading and Syllabus:  Detailed reading assignments and a finalized syllabus will be available closer to the beginning of the course.  The readings for adult students can be accessed online in early January.  Printed material will not be available.

REGISTRATION FOR THIS CLASS ONLY begins on Thursday, November 17, at 8 AM and continues throughout the registration period until the class is full.

The Dance—as Homer named it—is always an expression of the ideas, traditions, and values of the society that creates it, whether spiritual, recreational, or artistic in form. The body in motion is both the mode of expression and the meaning of the Dance. In this course we explore the correlations between the body image as defined by science, the self image as described by psychology, and the human image as expressed in our dances. In the process we refer to the styles of depicting the human body in motion in visual art and literature through history and view a range of dance styles from Balanchine to Bausch and from ballroom to break dancing. The objective of the course is to enhance our viewing pleasure of the Dance in its thousand forms and styles.

Rome survives despite nearly 3,000 years of invasions by Sabines, Gauls, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Normans, Napoleon, Hitler, and mass tourism.  In this course we will visit Rome, interwoven in texts and art, from antiquity through the twentieth century. We will complement our reading selections from diaries, guidebooks, poetry, fiction, and history with film clips and discussion.

Beginning with its foundation on the Palatine Hill and continuing through the design of Mussolini’s Fascist Square, we will reflect on “the city that becomes to all a second native land by predilection and not by accident of birth alone,” to which “all roads lead.”  

Petrarch, the father of humanism, visited Rome for the first time in 1341, when he was already a famous poet. That year, on April 8, he stood on the Capitoline Hill as he was crowned poet laureate, the first to be so honored since antiquity.  In his account of the occasion he wrote, “I do not wonder that Rome conquered the world, but only that it took so much time.”

Join the many pilgrims who have experienced Rome’s immortal lights in her renaissances and revolutions throughout history, as Marion Crawford described them:

 “A man can no more say a last farewell to Rome than he can take leave of eternity.  The years move on, but she waits; the cities fall, but she stands; the old races of men lie dead in the track wherein mankind wanders always between two darknesses; yet Rome lives and her changes are not from life to death, as ours are, but from one life to another.” Ave Roma Immortalis (1898)
    

RECOMMENDED READING:

Hibbert, Christopher. Rome: The Biography of a City. Penguin, 1995. ISBN: 0140070781.

The UA Bookstore will not be able to order this text as it is now officially out of print. However, according to bookfinder.com, there are still lots of internet sites that sell this text. Please try any of these sites to purchase a copy, or check the local bookstores.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. (Henry IV, Part 2)

Of his ten histories, the four interrelated plays forming the second tetralogy are among Shakespeare's greatest theatrical achievements. These works, which deal with the period of 1400 to 1420, include Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. They feature a rich variety of characters: the tragic Richard II, the ruthlessly ambitious and ultimately remorseful Henry IV, the heroic Henry V, and the brilliantly comic Falstaff. The plays focus on some of the enduring political questions: the transference of power from one reign or government to another, the establishment of political legitimacy, the limits of power, and the inscrutability of historical forces. But they also deal with intensely human experiences and psychology—personal loyalties, family relationships, growing up and growing old, and the solitariness of political leadership.
 

This course will explore how the political developments at the turn of the twentieth century shaped the culture of Vienna. The failure of liberalism after its brief period in power due to the economic crisis of the 1870s, the rise of anti-Semitic parties, and World War I caused vast cultural upheaval that may be seen in the period’s works of literature, music, art, architecture, philosophy of science, Zionism, and psychoanalysis. We will examine how writers, artists, and other cultural figures dealt with the devastation of World War I and the fall of the Habsburg Empire after centuries of rule. Finally, this course will trace how all of these aspects were prophetic of the worst catastrophes that the twentieth century would bring.

In this course we’ll explore Homer’s brilliant storytelling in The Odyssey: his tales of Odysseus’s struggles to return home after the Trojan War. While the poem highlights the hero’s fantastic adventures, the underlying meanings reflect profound social concerns: female and male identities, and their respective realms and relationships; revisiting The Iliad’s military-centered notions of heroism from social-oriented perspectives; the roles of gods; storytelling traditions, and more. The class looks at how these diverse tales interweave to create Odysseus’s story, his journey, and the challenges he must face to become the worthy husband, father, son, and man of society praised by the poem. Appreciating ancient Greek views on these perennially important themes provides valuable insights into our own ideas about these complex social issues, and why this engaging ancient poem continues to influence our contemporary thinking and creativity

