| source Harvard (X) |
level |
department Literature and Arts (X) |
A study of selected traditions in American writing that have been formed by perceptions of the American environment. Topics include the cult of wilderness; white images of the American Indian and vice versa; the pastoral, agrarian, and natural history traditions in American prose; and literary responses to urbanization and environmental endangerment. Readings range from 17th-century Puritan texts to contemporary works, with primary emphasis on narrative and nonfictional prose, but some works of poetry are included as well.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page
During much of the 20th century, the Broadway musical stood at the center of American culture, producing tunes and tales that became the hits of their day. It commented-wittily, satirically, relentlessly-on the ever-shifting social and political landscape, with subjects ranging from new immigrants to poverty, power, westward expansion, and issues of race. This course explores the musical artistry and cultural resonances of a cluster of iconic Broadway musicals on stage and screen, including Shuffle Along, Show Boat, Stormy Weather, The Cradle Will Rock, Oklahoma!, and Pacific Overtures. Readings focus on primary sources drawn from Harvard's illustrious Theatre Collection.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page
This interdisciplinary course examines the rich tradition of protest literature in the US from the American Revolution to the rise of Hip Hop and globalization. Using a broad definition of "protest literature," it focuses on the production and consumption of dissent as a site of progressive social critique, using a wide variety of print, visual, and oral forms. We examine the historical links between modes of protest and meanings of literature, and explore how various expressions of dissent function as aesthetic, performative, rhetorical, and ideological texts within specific cultural contexts. "Readings" range from novels to photographs and music.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page
Examines the representation of "self" and "other" in two literatures foundational to Western culture, Classical Greek and Biblical Hebrew. The premise is the necessity of an "other" in order to define the "self." Starts with "Athens" and "Jerusalem" as emblematic of the self/other polarity that the West drew out of these literatures. Then explores in them other manifestations of self and other: group identity and group origins, woman and deity as other, the development of heroic selfhood, and the emergence of self-knowledge. Emphasizes throughout how poetic and narrative forms both shape and are shaped by visions of self and other.
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Examines selected masterworks of chamber music from the 1770s, when the distinctive timbres of Baroque instruments shaped composers' imaginations, to the beginning of the 20th century. Follows parallel developments in the technology of instrument making and growing performer virtuosity. Style and rhetoric are central concerns, and attention is given to the evolution in interpretative style through listening to historic, as well as recent, recordings. Selections from the assigned works are demonstrated in live performances.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page
With the so-called discovery or invention of childhood in the 16th and 17th centuries came a newfound emotional attachment, imaginative investment, and philosophical interest in the child. We explore literature for the child (Alice in Wonderland) as well as literature about the child (Lolita) and investigate how childhood has been constructed, investigated, and represented. Analysis of works by Locke, Rousseau, and Freud, as well as Dickens, J. M. Barrie, Henry James, and Roald Dahl.
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Studies Dante's Divine Comedy as an enduring work of poetry, a major text of the European literary tradition, and the most comprehensive synthesis of medieval culture. Largely based on textual analysis, the course looks at how literature works in relation to, on the one hand, the language and rhetorical tradition in which it is expressed and, on the other, the culture which it expresses and interprets. Particular attention is paid to the poem's central philosophical concerns, from the role of the individual in history and society to the relationship between progress and happiness, and between politics and morality.
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An interpretive look at the American city in terms of changing attitudes toward urban life. City and suburb are experienced as the product of design and planning decisions informed by cultural and economic forces, and in relationship to utopian and pragmatic efforts to reinterpret urban traditions in search of contemporary alternatives. Topics include: persistent ideals such as the single-family home, attitudes toward public and private space, the rise of suburbs and suburban sprawl, cycles of disinvestment and renewed interest in urban centers, and impacts of mobility and technology on settlement patterns.
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A study of five famous pieces of music, both as timeless works of art and as moments of cultural history. Close attention is given to techniques of musical listening, and to the details of the first performance of each work, with a consideration of the problems involved in assembling such a picture. Works studied are Beethoven, Symphony no. 9; Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique; Stravinsky, Le sacre du printemps; Handel, Messiah; Monteverdi, Orfeo. The course concludes with the first performance of a new work especially commissioned for this course.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page
A literary survey of China's search for affective modernity. Through reading unlikely romances and dangerous liaisons, in fiction as in reality, it examines how writers and readers imagined and enacted the "structure of feeling" of modern China, and how representations of forbidden love generated moral, legal, and political consequences.
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The Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the "Old Testament" and Jews call the "Bible," are the basis of both Judaism and Christianity. In this course we shall survey how this work of literature, through interpretation and re-interpretation, spawned two different cultural systems. Topics to be surveyed include: canon and prophecy; exegesis and Midrash; Shabbat and Sunday; temple, synagogue, church; the Oral Torah and the Logos; sin and righteousness; messiah and redemption.
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An exploration in the Russian imperial period (18th-19th centuries) of the development of a secular literary tradition. Focus on institutions of literature, issues of literature and ideology, and the refraction of cultural problems in literary form. Reading of novels by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy in social and historical context.
