Fine Arts University Seminars:

ARHI 180F - 01
Critical Moments in Classical Art and Culture
Professor Robin Rhodes

A history of art in the Greco-Roman world will be illustrated and discussed through the analysis of a series of artistic and cultural crises. An overall view of cultural and artistic evolution will be constructed through an understanding of these key points of transition. Among the critical moments to be examined will be the meeting of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, renewed contacts with East following the Greek Dark Age, the Persian Wars, the fall of Athens, the coming of the Etruscans, the Roman conquest of Greece, the invention of concrete, and the death of the Roman Republic.

ARHI 180F - 02
Art & Protest: From Civil Rights Movement to AIDS Crisis
Professor Robert Haywood

This freshman seminar will explore the intersection of social and political conflict and activism and the visual arts (photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance) from the 1950s to the present. We will study historical documents from the period in relation to projects by artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman.

FTT 180F - 01
Ecologies of Theatre
Professor Emily Phillips

Looking at non-American theatre and performance with the goal of coming to a global understanding of theatrical forms and their position within today's world. We will be working with text from non-traditional, western and non-western writers and performers, as well as viewing performances via film and video.

MUS 180F - 01
Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner
Professor Alexander Blachly

The music of these composers in its historical context.

History University Seminars:

HIST 180H - 01
Getting Crusaded
Professor Paul Cobb

What did it feel like to get crusaded? In this seminar, we will examine the roughly two-century period from the call of the first Crusade in 1095 to the final expulsion of Latin Crusaders from the Middle East in 1291. Our examination will be primarily from the perspective of the invaded, rather than the invaders, as is usually done. How did the Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians of the medieval Middle East respond to the presence of Frankish invaders?

HIST 180H - 02
Getting Crusaded
Professor Paul Cobb

What did it feel like to get crusaded? In this seminar, we will examine the roughly two-century period from the call of the first Crusade in 1095 to the final expulsion of Latin Crusaders from the Middle East in 1291. Our examination will be primarily from the perspective of the invaded, rather than the invaders, as is usually done. How did the Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians of the medieval Middle East respond to the presence of Frankish invaders?

The Vikings are notorious for plunder and pillage, pagan savagery, and horned helmets. But how much of this is stereotype? Did Scandinavian settlers make any real contribution to the societies they terrorized? Participants in this seminar will study the impact of Viking invaders in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas from the eighth century to the twelfth. Discussion (including small group work and heated debates) will be based on medieval primary sources from England, Ireland, France, and Russia, as well as from Scandinavia itself. The importance of archaeological evidence, and some modern treatments of Vikings in cinema and literature, will also be discussed. Requirements include participation in debates and discussions, 6 short papers (2-3 pages), and more substantial midterm and final papers.

HIST 180H - 04
Mission, Trade and Crusade: Europeans Abroad in the Early Modern World
Professor Margaret Meserve

The story of European exploration, conquest, diplomacy and exchange from 1492 to about 1650. While the European experience of the Americas was largely one of conquest and domination, elsewhere in the world Europeans faced the perils of military aggression (in the Ottoman Empire, e.g.) or found themselves at a cultural disadvantage (as Jesuit missionaries felt, for example, in China and Japan). Drawing on primary texts, early modern maps, recent historiography and film, we will examine the various ways Europeans went abroad in the early modern world-as pilgrims, crusaders, merchants, explorers, conquistadors, missionaries, or (sometimes) as converts, refugees, and prisoners of war. Key issues include European ideologies of crusade, conversion and colonization; the image of the noble savage and the politics of European identity (including the problems of 'going native' or 'turning Turk'); and the impact of geographical discoveries on European economic, cultural and intellectual life. Just what did Europeans discover in the "Age of Discovery," and how did their findings change the culture of Europe itself?

HIST 180H - 05
Medieval History thru Literature
Professor John VanEngen

Is fiction more real than history? Scholars sometimes find fictional accounts-say, a novel about life in World War II-more "true to life" than historical accounts of the same events. And some scholars say that historians are themselves writers of fiction, trying to recover a past far distant from them. This course will explore those questions by way of works written in the European Middle Ages. We will learn the skills of reading, interpreting, thinking, and writing by way of works of literature written during the Middle Ages, such as Dante's Inferno. We will compare these to works of history written by later historians, and discuss the differences. Students should come away with a sense of "history" and "literature" as categories of human thought, and also with a far deeper knowledge of the Middle Ages.

