Course Descriptions

Term:

Locating Europes and European Colonies

Spring Quarter (S18)

Dept/Description Course No., Title  Instructor
AFAM (S18)143  SOUNDS OF RESISTANCMITCHELL, N.
ART HIS (S18)120  ITALIAN RENAISSANCEMASSEY, L.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

The Italian Renaissance was one of the most intense and exciting periods of artistic invention and production in the history of Western Europe. In this course we will examine the careers and works of a broad range of famous artists (Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Giorgione and Titian, etc) who contributed to this era of cultural revitalization. In addition, we will explore how the arts contributed to and interacted with the political, social and cultural life of the important urban centers of Italy (Florence, Rome, Venice). Throughout the course we will move between lectures and group activities/discussions: among other things, we'll try to recreate Brunelleschi's famous experiments with linear perspective (the geometrical technique used by artists to create the illusion of 3-D space on the flat picture plane); we'll discuss "contracts" between patrons and painters; come up with solutions to erecting the Duomo in Florence; we'll look at issues of gender and sexuality in Renaissance painting and sculpture; and discuss the newly emergent concept of genius in the Renaissance and how it was applied to artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo. Course requirements: two midterms, one final paper, and participation in discussions.
Days: MO WE  03:00-04:20 PM

ART HIS (S18)128  DUTCH GOLDEN AGEPOWELL, A.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

In 1566, the Netherlands saw widespread iconoclastic events. Churches were purged of images, altars stripped, and walls whitewashed. Two years later the Dutch Revolt against the ruling Spanish Monarchy commenced. In this course, we will begin by asking what iconoclasm is and why it happened in the Netherlands. We then turn to the lasting impact iconoclasm had on sixteenth and seventeenth-century art production. We will consider its effects on patronage and art markets, and we will look at the more and less obvious marks it left on the work of key artists: from the motif of blindness in Rembrandt’s work to the painting of purified church interiors by Pieter Saenredam to the “domestication” of painting in the works of Vermeer. Finally, we will consider the secular genres that flourished in the wake of iconoclasm.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

CLASSIC (S18)170  ANCIENT MEDICINEGIANNOPOULOU, Z.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

This course will offer an overview of the origins and development of Western medicine in ancient Greece and Rome. It will track the trajectory of ancient medicine starting from the Pythagoreans (c. 6th century BCE) and their belief in the special powers of numbers (e.g. they considered the number 40 to be sacred—hence, quarantine) and ending with Galen (2nd century AD), the physician and philosopher of the late Roman empire. We will begin with a brief account of medicine in Mesopotamia and Egypt (the Edwin Smith Papyrus) and work our way through Homer, the Greek rationalists, the Hippocratic writers, the theory of humors, Thucydides, the tragedians, Plato, Aristotle, Herophilus, Soranus, the Gospel of Matthew, and Galen. We will ask questions such as: how did western medicine begin? What led the Greeks and Romans to “invent” medical theories and practices? How did they think of medical effectiveness and failure? How did the Greeks and Romans understand the complex relationships between mind, body, and spirit? What led them to prescribe regular exercise, healing baths, special diets, the use of specific herbal remedies, and healing ointments? How do we separate medicine from other healing methods such as folk medicine, magic, and especially the cult of the god Asclepius? How did purges, cold baths, and prayers to the gods affect health and wellness?

Paying special attention to how gender, ethnicity, and social order influenced medical knowledge, students in this course will learn about ancient notions of health, disease, and healing that may still have relevance to contemporary medical practices. They will also explore ancient attitudes towards the body and disability; the relationship between medical theory and medical practice; and Greek and Roman reactions to bodily suffering, healing, illness, injury, and the epidemics that occasionally swept across whole populations.

Grading will be based on class participation, two non-cumulative exams, one oral report, and one short paper (5 pages).
Days:   12:00-12:00 AM

CLASSIC (S18)176  ANCT & MED SENSESBETANCOURT, R.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

Considering the interrelations between the senses and the imagination, this course surveys classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision to elaborate on how various spheres of the medieval world categorized and comprehended sensation and perception. The class focuses on how the affordances and limitations of the senses came to contour the manner in which art and rhetoric communicate. This would similarly come to define how ancient and medieval religious culture could also go about accessing the sacred, the image serving as a site of desire for the mediated representation of the Divine.
Days: MO  04:30-07:20 PM

ENGLISH (S18)102A  RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATIONHELFER, R.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

This course explores English Renaissance literature with a particular focus on the cultural, political, and religious transformations of the 16th and 17th centuries.  We will cover a range of genres – drama, prose, and poetry – and a variety of authors, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Cavendish, Spenser, and Milton.  Course requirements include a midterm and final, as well reading quizzes.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

ENGLISH (S18)102C  YOUNG ROMANTICSROBERTS, H.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

In this course we will explore the writings of the "second generation" of English Romantic poets. We will look at the ways in which the redemptive promise of High Romanticism is increasingly called into question by the writers who emerge after the great achievements of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the tense political context of the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire and the repressive European order which followed in its wake, writers as diverse as Byron, Thomas de Quincey, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Felicia Hemans explored extremes of feeling, of estheticism, of political protest, and of ironic detachment which have in common a fascination with incompletion or "failure".
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

EURO ST (S18)101A  CRUSADESMCLOUGHLIN, N.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

