| source Johns Hopkins University (X) |
level Graduate (14) Upper Level Undergraduate (6) Independent Academic Work (1) |
department Humanities Center (X) |
Tacking between theoretical and ethnographic texts on art and poetry, visual image and dramatic performance, living body and natural landscape, this course seeks anthropological ground for an impersonal and asubjective philosophy of creative expression.
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
AS.212.403 for advanced undergrads. Through a close reading of Flaubert's novel and selective consideration of the drafts, we shall examine the making of that masterpiece of narrative prose, which Flaubert himself conceived under the sign of modern art. Our central concern, in other words, is with Madame Bovary as a crucial event in aesthetic modernity, one that has had a prodigious afterlife in both literature and visual arts. Seminar will be taught in French and English. Madame Bovary edition required: Le Livre de Poche Classique, 1999. Meets with AS.212.623 Cross-listed with Humanities Center
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
Through a close reading of Flaubert's novel and selective consideration of the drafts, we shall examine the making of that masterpiece of narrative prose, which Flaubert himself conceived under the sign of modern art. Our central concern, in other words, is with Madame Bovary as a crucial event in aesthetic modernity, one that has had a prodigious afterlife in both literature and visual arts. Seminar will be taught in French and English. Madame Bovary edition required: Le Livre de Poche Classique, 1999.
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
The course will examine representation of Europe, mostly but not exclusively France and Paris in the fiction produced by writers from the former French colonies, from the 1950's to the present.
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
The role and function of a university in life and in society was a topic of considerable concern for some of the most prominent German philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th century. Their published (and unpublished) contributions led to a new understanding of what a university should be that proved to be very influential for the conception of the 'modern' university, as realized in Germany in the 19th century. The seminar will examine the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Humboldt on the university with attention to the relation of the authors' thoughts on education to their more general philosophical positions. The seminar will begin on March 22 and continue to the end of the term.
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Schillerâs theoretical writings might be approached by the sentence âit is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedomâ. Discussing the assumption that humans live in a condition of unfreedom resulting from social and economic divisions, Schillerâs notion of beauty crosses boundaries between ethics, politics and aesthetics to formulate a theory of modernity in which beauty functions as a medium to reconcile man's sensuous nature and his capacity for reason. The course will examine Schillerâs concept of beauty in relation to the anthropological, political, ethical and aesthetic discourses of his time especially with respect to Kantâs view of aesthetic judgment which Schiller at the same time embraced and criticized. Particular attention will be paid to Schillerâs reflexions on representation as well as to the poetics of his aesthetic discourse. Readings include: Kallias-Briefe (1793), Ãber Anmut und Würde (1793), Vom Erhabenen (1793), Ãber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1793), Ãber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795/96). Readings and discussions in German.
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Since the enduring disavowal of description by Lessing, characteristics commonly assigned to description include structural endlessness and exorbitance; the simple succession of elements; the âbreakdown of compositionâ (Lukács) in a proliferation of details; the parity of described details; its failed ability at illusion; also its tendency to mortify, insofar as it transforms its subject into something static, stagnant. The course will undertake a critical revision of these characteristics by analyzing aesthetical debates and literary descriptions from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Topics leading the discussion will be: text-image relations; description between literature and science; observation through description; dynamization of description; motion and motionlessness; poetics of perception; performativity of description; the boredom of reading. Readings include: Bodmer, Breitinger, von Haller, Winckelmann, Lessing, Alexander von Humboldt, Hebbel, Stifter, Darwin, Ossip Mandelstam, Aby Warburg, Lukács, Peter Weiss, Peter Handke. The course will be taught in German.
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The invention of printing occurred amid two centuries of intense development in the conduct and material means of European scholarship. The transition from writing by hand to movable type was accompanied by a revolution in scholarship that involved a new attitude to Classical and Biblical antiquity, the recovery of neglected and "lost" works, the formation of secular libraries, and the development of tools for the study of ancient handwriting, writing materials, and the history of language and of history itself. The revolution in attitudes to and uses of the book eventually transformed every discipline related to reading, writing, and the organization of knowledge. Topics to be covered include writing as an object of wonder, the transformation of a mythology of writing into a true history of books, writing, and libraries, the scientific study of writing and of language, and the representation of writing and books in the art and literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Extensive use will be made of Johns Hopkins' large collection of books published before 1600, and student projects will be oriented toward reliving the experiences of scholars in this period, including via computer-assisted means. Open to all undergraduates. Knowledge of a foreign language helpful but not required.