CLAS 180J - 01
Eros in Rome
Professor Daniel Sheerin

The subject of this course will be the corpus of Roman erotic poetry, drama, lyric, elegy, epic, and satire, as well as relevant prose works in the genres of oratory, history, and novel. Our goal will be to attempt a description of the fantasy world of Eros in Rome as a literary confection put together from tradition, convention, reality, and imagination. Our seminar will pay close attention to the social conventions of the world of lovers and the underlying negotiations of power and exchanges of goods. But our primary focus will be on the creativity, hard work, and, yes, banality that created Roman erotic literature.

Warning: there will be no cheap thrills here. Do not enroll in this course unless 1) you are prepared for some careful, critical thinking and writing about gender, society, and power, and 2) you have a vigorous, disciplined imagination that can interact with and analyze the imaginative creations of others, ancient and contemporary.

CLIR 180J - 01
Reinventing Irish: 20th Century Irish Literature in Translation
Professor Sarah McKibben

This course will introduce students to the vibrant contemporary literature in Irish (Gaelic) by looking at poetry, short stories, essays, and two novels from roughly the last hundred years, since the Gaelic Revival, which sought to rescue the language from extinction, right up to the present. This will be a course about how to read with care and passion and how to write with precision and verve. Along the way, we'll consider the particular excitement and difficulty of writing in (and about!) a minority language that also happens to be the first official language of Ireland, as well as debates about Anglicization, assimilation and hybridity, the new prominence of women writers, and ongoing challenges to stereotypes about Irish as tradition-bound (rather than, say, tradition-enabled), puritanical or premodern.

ENGL 180J - 01
The Insider and the Outsider in Modern Literature
Professor Barbara Walvoord

This course explores the voices of insider and outsider in selected works of modern fiction and drama, and poetry. The course has two sections. In the first, we read works written in the voice of the outsider: examples: Ellison's Invisible Man, and a poem by Notre Dame artist Sonia Gernes, spoken in the voices of several deaf-mutes in the little town of Sleepy Eye. We seek to understand how the artist gives this outsider voice its authority, how the reader understands the dynamics of insider-outsider, and how the work achieves its power. Next, we read works written from the third-person, where the artist explores miniature societies that create insider and outsider dynamics. An example: Porter's The Ship of Fools, about a ship full of Germans, British, and Mexicans on its way from South America to Germany in the 1930's. We watch as the passengers and crew create their own society of insider-outsider. We read several works of social science that help us understand insider-outsider dynamics from that perspective. The goal of the course is that students will understand more deeply how the complex dynamics of insider-outsider work in society, how literature portrays those complex dynamics, and how they themselves experience the readings and the insider-outsider dynamics in their own lives. Students will write essays of literary analysis, but they will also have an opportunity to write their own fiction, drama, or poetry dealing with insider-outsider themes.

ENGL 180J - 02
British Culture and Empire
Professor Mary Burgess Smyth

This course will consider the representations of Empire in some texts by major ‘British’ writers, and will also consider how the long history of Empire has affected modern British culture. We will use fiction, film and poetry, and our readings may include works by the following: Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. Other writings by Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, CLR James and Aime Cesaire will complement our literary encounters.

ENGL 180J - 03
Gender and Modernism
Professor Barbara Green

This course will function as an introduction to literary modernism with a special eye to the ways in which the idea of modernity itself (or its various aspects--technology, mass culture, consumerism, etc.) was gendered at the beginning of the last century. Texts include novels by Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West and others. We will also view some films; certainly "Metropolis."

ENGL 180J - 04
The Death and Return of God in Radical Poetry
Professor Romana Huk

This course will introduce students to several of the key upheavals in twentieth-century thought that rocked spiritually-inclined poets, leaving them without easy paths back to devotional art. We will be particularly focused on those British, Irish and American poets whose cutting-edge, radical ideas about themselves and culture would shake apart the very syntax of their medium -- language -- and cause them to write in forms that seemed very strange and even disturbing to unaccustomed eyes. At the crux of our discussions will be the fate of the idea of God in the works of "postmodern" poets whose secular political projects and views of language -- "the word" -- would conflict at the deepest levels with their desire for belief in divinity; we will focus closely on the work of small-press writers like Brian Coffey (Ireland), John Riley and Wendy Mulford (U.K.), Fanny Howe (U.S.) and several others who have recently emerged, with the help of 21st-century hind-sight, as part of an important group of poet-thinkers engaged in this crucial project of "reconstructing God." The course will begin with gentle introductions to the problems of reading twentieth-century literary philosophy as well as to the problems of reading poetry as a literary genre.

