Course Archive
Spring 2015
Spring 2015
Mary Beth Haralovich
TUESDAYS
1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Jan 27 to Apr 7
The “scandalous female genre” has long had box-office value and cultural presence. This seminar explores the history of such women in films. We will first discuss genre conventions: how film style and storytelling present and comment on scandalous behavior. We then will explore how film-industry conditions permit and encourage portraying scandalous females. Each week we will engage a key question of interpretation: whether the character’s scandalous behavior is shameful, or whether it reveals and critiques gender norms and social-cultural conventions. This seminar covers: early film melodrama...
Spring 2015
Bella Vivante
TUESDAYS
9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Jan 27 to Apr 7
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...
Spring 2015
John Wilson
MONDAYS
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Jan 26 to Apr 6
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...
Spring 2015
Barbara Kosta
MONDAYS
1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Jan 26 to Feb 16
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...
Fall 2014
Fall 2014
Fabian Alfie
THURSDAYS
1:00 to 4:00 P.M.
Nov 13 to Dec 11
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...
Fall 2014
Jay Rosenblatt
MONDAYS
1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Oct 27 to Nov 17
Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the great masters of the Classical and Romantic eras in music, and no genre summarizes his achievement better than the string quartet. This course will examine 16 works spread evenly throughout his early, middle, and late styles. The first six quartets reveal his consolidation of Mozart’s and Haydn’s techniques, the five middle quartets demonstrate his expansion of form and mastery of harmony, and the final five quartets, along with the “Grosse Fuge,” invite us into the experimental realm of the deaf and isolated composer. The first session surveys Beethoven’s...
Fall 2014
Paul Ivey
MONDAYS
9:00 a.m. until noon
Oct 7 to Dec 15
This course examines the issues, artists, and theories surrounding the rise of Postmodernism in the visual arts from 1970 into the twenty-first century. We will explore the emergence of pluralism in the visual arts against a backdrop of the rise of the global economy. And we will look at the “crisis” of postmodern culture, which critiques ideas of history, progress, and personal and cultural identities, as well as embracing irony and parody, pastiche, nostalgia, mass or “low” culture, and multiculturalism.
In a chronological fashion, and framed by a discussion of such midcentury artistic...
Fall 2014
Lynda Zwinger
THURSDAYS
9:00 a.m. until noon
Oct 2 to Dec 18
One of the most popular and beloved novelists in the English language, Jane Austen wrote novels that have beguiled and challenged readers for two centuries.
For some, Austen is our beloved Aunt Jane, chatting with us about tea parties, excursions in pony phaetons, and ill-advised epistolary relationships. For others, she is a subversive ironist whose piercing vision of human foibles offers us reflections relevant to our own lives and times.
How did this seventh child of a provincial clergyman, a single woman who lived an intensely domestic life, produce some of the greatest novels in the...
Fall 2014
Patrick Baliani
WEDNESDAYS
9:00 a.m. until noon
Oct 1 to Dec 10
The tragicomedy genre, so prevalent in our day, has actually been evolving for many centuries. While one can take a primarily aesthetic approach to any genre--what makes comedy comedy?--here we will include a fuller consideration of history, stressing the social, political, and philosophical contexts of the particular plays.
How does a certain “age” or “culture” perceive tragicomedy? What are the roots of this standpoint, and how does it evolve across cultural and temporal barriers? How do interpretation and performance affect our understanding of the works today? How is it plays, on the page...
Fall 2014
Charles Scruggs
TUESDAYS
1:00 -4:00 p.m.
Sep 30 to Dec 16
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...
Fall 2014
Malcolm Compitello
TUESDAYS
9:00 a.m. until noon
Sep 30 to Dec 16
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...
Summer 2014
Summer 2014
Doug Weiner
WEDNESDAYS
9:00 a.m. - noon
Aug 6 to Aug 27
How did our globalized economy and international culture come to be?
The “Rise of the West” idea has long suggested something innately superior about “Western civilization.” But there are better grounded ways than appeals to cultural or racial superiority to explain the emergence of today’s world, based as it is on European economic power, market logic, science and technology, and to a significant extent, culture. We will learn the central roles of biogeography, epidemiology, patterns of trade, geopolitics, and pure accident in the “Rise of the West.”
We will explore how the various regions...
