| source Harvard (X) |
level |
department Foreign Cultures (X) |
Examines the role Chinese literary texts have played in articulating the place of the individual as part of, or against, the authority of community and state. Beginning with the celebrations of social integration in the early parts of the Classic of Poetry (early first millennium BC), we will follow the increasingly complex role literature came to play, both as a critic of authority and as establishing a domain of private life.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
This course is designed to enable students to analyze a wide range of Japanese cultural creations-such as Noh Theater, Haiku poetry, art of tea, manga, and anime-by illustrating the influence of Buddhism both on their forms and at their depths. The first part of the course is a study of major Buddhist philosophy and its impact on Japanese literature. The second part observes Buddhist ritual practices and their significance for Japanese performing arts. The last part traces the development of Japanese Buddhist art, and considers the influence of Buddhism on diverse contemporary popular Japanese art media.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
Caribbean societies are largely the economic and political creations of Western imperial powers. Though in the West, they are only partly of it, and their popular cultures are highly original blends of African and European forms. The course examines the area as a system emerging from a situation of great social and cultural diversity to the present tendency toward socio-economic and cultural convergence. Patterns of underdevelopment are explored through case studies of Latin and Afro-Caribbean states, as are cultural adaptations through studies of Afro-Caribbean religions, folkways, and music.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
A general overview of the patterns of social life in China and how these have changed since the revolution in 1949. The socialist transformations led by Mao Zedong after 1949 and the market and other reforms led by Deng Xiaoping after Mao's death receive equal emphasis. Topics covered include political institutions, work organizations, village life, cities, religion, family life, population control, gender relations, inequality, and schooling.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
Focuses on relations of cinema to French culture from the silent era to the age of video. Explores film in dialogue with cultural and historical events, development of a national style and signature, a history of criticism. Correlates study of cinema to cultural analysis. Takes up Renoir and poetic realism, unrest in 1930s, France and other filmic idioms (Italy, Hollywood, Russia), new wave directors, feminist and minoritarian cinema after 1980.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
This is a survey of the modern cultures of Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Spain. Southern Europe has been viewed as both the fount of "Western civilization" and as a poor and crime-ridden backwater; it has been home to imperial powers and humiliated client-states alike. Through the reading of anthropological field studies (urban and rural), literary and historical portrayals, and artistic representations (including film and opera), this course focuses on what such contradictions mean for people in those countries at the level of everyday life, and provides an account of differences as well as similarities among the countries discussed.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
Examines how the intense political pressures of invasion, occupation, and revolution shape a country's intellectual life and are shaped by it in turn, looking at Czechoslovakia's literature, drama, art, and music from the 1968 Prague Spring reforms, through the Soviet invasion and subsequent political crackdown, to the 1989 Velvet Revolution, a hallmark of the peaceful overthrow of Communism in Central Europe. We consider works by Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, and Vaclav Havel; films of Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel, and Petr Zelenka; music of the Plastic People; the dissident "anti-politics" of Charter 77; and legacies of the past in post-Communist Prague.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
Globalization may seem quintessentially modern, but in fact it is nothing new. To demonstrate the deep interconnectedness of the historical cultures of Eurasia, this course takes students on a journey along the Silk Road, from ancient times to the present. We will use an integrated interdisciplinary approach to study the ebb and flow of people, ideas, goods, techniques, and artistic styles along the trade routes of Central, South, and East Asia, with a special focus on musical traditions. In addition to learning about particular histories and historic links among societies, we also consider the formation of critical theories of relatedness.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
Can a society modernize yet preserve its cultural identity? We will explore this issue with reference to Vietnam, where a Marxist-Leninist political system co-exists with a market economy. Modernization has been accompanied by a revival of tradition, religion, and rituals; urbanization by renewed stress on village solidarity. Gender roles are being transformed. Family relationships are being reshaped by increased mobility and new means of communications. Migration to the uplands is changing local cultures even as ethnic minorities are offered to global tourists as icons of authenticity. What does it mean to be Vietnamese under these circumstances?