ENGL 180J - 05
American Fictions of the Cold War
Professor Kate Baldwin

What might it mean to be un-American ? This seminar will address this question by introducing (or reintroducing) students to some key texts of the post-WWII era by situating them within their historical moment and relevant criticism. Questions that will form the bases of our discussions include: What role does literature play in American culture? What place does it occupy in society? How is the common sense of a time period formed? What relationship does literature have to our sense of American history? How do we form our sense of what Americanness is? Along with historical essays and criticism that locate and complicate such concepts as McCarthyism, containment, Red Scare, the nuclear family, and the Cold War, we will read novels and plays that will include The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, A Raisin in the Sun, and Les Blancs.

GE 180J - 01
Playful Readings: Introduction to Drama
Professor Jan Hagens

If you would like to read some of world literature's greatest plays and learn how to interpret them, this course is for you. We will study dramas from widely differing historical epochs and cultural backgrounds: ancient Greece; Renaissance England, France and Spain; as well as modern Germany and the USA. As an introduction to general questions of drama and theater, we will read Esslin's classic An Anatomy of Drama. All plays will be studied in English language versions. From historical, literary-critical, and theoretical background readings, as well as videos and lectures, you will learn how to 1.) analyze and discuss a drama's content, 2.) think through a play's structure and its parts (you'll understand the dramatist's tricks-of-the-trade), 3.) identify a drama's genre (whether it is a tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, or something else yet), and 4.) place a play within the historical tradition. Because dramatic texts are meant to be acted out, we may do some dramatic readings, and if at all possible, we will watch stage performances on video and attend plays on campus or in South Bend theaters.

GE 180J - 02
The Wall in the Head: East and West Germans in Recent Literature and Film
Professor Kirsten Christensen

German unification occurred officially nearly thirteen years ago, on October 3, 1990. Yet many critics, politicians and German citizens still lament a divide between east and west Germans that some have called “the wall in the head.” This seminar will explore this phenomenon by considering issues of German division and unity as reflected in German literature and film produced since the fall of the wall. The authors and directors whose works we will study depict the poignant, humorous, even devastating effects of unification on individual lives.
No knowledge of German or of German history is expected. All texts will be read in English translation, and all films will have English subtitles or voiceover. The course will begin with a brief review of recent events in German history that will provide background knowledge for the texts and films. Finally, throughout the semester we will discuss and practice strategies for reading and writing about literature, and for viewing and writing about film.

LLEA 180J - 01
Self and Other in Modern Japanese Fiction
Professor Michael Brownstein

In 1868, after some two and half centuries of feudal isolation, Japan embarked on a vigorous program to “modernize” its society along Western lines. It emerged as a major military power by the end of World War I, and thirty years later emerged from the radioactive ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to become a major economic power. Modern Japanese writers, however, chose not to focus on the "big events" of history but rather on the way people thought of themselves and their relationships to others, whether family members, friends and acquaintances, or society as a whole in this new, “post-feudal” era. In this class we will explore how writers dealt with issues of identity, past vs. present, East vs. West and the role of the individual through close readings of five novels.

LLEA 180J - 02
Man and Nature in Chinese Poetry
Professor Yang, Xiaoshan

This course introduces students with little or no knowledge of Chinese language or culture to the ways in which nature is perceived and represented in premodern Chinese poetry. We will explore nature imagery not only as rhetorical and structural devices but also as reflections of underlying Chinese world views. Readings are arranged roughly in chronological order to reinforce the sense of historical development. Whereas their amount and difficulty vary from week to week, the texts always demand careful and thoughtful reading. Students are encouraged to bring in their experience of reading Western poetry in order to approach the Chinese texts from a comparative perspective.