Summer 2014
Peter Medine
FRIDAYS
9:00 a.m. until noon
Aug 1 to Aug 29
Jane Austen's portrayals of Regency England's provincial life provide fascinating commentary on social and economic issues as well as the characters' psychology and emotional lives. Throughout this class we will attend to the ironic presentation, where the narrative's implicit meaning often differs from what is literally expressed. Such approaches will bring into focus the education of the main characters through the trials of their experiences. While the novels conform to the comedic mode, in which the principals ultimately realize their destinies as well-married men and women, their...
Summer 2014
Melissa Tatum
THURSDAYS
10:00 a.m. until noon
Jul 10 to Jul 31
The role of tribal governments within the United States is not well understood, largely because most schools do not teach it. This course is designed to fill that gap. Each class will explore a different aspect of how tribal governments fit within the federal system. The first session looks at how historic and modern structures of tribal governments relate to the U.S. government. The next class focuses on issues of cultural property and sacred sites. The third meeting dispels the myth that tribal economic development consists primarily of casinos and examines the research and work of the...
Summer 2014
David Soren
TUESDAYS
10:00 a.m. until noon
Jul 8 to Jul 29
Join University of Arizona Regents Professor David Soren for a survey of the life and work of four great directors. First up is Fritz Lang whose collaboration with wife Thea Von Harbou led to the recently fully rediscovered science fiction epic Metropolis. Next the enigmatic Busby Berkeley is featured, stressing his importance as a creator of the Hollywood musical look of the 1930s and showing some of his lesser known but still amazing work, including the kaleidoscopic color images of The Gang's All Here, with Alice Faye. Alfred Hitchcock's dialectic follows, illustrating the evolution of his...
Summer 2014
Malcolm Compitello
MONDAYS
9:00 a.m. until noon
Jun 2 to Jun 30
The detective tale, born of the work of Edgar Alan Poe and altered by Dashiell Hammett, evolved over time in the hands of international masters such as Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri, and Donna Leon. Our examination helps identify the qualities that provide this genre with its enduring allure, and explores how modern practitioners play with the form and adapt it to the writer’s needs in ways that continue to fuel reader interest. Through the reading of the required primary texts and important recommended secondary texts and through the seminar's investigation...
Summer 2014
Laura C. Berry
FRIDAYS
9:00 a.m. until noon
May 2 to May 23
Bleak House is often said to be Dickens’s greatest novel; certainly it is one of his most compelling and enjoyable. We will spend four intense and rewarding weeks reading this masterpiece in its original installments, paying close attention to themes of loss, law, social class, secrecy, and inheritance. We will also explore Dickens’s astonishing use of language by way of close reading. Two critical lenses will guide us: the historical view and a psychological perspective. In addition to what I hope will be a lively discussion of the material, we will examine relevant materials from the period...
Summer 2014
Daniel Asia
THURSDAYS
9:00 a.m. until noon
May 1 to May 22
In four sessions we will look at works of art music from each of the decades of the latter half of the twentieth century. Our focus will be on the act and art of listening, and how to know what to listen for. We will explore the qualities of the music itself and strategies of understanding the music, bringing us deeper satisfaction and appreciation, and thus giving us a stronger relationship to the greatness expressed by the soul and mind of genius. Some works and composers will be familiar to you and some not: Copland, Bernstein, Messiaen, Brown, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Rzewski and...
Spring 2014
Spring 2014
Melissa Fitch
THURSDAYS
1:00 p.m. until 4:00 p.m.
Jan 30 to Apr 10
Forget the rose-in-the-mouth cliché, and discover how tango relates to art, activism, and even therapy. We will analyze films, advertising, theater, poetry, art, documentaries, material culture, digital art forms, and public protests to examine the production, consumption, and diffusion of meaning found in global cultural narratives related to Argentine tango. Students will learn how tango was used to champion women’s rights and modernization in Turkey in the early 20th century, and how Jewish prisoners used it as a symbol of life and endurance during WW II. Participants will explore how...
Spring 2014
Bella Vivante
FRIDAYS
9:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m.
Jan 24 to Apr 4
In this cultural excursion we will explore literary and artistic highlights of the diverse cultures that have flourished in the concise landmass of ancient Anatolia (modern Turkey) —Paleolithic and Neolithic habitation, Hittites, Amazons, Assyrians, Hebrew Biblical, Troy, Phrygia, Lydia, Lycia, Ionian Greeks, Roman, early Christian, Byzantine, Ottoman. Textbooks provide historical background; and art, architecture, poetry, philosophy, and other writings offer insights into the distinctive qualities that make these cultures memorable and still fascinating. The diverse values and creative...