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
A second-year language course that explores French institutions, values, and traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries as objects of humorous attacks by such authors as Beaumarchais, La Fontaine, Moliere, and Voltaire. Comprehensive syntheses of early-modern cultural debates through multi-disciplinary approach. Extensive use of visual material (Cassell, Leconte, Rossellini, Scola, Wajda). Emphasis on all four communication skills so that at the end of the course, students should be able to understand lectures in French, converse on a large variety of topics with native speakers, read material of moderate difficulty, and write correct French.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
A continuation of Foreign Cultures 22a at a higher level. Explores institutions, values, and traditions in humorous works of 19th- and 20th-century France. Emphasis on the individual's search for wisdom and happiness in a changing social context (Balzac, Beineix, Godard, Renoir, Sartre, and Stendhal).
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
A historical overview of cultural and social issues in contemporary Arab society as reflected in modern fiction. Attention will be given to the development of the novel and short story as literary media that treat themes such as the conflict between tradition and modernity, anti-colonialism, nationalism, civil war, poverty, alienation, religion and politics, and changing gender roles. Readings will include works of Tayeb Salih, Naguib Mahfouz, Muhammad Choukri, as well as prominent women authors, such as Hanan Shaykh and Sahar Khalifeh.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
More than a half-century after Hitler's demise, the legacy of Nazi sights and sounds remains contested and problematic. We will analyze seminal films of the Third Reich as ideological constructs, popular commodities, and aesthetic artifacts. How did emanations of Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda figure within the larger contexts of state terror, world war, and mass murder, and how have Nazi images been presented and recycled since 1945? Sampling of short subjects and documentaries (Triumph of the Will, Olympia, and The Eternal Jew), and narrative films (Hitler Youth Quex, La Habanera, Jew Suss, and Kolberg). Readings provide pertinent socio-historical backgrounds and important theoretical perspectives.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
This course provides a comprehensive examination of modern Chinese popular culture in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. From literature to film, from music to theatre, this course will probe popular culture as it has manifested itself, and trace its sociopolitical, aesthetic, and affective impact on modern Chinese.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
This course seeks to introduce students to aspects of cultural change in Africa as reflected in the dominant currents of contemporary African thought and literature, centered on a theme from which they derive coherence and significance: that of the tension between tradition and modernity. While concepts from sociology and anthropology will be employed to elucidate the theme, the emphasis of the course will be placed on the literary and intellectual texts that have shaped reflection on modern African experience. The lectures and discussions of the texts will be supplemented by documentary films and feature films by African directors.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
From 1966 to 1976, the People's Republic of China was wracked by civil strife, student violence, political intrigue, and military plots. What had once seemed the best disciplined and most stable of dictatorial states seemed about to dissolve into disunity, even anarchy, and as a result of the actions of the man who had done more than anyone else to create it: Chairman Mao Zedong. The Cultural Revolution is traced to pinpoint Mao's aims and to explore the deeper political, social, economic, and cultural issues that his actions raised for the Chinese, and for the rest of us as well.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
An inquiry into social and cultural life in China, past and present, through an exploration of the patterns of everyday life over the last thousand years in a single region. Uses writings from local women and men in the past, interviews with their descendants today, the ancestral halls and genealogies of multi-generational families, shrines and temples of local gods, and extensive photo documentation as sources for understanding how life was experienced by the inhabitants of a community, farmers and scholars alike, and how that community was related to the larger world.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
Tokyo has been one of the world's great metropolitan centers since the 17th century, both the urban hub of Japanese society and culture, and the intersection between Japanese domestic society and trends of global influence. This course examines trajectories of change in Tokyo's urban culture, lifestyles, social structure, and spatial environment across the city's history, using ethnography, history, literature, diaries, architecture, photography, art, cartography, animation, film, and the Internet to explore Tokyo as an urban culture in comparative perspectives drawn from anthropology, history, and other social sciences.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page
Offers an introductory survey of the fundamental concepts of the Islamic faith and devotional practices of Muslim societies around the world. Focuses on developing an understanding of the diversity of Muslim religious worldviews and the manner in which they have been shaped by the political, social and cultural contexts in which Muslims live in various parts of the world, particularly in the modern period. Briefly considers the contemporary situation of Muslims as a religious and racial minority in Europe and the US.
Score: 12.020805 Details | Listing | Web page