LLRO 180J - 01
Rebels, Vagrants, and Outsiders in French Literature and Film
Professor Catherine Perry

Taking for its point of departure the recent film series organized by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, “The New Rebels in European Film,” this seminar will explore the theme of rebellion in French fiction and cinema. We will read short stories and novels (in English translation) from the early to the late 20th centuryby Isabelle Eberhardt, Colette, Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, and J.M.G. Le Clézio, pairing them with films that examine a particular topic under the general theme of vagrants, outsiders, rejects, and renegades. As a means of developing our critical abilities, we will study differences between the cinematic and literary expressions of these topics while also paying close attention to issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and colonialism. The movies will be in the original French, with English subtitles. Attendance at the public screening of Chaos, presented by film director Coline Serreau in January (date to be announced) is mandatory. Attendance at four class screenings on Thursday evenings is also mandatory.

PLS 180J - 01
To be announced
Professor Fabian Udoh

This seminar is designed to develop the arts of careful reading, discussion and writing. Students will read classics from Homer, the Greek dramatistss, Thuycidides, and Plato.

PLS 180J - 02
To be announced
Professor Clark Power

This seminar is designed to develop the arts of careful reading, discussion and writing. Students will read classics from Homer, the Greek dramatistss, Thuycidides, and Plato.

Philosophy University Seminars:

PHIL 180 - 01
Introduction to Philosophy
Professor Patricia Blanchette

This seminar is an introduction to several central issues in philosophy, including the nature of human knowledge, the existence of God, the nature of the human mind (and its relation to the brain), and ethical theory.

Requirements include a number of short and medium-length writing assignments, and quizzes throughout the term.

PHIL 180 - 02
Introduction to Philosophy
Professor Bobik

Questions to be considered:
What is Philosophy? How does it differ from theology? From the sciences? From ordinary everyday knowledge? Should I do what is right? Why? Should I obey the laws? Why? What can I believe? What does it mean to believe? What can I know? What does it mean to know? What can I love? Who (what) can be a friend? Is there anything that is changing? What does it mean to be changing? Is there anything that is real? What does it mean to be real? What am I ? A body? A mind? A mind in a body? What is a mind? What is a body? Am I free? What does it mean to be free? What is the purpose of human life? Why do I exist? What is the purpose of the universe? Does it have a purpose? How did the universe come to be? Did it come to be? Is there anything that is beautiful? What does it mean to be beautiful? Is there anything that is funny? What does it mean to be funny? What is a joke? How does a joke differ from other sorts of humor?

Discussion for the most part. Lectures as needed.

PHIL 180 - 03
Introduction to Philosophy
Professor Thomas Kelly

In this seminar, we will read, think, and argue about questions such as the following: Does it make any sense to vote in an election (say, for president) if you know that your vote will almost certainly not make any difference to who wins? (Or is doing so just a waste of time?) Does it make any sense for us to punish genuine murderers more harshly than those who merely attempt murder but fail, if we think that both murderers and attempted murderers are equally wicked? Does the existence of evil in the world count as evidence that God does not exist? How can we know, at any given moment, that we are not in the midst of a particularly vivid dream? Would the world be a better place if everyone had an equal amount of money? What reason do we have (if any) to tolerate the views of those with whom we disagree?

Requirements: A total of four six-page papers.

Texts: Most of the readings will be drawn from a course reader that will be available at the O'Shaugnessy copy center. In addition, the following (relatively short!) books will also be required: David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil ; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty; Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy.

PHIL 180 - 04
Introduction to Philosophy
Professor Bobik

Questions to be considered:
What is Philosophy? How does it differ from theology? From the sciences? From ordinary everyday knowledge? Should I do what is right? Why? Should I obey the laws? Why? What can I believe? What does it mean to believe? What can I know? What does it mean to know? What can I love? Who (what) can be a friend? Is there anything that is changing? What does it mean to be changing? Is there anything that is real? What does it mean to be real? What am I ? A body? A mind? A mind in a body? What is a mind? What is a body? Am I free? What does it mean to be free? What is the purpose of human life? Why do I exist? What is the purpose of the universe? Does it have a purpose? How did the universe come to be? Did it come to be? Is there anything that is beautiful? What does it mean to be beautiful? Is there anything that is funny? What does it mean to be funny? What is a joke? How does a joke differ from other sorts of humor?

Discussion for the most part. Lectures as needed.