In 1095, Pope Urban II called upon the military elite of Western Europe to undertake an arduous journey to rescue their fellow Christians and the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslim rule. His words marked the beginning of a crusade movement of warriors fighting under the sign of the cross, which resulted in the establishment of European colonies in Syria and Palestine. This movement had a profound effect upon the development of European society and inspired other wars of expansion and colonization. Although the prolonged and violent contact among European crusaders, Byzantine Christians and Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean profoundly changed all three cultures, this course will primarily focus on medieval Europe for the purpose of answering two questions. First we will ask what caused the Europeans to engage in what they understood to be a holy war against eastern Mediterranean Muslims in 1095. Second, we will ask how did the active engagement in a prolonged crusade movement change European culture, institutions, and attitudes towards those they perceived to be religious others.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

EURO ST (S18)103  FRNCE NATION/MDRNTYFARMER, S.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

When the French destroyed their monarchy in the Revolution of 1789, they created a republic based on ideas of nationhood and citizenship specifically tied to France, its language and its people -- but with universal inspirations. Students will learn about the tumultuous century, from the reign of Napoleon to the eve of World War I, during which the French forged a nation based on republican principles. Fought over at home and imposed abroad in the French empire, these principles also inspired revolutionaries around the globe. We will study the dynamism of French culture and society that gave France an importance in world history disproportionate to its size. We will end the class by considering the ways in which contemporary developments (particularly the rise of Islam in Europe) have challenged the French republican model elaborated in the nineteenth century.

Topics include: nation building, empire, French universalism, secularism vs. religion in public life, class structures and class relations, the central role of Paris in political and cultural life, relations within the family and between genders, the birth of cinema.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

FRENCH (S18)101B  FRENCH CLASSICSFREI, P.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

This course will offer an overview of Early Modern French Literature, from the Renaissance of the 16th to the Enlightenment of the 18th century. We will read and discuss key passages from the works of classics such as Rabelais, Labé, Du Bellay, Montaigne, Molière, Racine, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Voltaire.

Reading, writing and discussions will be in French. The course material will be made available on Canvas at the beginning of the quarter.

Grading: short presentation and class participation (1/3 of the final grade), 2 short (about 2 pages each) papers (1/3 of the final grade each)

Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

GERMAN (S18)150  JEWISH LIFE IN GERMANY 800-2018LEVINE, G.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

The goal of this course is to explore the long and fascinating relationship between Jews and Germans in
German-speaking lands from the medieval period to the present. Through historical readings, literary texts,
essays, memoirs, and films we will address some of the following questions:
• How did the Jews come to be in German-speaking lands?
• How did Jews in Germany live in the medieval and early modern periods?
• What is the Yiddish language and how did it develop in Germany?
• Why have Jews had it so good in Germany during some periods, and so bad during other periods?
• What was the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) about? What effect did it have on Jewish and
German culture in the 19th and 20th centuries?
• What are the roots of modern anti-Semitism?
• What was German-Jewish life like in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi years?
• What was it like to grow up as a Jewish child during the Holocaust?
• What were the effects of the Holocaust on German-Jewish survivors and their children?
• What was the state of German-Jewish culture and relations in post-World War II period?
• How has reunification in 1990 affected German-Jewish culture and German-Jewish relations, and
what is the state of the culture in contemporary Germany?
• And the million-dollar question of the quarter: Was German-Jewish history an inexorable path to
destruction?
The course is conducted with a combination of lecture and discussion (but primarily in lecture format), with
the grade based on attendance, focus-question homework activities, online quizzes, and a final exam. No
knowledge of German is necessary. Basic knowledge in European history is assumed. No prerequisites.
Materials include a range of genres, including the two required textbooks (see Course Materials) and Ruth
Kluger’s memoir, Still Alive. For each epoch we investigate will be accompanied by a literary or other sort of
contemporaneous text, such as lyric poetry, short fiction, letters, and essay/pamphlet (e.g. Luther’s writing
about the Jews). Our study of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries we will also include film clips
from both feature films and documentaries.
Days: TU TH  09:30-10:50 AM

GREEK (S18)104  GREEK POETRYSTAFF
HISTORY (S18)110D  CRUSADESMCLOUGHLIN, N.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

In 1095, Pope Urban II called upon the military elite of Western Europe to undertake an arduous journey to rescue their fellow Christians and the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslim rule. His words marked the beginning of a crusade movement of warriors fighting under the sign of the cross, which resulted in the establishment of European colonies in Syria and Palestine. This movement had a profound effect upon the development of European society and inspired other wars of expansion and colonization. Although the prolonged and violent contact among European crusaders, Byzantine Christians and Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean profoundly changed all three cultures, this course will primarily focus on medieval Europe for the purpose of answering two questions. First we will ask what caused the Europeans to engage in what they understood to be a holy war against eastern Mediterranean Muslims in 1095. Second, we will ask how did the active engagement in a prolonged crusade movement change European culture, institutions, and attitudes towards those they perceived to be religious others.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

ITALIAN (S18)150  RENAISSANCE EPICCHIAMPI, J.
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies

An overview of the development of epic in the West, its themes, topoi and motifs. Understanding the role, nature and identity of the hero; the role of women and the figuration of gender; the development of the person; the nature and possibility of civic life; virtue, vice and their consequences; the relationship between city and countryside, private satisfaction and civic concern. Familiarity with the development of such themes and topoi as the Earthly Paradise; the locus amoenus; vows; rigidity versus flexibility; the meaning of Christian epic; control and containment; disguise; unity and multiplicity; illusion and reality; prudence and recklessness - and their interpenetration and redefinition.
Days: MO WE  02:00-02:50 PM

Courses Offered by Global Cultures or other Schools at UCI

Locating Europes and European Colonies

Spring Quarter (S18)

Dept Course No., Title   Instructor