by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course encompasses Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and King Lear. While addressing ourselves to such matters as language and theatricality, we shall approach plays primarily from the perspectives of...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Dante’s Purgatorio, as is well known, is not a standalone text; it is simply the second part of The Divine Comedy. In this course we will deal with Dante’s views on redemption and salvation as represented in his Purgatorio. Our focus will be the nature of sin: How it...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This five-week course examines concepts that have become increasingly relevant to contemporary artists working in a variety of media over the past 50 years. It concentrates on more recent art, understood against the backdrop of modern art movements. In this class we...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
The Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union played defining roles in the twentieth century, yet are poorly understood. To help us to better grasp their history, this course will integrate the best scholarship and currently available evidence to provide a broad...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
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...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This survey of astronomy begins here on Earth and heads outward to the ends of the observable universe. We will explore the Sun, the Moon, and the most interesting planets in our stellar neighborhood. Comets, asteroids, the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud are the next...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
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:...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
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...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Set decorators call it the art of silent storytelling–how art direction and production design (everything on screen) establish and convey character and story. We examine this “narrative space” through three topics. “Life Stories” that range from personal to...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This seminar aims to elicit students’ participation in a free-spirited conversation and regain a sense of wonder and intimacy with architecture. The discussion topics will be based on five readings, which are accessible, practical, and poetic. They will offer a...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
The Bronte family – their extraordinary literary output, as well as their fascinating lives – have become something like a cottage industry, inspiring imitators, adaptations, a tourist attraction, tea towels, dance, music, and even the names of three asteroids. What...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
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...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
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...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This class deals 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...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
In this class we will begin to see for ourselves what James contributed to the art to which he devoted his entire life. The course will include lectures on the history and form of the English and American novel, Henry James’s life and times, selected passages from...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Medieval literature was not simply doom and gloom. It also had a strong sense of hope, happiness, and love, embodied best perhaps in the Holy Grail and courtly love. As in all other literary eras, we can also find many tragic or religious works. But one of the...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course explores the background and the groundbreaking stylistic features of Stravinsky’s most famous works: Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Considered the epitome of early 20th-century composition, these works defined musical syntax for...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course surveys the Reformation. Beginning with Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, we discuss why Martin Luther broke with the late-medieval Roman Catholic Church, and explore traditional and novel theologies and ecclesiastical practices. We touch on...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course explores works from the postwar era by Jewish and German authors–both writings and films–from East and West Germany and Austria. In these works we will see differences among the three successor states to the Nazis, including the ways people...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course continues to survey Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s vast musical output from the unique perspective of specialists in the field, all professors at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music. Jay Rosenblatt leads the first session with an overview of...
