Course Descriptions
Locating Europes and European Colonies
Winter Quarter (W18)
Dept/Description | Course No., Title | Instructor |
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ART HIS (W18) | 134C IMPRSSNSM TO FAUVES | HERBERT, J. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies Paris, it is has been said, was the capital of the nineteenth century. Surely that claim stands true when it comes to painting. Over a handful of decades French painters produced some of the most stunning, complex, and beloved works in the history of art. We will attempt to grapple with the great richness of art in this period art by, paradoxically, focusing down on a mere handful canvases, paintings by the likes of Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Monet, and Seurat. In most cases, we will devote the full lecture period to a single work of art. This approach will allow us to view individual canvases from a wide variety of perspectives, placing paintings within their historical context, comparing them to other works, studying their formal properties, honing in on details with near-microscopic precision. In similar spirit, for your assignments you will select a single painting from the Norton Simon or the Getty, conduct a deep and varied analysis of your own, and then report on your findings in an oral presentation, a written essay, and an exhibition design or website. | ||
CLASSIC (W18) | 150 THE UNDERWORLD | SNYDER, R. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies The Underworld: Ancient Literature on Life, Death, and Regeneration. | ||
CLASSIC (W18) | 160 ROMAN EPIC | SNYDER, R. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies This course will explore the amazing vitality of epic poetry in late republican and early imperial Rome. While a close reading of Virgil’s foundational Aeneid will be the centerpiece of this course, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and selections of Ovid’s Metamorphoses will offer evidence of the breadth and variety of Roman epic. The beginnings of the epic tradition in Rome will be examined through the fragments of archaic poets, such as Ennius, and Catullus’ epyllion, poem 64, will provide insight into later variations on epic tropes. These readings will be informed by critical texts that examine the historical and social context in which they appeared, as well as broader considerations of the genre’s relation to notions of gender, nature, and national identity. | ||
EURO ST (W18) | 101A THE BODY AT THE RENAISSANCE: TEXT AND IMAGE | FREI, P. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies The Renaissance not only rediscovered the artistic, literary and philosophical creations of the Ancients which still haunt our modernity, but it also revived our knowledge of the human body. It was the time of both decisive innovations in modern medicine – especially anatomy – and fantastic re-imaginations of the human form and the aesthetic, social and philosophical orders it represents. This course will focus on how early modern writers (namely Rabelais and Montaigne) as well as artists (Da Vinci, Bosch, Brueghel), thinkers (Erasmus) and physicians (Vesalius, Paré) recreated the human body and its forms in order to figure (out) the new world to which the Renaissance gave birth. | ||
FRENCH (W18) | 101C INTRODUCTION TO 20TH CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE | FARBMAN, H. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies An introduction to 20th-Century French literature through close readings in texts of Péguy, Apollinaire, Éluard, Bataille, Ponge, Sartre, Duras, and Fanon. Reading, writing, and class discussion in French. | ||
FRENCH (W18) | 119 WOMEN OF PARIS | BURT, E. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies The 19th century in France saw the beginning of a literature focused on urban life. Discussion will focus on the new roles accorded women in the works. We will consider the characters as representations of real-life women, in their new cultural functions as laboring women, saleswomen, prostitutes, actresses, consumers, style-setters, etc. But we will also consider them as models for what is desirable about urban literature itself (as distinct, say, from a Romantic literature usually set in rural landscapes). Texts by Duras, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant and Baudelaire. | ||
FRENCH (W18) | 150 THE BODY AT THE RENAISSANCE: TEXT AND IMAGE | FREI, P. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies The Renaissance not only rediscovered the artistic, literary and philosophical creations of the Ancients which still haunt our modernity, but it also revived our knowledge of the human body. It was the time of both decisive innovations in modern medicine – especially anatomy – and fantastic re-imaginations of the human form and the aesthetic, social and philosophical orders it represents. This course will focus on how early modern writers (namely Rabelais and Montaigne) as well as artists (Da Vinci, Bosch, Brueghel), thinkers (Erasmus) and physicians (Vesalius, Paré) recreated the human body and its forms in order to figure (out) the new world to which the Renaissance gave birth. Course materials will be made available on Canvas at the beginning of the quarter. | ||