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An introduction to the culture of the medieval East Slavs, precursors of the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. The course examines icon and fresco painting, architecture, ritual, music, folklore, and literature in historical and social context for clues to the evolution of an apocalyptic worldview, extending from the Christianization of Rus' in the 10th century, through the reign of Ivan the Terrible, to the advent of Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century.
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This course examines a wide variety of literary texts on black-white couples, interracial families, and biracial identity, from classical antiquity to the present. Works studied include romances, novellas, plays, novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction, as well as films and examples from the visual arts. Topics for discussion range from interracial genealogies to racial "passing," from representations of racial difference to alternative plot resolutions, and from religious and political to legal and scientific contexts for the changing understanding of race. Focus is on the European tradition and the Harlem Renaissance.
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An exploration of the theme of reading as presented in the novel from the 18th century to the present. Topics include misreading and escapist reading, confusing fiction with reality, modeling one's life on fiction, and misusing literature in relations of love and friendship. Attention also paid to narrative point of view; problems of intertextuality; and comedy, tragedy, and parody in the novel. Authors include Goethe, Flaubert, Rilke, Wharton, Nabokov, and Barnes.
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An exploration of love in five genres of classical South Asian literature-epic history, story literature, plays, poetic miniatures, and court poetry. We will pay particular attention to the nature of literary genres and practices and how they were theorized by South Asian intellectuals. Especially relevant are theories of poetic language, aestheticized emotion (especially love), and literary ornamentation.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page
Examines the royal arts of Africa, at once providing an overview of key themes in royal African art and discussing what these arts reveal about the nature of kingship generally. The diverse ways that African rulers have employed art and architecture to define individual and state identity are considered in the context of key traditions from West, Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. Among the topics to be discussed are palace architecture, royal regalia, status prerogatives, women of the court, divine kingship, state cosmology, royal burial, enthronement ceremonies, dynastic history, and the importance of art in diplomacy and war.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page
This course introduces the complex and contradictory history of modernism in the visual arts of Europe and the US, focusing on central figures (e.g. Manet, Picasso, Duchamp, Warhol) and movements (e.g. Cubism, Dada, Soviet Avant-garde), as much as on the key concepts of that history. Lectures will emphasize the methodological diversity developed within recent art history to theorize and historicize Modernism. Readings will comprise key texts by artists, historians, and critics.
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Studies Jewish experience of the 20th century as interpreted by eight major writers including Sholem Aleichem, Kafka, Isaac Babel, I. B. Singer, and Saul Bellow. Focuses-not exclusively-on how moral imagination is refracted through language, subject, genre, and style. What is the moral dimension of fiction? How does language affect nature of morality? How does literature cross cultural boundaries? Introductory course requiring no prerequisites.
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The course will examine a different domain of Mozart's oeuvre each time it is taught, this time treating the duo sonatas. The origin of sonata forms precedes study of a representative selection of the 18 duo sonatas for piano and violin. Style and rhetoric will be central concerns, and attention will be given to evolution in interpretative style through listening to historic as well as recent recordings. The assigned works will be demonstrated by live performances by the professor and invited guests.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page
A study of poetry as the history and science of feeling: readings in major lyric poems of England and America. Emphasis on problems of invention and execution, and on the poet's choice of genre, stance, context, and structure. Other topics to be raised include the process of composition, the situating of a poem in its historical and poetic contexts, the notion of a poet's development, the lyric as dramatic speech, and the experimental lyric of the 20th century.
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The Celtic word "bard" comes from languages now spoken by relatively few. Once, bards were powerful: they could destroy weak, unjust, or greedy kings with their invective, or make good kings prosperous, victorious and fertile. Over time, poets found new ways to use their powers-in love, in politics, in lament. When their languages began to retreat before the advancing tide of English, bards found themselves making poems about language and about poetry itself. We read (in translation, but with glimpses of the originals) poetry of Celtic bards from the Middle Ages to the present, tracing the transformations of power that it undergoes.
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An introduction to the radical transformations of Russian culture between 1890-1930, with particular attention to the "isms," avant-garde and otherwise, that shaped society and the arts during a period of rapid modernization and experimentation: Symbolism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism. Focuses on developments in literature, art, music, ballet, and film, their interaction and relation to the historical context.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page
An examination of jazz improvisation as a musical and social process. Key themes are learning to listen from the "bottom of the band up," and understanding why jazz is a music that is perceived to "say something" about social issues. The social issues addressed are racial segregation, interracial encounter through music, the impact of the struggle for civil rights on the music, and the politics of aesthetic modernism in jazz. Musical examples drawn from throughout the history of the music will illustrate this ongoing dialogue between the musical and the social.
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An overview of Surrealism in the context of European culture and politics of the 20th century. Focus on major works of writers, artists, and filmmakers associated with the Surrealist movement, chiefly in the period between the two world wars; some attention also paid to earlier works and movements, and to the influence of and reactions to Surrealism after 1945. Discussion of works by Breton, Aragon, Tzara, Lautreamont, Artaud, Eluard, Carrington, Bunuel and Dali, Dulac, Magritte, Tanning, Ernst, Man Ray, Bellmer, and others.
Score: 11.466675 Details | Listing | Web page