Course Descriptions
Fall 2008 Classes Winter 2009 Classes Spring 2009 Classes
Fall 2008
HUM 395-0: Humanities Seminar/ART 390-0: Special Topics/ PERF_ST 330-0 Topics in Performance Studies:
How to Create a Melodrama in Total Darkness
Instructor: William Pope.L, Multi-disciplinary artist and Visiting Jean Gimble Lane Humanities Professor
Day/Time: Friday 9:00 a.m. – 3:50 p.m.*
Room: Kresge 3-365
Melodrama is the workhorse of literary genres and can be seen almost everywhere from the usual places like novels, film and television to the TV commercials themselves, video games, pop music and politics.
Peter Brooks, in The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), finds melodrama acting powerfully in society, reflecting the socialization of the deeply personal. Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) described melodrama as the triumph of moral virtue over villainy and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience.
In this course students explore the melodramatic genre from early silent film of the 1920’s to avant-garde film and stage works of the late 20th C. we look at the formal features of the melodrama such as its roots in the stage and the variety show, character types, clear distinctions between good and evil and the happy ending. Some questions we investigate are: Is melodrama an energizing, democratic and transparent form or does its user-friendly nature conceal a darker aspect whose function is the shoring up of the powerful and an entrenched social order? In response to readings, screening and theorizing, students will create their own critical melodramas.
The first half of the course is lecture/discussion; the second half is hands-on in which students collaborate to create their own critical works of melodrama.
Readings:
---Bratton, Jacky, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, editors. Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen. 1994.
---Lozano, Elizabeth “The Force of Myth on Popular Narratives: the Case of Melodramatic Serials.” Communication Theory. 1992.
---Thorburn, David, “Television Melodrama” In Richard Adler, and Douglass Cater, editors. Television as a Cultural Force. 1976.
Restrictions: Limited to 15. Department permission required. Art, Theory and Practice, and Performance Studies majors please contact your respective departments. To register with Humanities contact Beverly Zeldin-Palmer at b-zeldin@northwestern.edu, or 7-3970.
*NOTE: Class is scheduled to meet for three hours on Friday (1:00 p.m-3:50 p.m.) except for 2 days (dates to be determined at the beginning of the quarter), where students will attend a six -hour session from 9 a.m. to 3:50 p.m. with a one hour break from noon-1:00.
HUM 301-0 Topics in Humanities/ENG 385 Topics in Combined Studies*:
The Revolutionary Transatlantic
Instructors: Betsy Erkkila/Helen Thompson
Day/Time: TTH 11:00-12:30
Room: Abbott Auditorium, Pancoe Building
When you think about the American Revolution, do you also think about French libertinism? When you think about blushes and tears in the early American sentimental novel, do you also think about British social contract theory? In this class, we will explore how these and other transatlantic connections decisively shaped our modern notions of the self, sex, nature, society, and the body politic. The class will trace the transatlantic relays of sentiment and politics, sex and philosophy, theory and literary form, whose historical impact we experience today in realities as various as the American presidential debates or the language of romantic desire. We will begin by studying the origins of modern political and social thought in works by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine. We’ll then consider how this body of revolutionary thought was rearticulated by the Black Transatlantic authors Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano; by Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence; and by the American Gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown. We will ponder how political revolution transforms categories of sex, gender, and domestic authority in the letters of Abigail Adams and the treatises or novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, and we’ll conclude with an exploration of sexual libertinage, sexuality, and queerness in Sade’s “Philosophy in the Bedroom” and Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons. Through these readings, we’ll chart the transatlantic currents of eighteenth-century revolution and test how deeply these currents determine the political and discursive realities we inhabit today. The course will include some film screenings (including Dangerous Liaisons [dir. Stephen Frears, 1988]), as well as contemporary visual, musical, and pop cultural manifestations of eighteenth-century revolutionary struggle.
Betsy Erkkila teaches and writes about American literature, with particular interests in history, race and gender studies, and political theory. The author of several books on American literature, she is currently working on a study of the fictions of politics and the politics of fiction in revolutionary America.
Helen Thompson teaches literary theory and eighteenth-century British literature, philosophy, and science in the departments of English and Gender Studies. She's presently working on eighteenth-century theories of sensation and subject-object relations in science, pornography, and the novel.
*Fulfills ONE of the THREE pre-1798 courses required for the English Major in Literature!
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HUM 395-0 Humanities Seminar/Art_Hist 319-0 Special Topics in Ancient Art/Classics 390-0 Greco-Roman Civilizations
Exhibiting Antiquity: The Culture and Politics of Display
Instructor: Ann Gunter
Day/Time: TTH 11:00-12:20
Room: Kresge 3-430
How do institutions such as museums, and other created contexts such as websites and archaeological sites developed as tourist destinations, shape and construct our notions of the past? How are these institutions enmeshed with broader cultural and political agendas regarding cultural identity and otherness, the formation of artistic canons, and even the concept of ancient art? This course explores modern strategies of collecting, classification, and display of material culture from ancient Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, and Rome, both in Europe and the United States and in their present-day homelands. Topics examined include the development of modern displays devoted to ancient civilizations in public and private museums, notions of authenticity and identity, issues of cultural heritage and patrimony, temporary and “blockbuster” shows, virtual exhibitions, and the archaeological site as locus of display.
Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Visits to museums in the Chicago area will enhance opportunities to analyze specific ways in which objects and ideas about antiquity are presented.
Projects: Two short papers and a take-home final exam.
Evaluation Method: Discussion/participation 40%, papers 30%, exam 30%.
Reading: Readings will include primary sources (e.g., exhibition reviews, correspondence) and secondary sources.
Restrictions: Limited to 16. Department permission required. Art History, and Classics majors please contact your respective departments. To register with Humanities, contact Beverly Zeldin-Palmer at b-zeldin@northwestern.edu, or 7-3970.
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HUM 302 New Perspectives in the Humanities
New Perspectives in the Humanities: Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Power in Eighteenth-Century France
Instructor: Sarah Maza (History)
Day/time: W 2:00-4:30
Room: UH 318
This seminar explores the many meanings, contexts, and adaptations of a major work of literature. In the 1770s, a French artillery officer, Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, told an acquaintance that he was resolved to “write a book that would cause some stir in the world and continue to do so after I had gone from it.” In 1782, he published Dangerous Liaisons, one of the most controversial and brilliantly plotted novels ever written, a work that has been adapted many times on stage and film, and whose afterlife includes the classic teenage drama “Cruel Intentions”. In this seminar we will focus first on the novel’s origins and meanings in its own context: what it owes to court culture, to military strategy, to libertine and pornographic literature of the time and to the epistolary tradition. We will read about aristocratic culture and the origins of the French Revolution. Second, we will explore two plays and several movies and discuss the process of adaptation from page to stage and screen. Finally, we will look at the work’s resonance today, especially in the analogies that can be drawn between the enclosed and privileged worlds of the eighteenth-century aristocracy and middle-class American high schools.
REQUIREMENTS AND METHOD OF EVALUATION:
One midterm paper of about 6-7 pages, one in-class presentation, a final paper of about 10 pages, and class attendance and participation.
READINGS:
Pierre-Ambroise Cholderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons
Norbert Elias, The Court Society (excerpts)
Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves
William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution
Lynn Hunt, ed. Eroticism and the Body Politic (excerpts)
Christopher Hampton, Dangerous Liaisons
Heiner Müller, Quartet
Margaret Talbot, “Girls Just Want to be Mean”
FILMS:
Film adaptations of the novel by Roger Vadim, Stephen Frears, Milos Forman, and Roger Kumble.
HUM 395-0 Humanities Seminar
Catastrophe Today
Jean Lane Humanities Professor: James Siegel
Day/time: Tues 1:00-4:00
Room: KRG 2-370
'Catastrophe' meant the turning point of a drama before it meant 'disaster'. But it contained the idea that the events previous to a calamity were essential to its interpretation until today. Now it is not clear that this is the case.
To find the implications of drama in catastrophe and what it might mean if they are absent we look at examples from Indonesia as well as other places in the world. We consider witchcraft and the after effects of the tsunami in particular. We proceed by reading certain works which bare on the idea- in particular those of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud. After having done so, half of each session will continue to be devoted to such works and half to historical cases.
TEACHING METHOD: Lecture/discussion
PROJECTS: Students will write short weekly papers commenting on the reading. These papers will be due on Wednesday. They will also write a longer paper (10-15 pages) due at the end of the term.
EVALUATION METHOD: Students will be evaluated on the quality of their submissions.
READING: Readings will include ethnographic accounts of catastrophe, particularly from Indonesia as well as theoretical works, particularly from Jacques Derrida.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (section on the sublime)
Neil Hertz, "Notion of Blockage" in The End of the Road
Sandor Ferenczi, "The Confusion of Tongues" in Final Contributions…to Methods of Psychoanalysis
Ruth Leys, Trauma, A Genealogy, Chapters 1, 4 and 5
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, Chapter 1
Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now" in Psyche: Inventions of the Other
Jacques Derrida Politics of Friendship –Chapters to be assigned
Jacques Derrida, "Before the Law"
James Siegel, "Voodoo Death", "Witchcraft Recurs" in Naming the Witch
James Siegel, Shadow and Sound, pages to be assigned
James Siegel, The Rope of God
James Siegel, A New Criminal Type in Jakarta
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Samuel Weber, Chapter Two from Targets of Opportunity
John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder, pages to be assigned.
RESTRICTIONS: Open to advance undergraduates and graduate students.
BIO: James Siegel is a highly regarded Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Cornell University. He has worked mainly in Indonesia. This is a rare opportunity to take a class with Professor Siegel in the United States.
