Spring 2024 Syllabus
Books
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Knopf Doubleday)
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (Harper Collins)
- Aime Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review)
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Bantam)
- Sigmund Freud, Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (Norton)
- Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford)
- Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums (Pluto)
- Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (Penguin)
- Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses; trans. Hoare (Verso)
- Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (Schocken)
- Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Touchstone)
- Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals; trans. Kaufmann (Knopf)
- Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (Longman)
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Houghton Mifflin)
- Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Grove)
Schedule
Note on Lectures: All lectures will be recorded and available online.
Week 1 (Jan. 22)
Day 1: "Sign City: Baudelaire's Exile on Main Street" / Hugh Hochman
- Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, ("To the Reader," "The Albatross," "Correspondences," "A Hymn to Beauty," "A Carcass," "Invitation to the Voyage," "Spleen (IV)," "The Sun," "To a Woman Passing By," "The Swan”) (e-reserve).
- Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," chapters 1-4 and 9-12 (e-reserve)
Day 2: "Manet and Modernism" / William Diebold
- J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, chapter 2 (e-reserves)
- Image Gallery
Week 2 (Jan 29)
Day 1: “Death by Irony” / Hugh Hochman
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Day 2: No lecture
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, cont’d
Week 3 (Feb 5)
Day 1: "No Humans Involved" / Kris Cohen
- Joel Snyder, "Res Ipsa Loquitur" (e-reserves)
Day 2: "On the Origins and Ends of Species" / Benjamin Lazier
- Charles Darwin, Darwin Reader, 3rd ed, ed Appleman, “Origin of Species,” 95-98, 103-120, 133-135, 169-174; “Descent of Man,” 175-177, 209-222, 232-254.
- OPTIONAL: “Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (eds. Hodge and Radick). (e-reserves)
Week 4 (Feb 12)
Day 1: "Lessons in Alien Horticulture" / Benjamin Lazier
- Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Day 2: No lecture
- Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Week 5 (Feb 19)
Day 1: “Beyond the Pleasure Principle" / Jan Mieszkowski
- Freud, The Freud Reader (Selections according to Instructor)
Day 2: No lecture
- Freud, The Freud Reader (Selections according to Instructor)
Week 6 (Feb. 26)
Day 1: “Kafka: Modernism and Displacement” / Katja Garloff
- Kafka, Selections by Instructor
Day 2: No Lecture
- Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums, selections TBD
Week 7 (Mar. 4)
Day 1: “An Event Without an Idea: The "Irony" of World War One" / Mary Ashburn Miller
- Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 3-51, 75-82, 169-190, 326-335
- Poems of WWI (e-reserves)
Day 2: "Jünger in World War I / Jan Mieszkowski
- Jünger, Storm of Steel (recommended: 5-33, 91-110, 224-56, 274-89)
- Jünger, from "War as Inner Experience" (e-reserves)
Spring Break
Week 8 (Mar. 18)
Day 1: (i) Radhika Natarajan on the Russian Revolution, (ii) Mary Ashburn Miller on the Russian revolution
- Vladimir Lenin, Lenin Anthology, excerpts (e-reserves)
- Alexandra Kollontai, "Love and the New Morality" (e-reserves)
- OPTIONAL: Alexandra Kollontai, "Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle" (e-reserves)
Day 2: “Man With a Movie Camera” / Kris Cohen
- Dziga Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera
Week 9 (Mar. 25)
Day 1: “Clarissa Explains It All" / Jay Dickson
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Day 2: No lecture
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
- OPTIONAL: Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Modern Life" (e-reserves)
Week 10 (Apr. 1)
Day 1: “The Weimar Republic: Political Culture and Cultural Politics" / Benjamin Lazier
- Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses, pp. 25-59, 68-106
- Optional: Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (e-reserves)
Day 2: “Totalitarianism, or the Night of the Living Dead" / Benjamin Lazier
- Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. vii-ix, 437-459, 460-479,
- Triumph of the Will, dir. L. Riefenstahl (watch at least the following clips: 0-9:10; 14:00-20:00; 31:23- 38:14; 1:05:00-1:15:00; 1:34:45 - end)
Week 11 (Apr. 8)
Day 1: "The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation / Katja Garloff
- Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
- OPTIONAL: Paul Celan, "Death Fugue" (e-reserves)
Day 2: "How to Hate Nazis: Four Suggestions" / Benjamin Lazier
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, pp. xv-xxii, 1-8, 39-77, 121-142, 159-189.
- UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) (e-reserves)
- UN Convention on Genocide (1948) (e-reserves)
Week 12 (Apr. 15)
Day 1: "Césaire, Négritude, Surrealism" / Hugh Hochman, Kris Cohen
- Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
Day 2: “Simone de Beauvoir: Existence and Resistance" / Mary Ashburn Miller
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 3-17, 46-75, 266-74, 468-85, 519-23, 638-45, 661-64, and 753-66.
Week 13 (Apr. 22)
Day 1: “Samuel Beckett, Enemy of Obviousness” / Maureen Harkin
- Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Day 2: "“To say these things, to have lived these things”: Colonial Migrants and the Remaking of the Imperial Metropolis" / Radhika Natarajan
- Samuel Selvon, Lonely Londoners
Course outcomes
Hum 220 is a course that can be used to satisfy Group I or Group II requirements. After completing the course students will be better able to:
- Understand how language or other modes of expression (symbols, images, sounds, etc.) work , make an argument, present a vision, convey a feeling, and/or convey an idea;
- Analyze and interpret a text, whether a literary or philosophical text, or a work of the visual or performing arts;
- Evaluate arguments about texts;
- Analyze social, political or economic institutions, cultural formations, languages, structures, and/or processes;
- Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social change and/or the relationship between individual and society;
- Evaluate data and/or sources.