How do media impact our sense of such fundamental concepts as personhood, social life, and time and space? How do new technologies transform sensory experience at different moments in history? This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writings within the humanities addressing the nature of media and the role of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century culture. We will pay close attention to the work of key media theorists, including (but not limited to) Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Donna Haraway. We will also analyze works of art, sound, film, and literature in order to catalyze, test, and expand our sense of how media matter.
HUM 260-0-20 Economics and the Humanities: Understanding Choice in the Past, Present, and Future
Co-listed with SLAVIC 396-0-20.
This course offers a cross-disciplinary approach to the concept of alternatives and choices. At any given moment, how many alternatives are possible? Is there really such a thing as chance or choice? On what basis do we choose? How does our understanding of the past affect the future? Can we predict the future? With Professor Schapiro, President of Northwestern and a labor economist, and Professor Morson, a specialist in literature, you will examine approaches to these questions and learn how to evaluate assumptions, evidence, moral questions, and possibilities across disciplines.
Performance, Imitation, Interpretation, Adaptation. What happens when Shakespeare’s plays time travel, migrate across the globe, mutate into new forms, and reach audiences through new media? From Renaissance London to 21st century India, from apartheid South Africa to modern China, readers have remade Shakespeare’s plays to address their own local issues. In this class we will reflect on the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare in cultures of the world across various scales, from the local to the global, and through a range of media—from the latest digital platforms to traditional forms like print, theater, and film. Like Shakespeare’s plays, our conversations will take place in multiple venues and from multiple perspectives, from the traditional classroom to the digital media lab, from the rare books room of the Newberry Library to the stages of Chicago’s theaters. We will consider how Othello, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice have been continually reinvented across the globe in many media, exploring texts like Shishir Kurup’s Merchant on Venice, Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Msomi’s uMabatha, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, the teen film O, and scenes from films including Throne of Blood and Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti, Te (the Maori Merchant of Venice). Our exploration will culminate with students collaborating to build a digital curation of Shakespeare's works.
HUM 370-3-20 Fire and Blood: Resources, Energy and Society
Climate crisis, directly linked to CO2 emissions from centuries of burning fossil fuels, has brought energy resources to the center of public attention. This course will survey works of anthropology, history, and geography as well as films and novels to understand how various resources and energy systems relate to sociocultural practices and politics throughout the world. Focusing on one energy resource each week, Fire and Blood will examine how uranium, wind, coal, light, oil, water, and other materials are made into sources of power—both physical and political. It will trace the movement of resources from the subsoil, atmosphere, or riverbeds to pipelines, power plants, dams, turbines, or other kinds of energy infrastructures; and finally, to the electrified streets of urban Mumbai, the wastelands of Navajo County; or the melting ice sheets of the Arctic. After discussing the toxic legacies of fossil fuels and nuclear things, we will end the course by reading texts on “energy transition” and post-carbon futures. By the end of the course, each student will have produced a research paper on an existing, past, or planned energy resource project of their choice from anywhere in the world.
This course will introduce students to various aspects of Islamic cultural and intellectual history that contributed to Renaissance thought, and to early modern "Western Civilization" generally. In modern times, of course, the Islamic world has gotten a pretty bad rap for (allegedly) lacking the things that made the modern west "modern:" a spirit of rational philosophical and scientific inquiry, a commitment to religious tolerance, a humanistic respect for intellectual freedom and curiosity, a historical consciousness, and so on. But as we will see, Muslim scholars, intellectuals, and literati throughout history have not only espoused such values, many were pioneering thinkers whose works had a profound influence on the development of early modern European intellectual culture. It is a feature of our shared intellectual past that has largely been forgotten in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But recuperating such global genealogies of modern thought—and specifically, the modern humanities—is perhaps more urgent than ever today, in our own era of resurgent ethnic, nationalist, and sectarian chauvinism around the world.
HUM 370-6-20 Cultures of Information: Neoliberalism, Affect, Global Media
What does the information age feel like? This course follows the rise of hyper-modernized cultures of information that developed in Japan and the Western world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It does so not only by attending to the advent of new technologies that defined this period, but also through the rise of “neoliberalism:” an economic and political paradigm prizing the creation of new markets and a focus on the productivity and care of the self. Evolving unevenly in different contexts, neoliberalism values market exchange, according to David Harvey, as “an ethic in itself,” which has come to shape contemporary forms of politics and art. In this course we will attend to a variety of aesthetic texts that will allow us to follow the history of neoliberalism in its global, national, and aesthetic contexts.
We first trace the development of concepts central to the information age—such as cybernetics, feedback, and system—and how they came to inform works of literature, film, and other media in the 1960s and 1970s. We then move to aesthetic works that reflect and articulate the shift from forms of industrial to “post-industrial” labor. Finally, we will focus on how, in the neoliberal context, capital has come to dominate nearly every aspect of human life, producing a range of aesthetic affective responses from depression to distraction, and angst to the minor adjustment of moods.
We will study the history of the story collection known in English as The Arabian Nights or The Thousand and One Nights, from its medieval Arabic sources, its global circulation, to its contemporary interpretations in modern literature, art, film, and dance. We will consider how the Nights has been used as a source of narrative techniques, literary themes, political allegories, and feminist debates across languages. Reading these later works next to their original Arabic versions, we will consider how the collection serves as a privileged site of interaction--for good or ill--between the Middle East and the West.
Co-listed with LEGAL_ST 376-0-20 and RTVF 377-0-20.
In this course, we will view non-fiction and hybrid films that revolve around crime, criminal justice, and criminal court cases. Our emphasis will be on cases that are either mired in controversy and/or emblematic of wider social concerns. Readings will accompany viewings and experts will weigh in with legal, philosophical or scientific perspectives: What is accurately depicted? What is omitted? What is misrepresented? Concurrently, we will investigate the films aesthetically: How is the film structured and why? What choices are being made by the filmmaker in terms of camera, sound and editing and how do these choices affect viewers? Throughout the course, we will consider the ethics of depicting real people and traumatic events. We will also look at specific films in regard to their legal or societal impact. Assignments will include a series of short response papers and a substantial final project, which can take the form of either (up to the student) a final 12-15 page paper or an 8-12 minute film or podcast. The final should center upon a legal topic. Ideas include, but are not limited to: A comparison of two films depicting the same criminal case, a polished/edited interview with a person somehow connected to a crime, an investigation of a local court or legal advocacy center. Group projects (two people max) will be allowed.
Please note: For students who have not completed RTVF 190, if you choose to make a film or podcast for your final project, you may either use your own gear, or, pending availability, you may reserve equipment from the Northwestern Library: http://libguides.northwestern.edu/circulatingequipment/summary. Technical skills such as lighting, camera, sound, and editing will not be taught in this class.