FRENCH (W18) | 171 SELF-LOVE AND THE COMMON GOOD | LITWIN, C. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies “Self-love is more skillful than the most skillful man in the world”, writes La Rochefoucauld in his Maximes. Indeed no passion is more capable of disguising itself behind the mask of virtue, altruism or charity, than this opaque selfishness, which makes the human soul impenetrable to others as well as to oneself. However, beyond the critique of the moral ambiguity of this passion, there is also room for positive reappraisal, for if self-love is capable of such perfect disguise under the appearance of virtue or charity, although it is most contrary to virtue or charity by its nature, it may be very similar by its effects on moral, social and political life. Some moralistes suggested provocatively, after La Rochefoucauld that encouraging men to be unrelentingly selfish in a free-market society might be better than educating them to be virtuous. These reflections directly influenced Bernard Mandeville’s controversial and paradoxical motto “Private vices. Public benefits” and they paved the way for Adam Smith’s metaphor of an “Invisible Hand”: the greed of the rich may result in creating more wealth, and more distribution of this wealth to the poor, than charity will have been able to. In this course we will examine the genealogy of such claims and the important moral, political, theological, and aesthetic debates that they raised in 17th-and-18th-Century France and in Europe. | ||
GERMAN (W18) | 102 GERMAN CONTROVERSIES 1945 – 2018 | EVERS, K. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies This course looks at German culture and politics from the end of the Second World War to today by retracing major debates, scandals, and controversies that shaped the two Germanys and that continue to reverberate in today’s Germany. How did the two new German states deal differently after 1945 the loss and the destructions of the Second World War II? How did they reckon with a past of war crimes and genocide? What was the impact of the 1960s student movement on German culture and society? How were the protection of civil liberties debated during the times of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s? What debates and controversies surrounded the German unification 1989/90? What has been Germany’s changing role in the EU under Chancellor Merkel? How are the German-American relations changing with President Trump? These are just some of the questions we will address in analyzing non-fictional and fictional texts, films, German TV broadcasts. The course will pay particular attention to contemporary debates on the environment, social justice, and the current political crises by reading current newspaper articles and watching German news programs. | ||
GERMAN (W18) | 150 REPRESENTING THE HOLOCAUST | STAFF |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies Representing the Holocaust: The Limits of Representation in Literature, Film, and Theory | ||
GREEK (W18) | 103 THE THIRTY | CLAXTON, C. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies After the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, Athens was ruled by a brief and brutal oligarchy known as "The Thirty Tyrants" which lasted about eight months. The main sources for this event are Xenophan, Hellenica 2.1-4; Ath. Pol. 34-40; Diodorus 14.3-6, 32-3; Lysias XII and XIII; and Plutarch's Life of Lysander. In this class, we will explore some of the primary sources for this time period in Athenian history by reading Lysias XII. Against Eratosthenese. in Greek and a selection of the other sources in English. If time permits, we will read selections from additional sources in Greek as well. When reading Lysias' speech, special attention will be paid to accurate grammatical understanding, increasing vocabulary and the speed of reading as well as to the historical details of these events. | ||
HISTORY (W18) | 190 FRANCE UNDR OCCPATN | FARMER, S. |
Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies Description availanle soon. |
Courses Offered by Global Cultures or other Schools at UCI
Locating Europes and European Colonies
Winter Quarter (W18)
Dept | Course No., Title | Instructor |
---|---|---|
GLBLCLT (W18) | 105 LANGUAGE ORIGINS | SCHWEGLER, A. |
Emphasis/Category: Hispanic, US Latino/a and Luso-Brazilian Cultures, Locating Europes and European Colonies, Pacific Rim, Inter-Area Studies, Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora), Atlantic Rim, Locating Africas, Global Middle East |