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This class will read basic texts in media theory, history, and philosophy â from Marshall McLuhan, and the school of French structuralists, to film semiotics and current approaches to media analysis within ubiquitous computing. We will look at some media artists from Nam June Paik to Cindy Sherman and ask the question of how their art-work incorporates a specific media-theoretical and -philosophical background. Readings from Mark Hansen, Tom Mitchell, Ulrik Ekman, Vivian Sobchack, Amelia Jones a.o.
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
This course has a fourfold aim: First, it is designed to familiarize participants with the basics of Latin paleography from Roman antiquity through the age of printing with moveable type; throughout, we will practice deciphering literary and documentary sources of various types, even as we concentrate on the evolution of different writing styles. Second, we will think about paleographyâs status as a âdiscipline.â That is, the term âpaleographyâ dates back to 1708 and Montfauconâs classic work, Palaeographia Graeca. However, it was only in the late nineteenth century in the world of the German research university that paleography came into the orbit of the Geisteswissenschaften as a âHilfswissenschaft.â Both implicitly and explicitly throughout the seminar we shall be asking what consequences that move entailed. Third, we will study the manner in which printing with moveable type changed western graphic culture: was printing ârevolutionaryâ or âevolutionaryâ? Did printing and its radical graphic changes introduce new forms of consciousness in readers? Fourth, we will become familiar with certain aspects of âthe history of the book,â discovering as we do what sorts of questions scholars in this broad field of scholarly endeavor have been asking recently.
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Since the late 18th century, tragedy has repeatedly been declared dead on the grounds that the changed social, historical and philosophical conditions of modernity do not allow for the genre in a strict sense. This course looks at some versions of this argument in relation to modern works of drama in order to examine its validity and the extent to which the concept and experience of the tragic have changed in our time. Authors to be studied will include Schiller, Kleist, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Lorca, Miller, Brecht and Beckett
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
Since the late 18th century, tragedy has repeatedly been declared dead on the grounds that the changed social, historical and philosophical conditions of modernity do not allow for the genre in a strict sense. This course looks at some versions of this argument in relation to modern works of drama in order to examine its validity and the extent to which the concept and experience of the tragic have changed in our time. Authors to be studied will include Schiller, Kleist, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Lorca, Miller, Brecht and Beckett. Cross-listed with GRLL and English
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
Called a "loose baggy monster" by Henry James, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is a sui generis work of modern literature that offered a response and challenge to the European Realist novel and founded a Russian national myth. We will read the novel in translation alongside theoretical works examining issues of genre, narrative, perspective, theatricality, the everyday, domesticity, desire and violence.
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
This course analyzes classical and modern conceptions of freedom and subjection. Readings include: Plato, E. de La Boétie, J.S. Mill, J.J. Rousseau, B. Constant, Kant.
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
Students with a serious commitment to critical journalism may contract a supervised internship with one of the University publications or cooperating sponsors in the Baltimore community. S/U only.
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
Texts to be announced
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
Debates over the nature of trauma, testimony, and representation before and after 9/11. Texts by Shoshana Felman, Cathy Caruth, Giorgio Agamben, Don DeLillo, Marianne Hirsch, Art Spiegelman, Georges Didi-Huberman, and others.
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar revisits the debate between Derrida and Lévinas about metaphysical, ethical, and political violence with a specific focus on the importance granted or denied to the animal life of humans. Cross-listed with Political Science
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This seminar will investigate the historical transformation of the tradition of âpolitical theologyâ and analyze several contemporary proposals for a so-called politics âbeyond sovereignty.â Readings will include Kantorowicz, Lefort, Derrida, Nancy, Laclau, Agamben, Gauchet, Niebuhr, Obama, Roy, and Nusseibeh.
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page
Not Available
Score: 12.707403 Details | Listing | Web page