This course surveys the music of Ludwig van Beethoven from the perspectives of different professors at the Fred Fox School of Music. Jay Rosenblatt begins with an overview of Beethoven’s life: his youth in Bonn, the reasons for his move to Vienna, and the outline of his early, middle, and late style periods. He will also introduce the stylistic characteristics of Beethoven’s music. Subsequent sessions will be led by Bruce Chamberlain, Director of Choral Activities, who will consider Beethoven’s sacred music, particularly the Missa Solemnis; Thomas Cockrell, Director of Orchestral Activities, who will discuss Beethoven’s symphonies; John Milbauer, Professor of Piano, who will focus on Beethoven’s late piano work; and Tim Kantor, Assistant Professor of Violin, who will examine Beethoven’s chamber music from the perspective of a professional string quartet member.

What was the relationship of ancient Greek culture to early Christianity? This seminar will open with two topics of significance in the early development of Christianity: the image (or icon) and the Jesus story itself. The course will also include lectures on the tragic paradigm in Greek poetry (Homer and Sophocles) and a discussion of the soul in Plato's Phaedo. Then we trace the Hellenization of the ancient Mediterranean, beginning with the conquests of Alexander the Great and their influence on the diffusion of Hellenic philosophy and culture. We will also discuss the Logos in the Gospel of John, as well as how the Apostle Paul fits into ancient Epicureanism. The seminar will conclude with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, and examine the fusion of Judaism and Platonism in the formation of the Nicene Creed in 325 CE.

Who are the Turks? Where did they come from, and how did they help build the Islamic world? What role did they play in the Crusades? A major world power for nearly 500 years, how did they rule so much of Europe before finally taking Constantinople in 1453, and with what consequences?

More recently, what role have Turks--both Ottomans and post-Ottomans--played in modern history? As the "Sick Man of Europe" for most of the 19th century, they provided fuel for the western imagination in literature, architecture, food, and fashion--not to mention wars. The dismantling of their empire created the current map (and many of the current problems) of the Middle East. Where are Turkey and the modern Turks headed as we approach two centuries since modern Turkey emerged?

Please note that due to popular demand this past spring this class is brought back in the fall of 2013.
 

Professor Tolbert brings back her popular spring 2016 course with some exciting updates!

Please Note: We will be offering two sessions of this course in the coming semester.
Session 1 will be held in the morning from 9 - 11 AM.
Session 2 will be held in the afternoon from 2 - 4 PM.
Both sessions will contain the same class content and will be held on the same dates this Fall.

The human brain, guiding our every thought and action, is as complex as anything we know. Its almost unimaginable complexity arises from minute interconnections between tens of billions of nerve cells. If we could map every connection among the cells, we still would have only a rough foundation for understanding brain function, because those connections are changing every moment of our lives. They are recording our experiences, our emotions, our plans for the future, and they are constantly repairing disruption and injury. Evidence is mounting that intellectual challenge, social engagement, and regular physical activity can have a profound positive impact on our lives as we age. Why? Because they influence the ongoing alterations, or “plasticity,” in our ever-changing brains. This course examines the recent revolution in our views of brain function that gives us a new way to grasp how our brains work.

This seminar will concentrate on eight of Shakespeare's comedies, among them Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest. The approach will assume that comedy is a genre distinguished not by light-hearted humor or triviality but by structure of plot. The action moves from conflict and separation to resolution and union, and the plays typically end in betrothal or marriage. But whatever its romance, Shakespeare's comedy is serious and psychologically realistic. The plays explore the hazards of human relationships and the perils of commitment. Ultimately it is the comic heroine's deep awareness of herself and the world that make possible the realization of the romantic ideal—if only within the confines of the play. Throughout the seminar analysis of the texts of the plays will be supplemented with video clips of their productions. 

Clearly, Nobel laureates have made major creative contributions to world literature and to international reception of emerging nations’ literary arts.   This course will expose students to movements in 20th-century world literature by reading Nobel laureates. Global modernism, as shown by influences shared among these laureates, combines Western and non-Western styles, traditions, and modes of expression.  This class will emphasize the relationship of modern world literature to traditional arts, performance, and ritual.

Formal categories and genres will be approached in terms of their relationship to cultural issues and ethnic history.   Students will discover how poetry, fiction, and drama reflect prevailing social forces and national histories.  Showing the interdependence of cultural rituals, folklore traditions, mythic beliefs, and culturally based aesthetics will enable students to employ new formal categories and vocabularies.

The course concludes with a work by the latest laureate, who is announced in early October.  The students and the instructor will read that new work together and utilize critical techniques and apply cultural analyses developed during the semester.