141 - 150 of 246 results for: Literary history

This class explores, through analysis and practice, the ways in which history can be told and experienced through means other than traditional scholarly narratives. Approaches include literary fiction and non-fiction, digital media, graphic arts, maps, exhibitions, and film. A final project will require students to produce their own innovative work of history. History Majors completing the capstone requirement through this course should enroll in HISTORY 299CA.

( History 204G/ POLISCI 104G/ INTNLREL 104G is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 304G is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) How Western societies and cultures have responded to modern warfare. The relationship between its destructive capacity and effects on those who produce, are subject to, and must come to terms with its aftermath. Literary representations of WW I; destructive psychological effects of modern warfare including those who take pleasure in killing; changes in relations between the genders; consequences of genocidal ideology and racial prejudice; the theory of just war and its practical implementation; how wars end and commemorated.

Designed along the lines of the PBS series, "In the Actor's Workshop," students will meet weekly with some of the leading literary biographers writing today. Included this spring will be "New Yorker" staff writer Judith Thurman -- whose biography of Isak Dinesen was made into the film "Out of Africa" -- as well as Shirley Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, now at work on a book about Anne Frank. Professor Zipperstein will share with the class drafts of the biography of Philip Roth that he is now writing. Critics questioning the value of biography as an historical and literary tool will also be invited to meetings with the class.

What did the "world" mean before the modern age, and who got to imagine it? This course explores how people across empires - from the Ottoman and Mughal courts to Iberian colonies, African kingdoms, and Chinese and Japanese polities - envisioned and represented the globe between 1400 and 1800. We will examine how exploration, conquest, trade, and migration connected distant societies and how those encounters inspired new ways of seeing and mapping the world. Rather than treating globalization as a modern or Western invention, we will trace its deeper roots in the early modern era, a time when goods, ideas, and beliefs moved faster and farther than ever before. Through travel accounts, maps, cosmologies, artworks, and literary texts, we will compare how different cultures understood the planet and their place within it. Along the way, we will also explore how these connections brought about colonization, displacement, disease, and environmental change, as well as creativity, adaptation, and resistance.

To explore the historical context of the earliest Christians, students will read most of the New Testament as well as many documents that didn't make the final cut. Non-Christian texts, Roman art, and surviving archeological remains will better situate Christianity within the ancient world. Students will read from the Dead Sea Scrolls, explore Gnostic gospels, hear of a five-year-old Jesus throwing divine temper tantrums while killing (and later resurrecting) his classmates, peruse an ancient marriage guide, and engage with recent scholarship in archeology, literary criticism, and history.

How do historians, art historians, and literary historians of premodern Europe shape their research and their teaching around questions of race? How do current debates on race theory shape our perception of the past and deepen historical inquiry? This graduate colloquium focuses on the most recent publications on race in medieval and early modern studies to reflect on such questions while examining the challenges that race studies put on historical definitions, research methodologies, as well as teaching institutions.

The intersection of play and violence has been a focal point for historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, even psychologists. In today's world, "gaming" represents a multi-billion dollar industry; in the Middle Ages, those with the means also invested vast sums on games and battle. These ranged from the tournament and the warhorse to hunting and falconry, ivory chess pieces, and musical "rap battles" that pitted contestants against one another. Treatises on the Art of Courtly Love described the conquest of a lover's body as a sport that could be played by women or men. This seminar traces the twin themes of violence and play as enacted by the fighting classes of medieval Europe, beginning with the emergence of the tournament and the crusading movement in the eleventh century. We will investigate how the new ethos of chivalry impacted social relations and the organization of feudal society. And, we will see how tactics and social structures changed with the coming of the gunpowder age. In addition to primary sources including Boccaccio and Machiavelli, the course introduces modern theories of play. Why do humans identify so powerfully with a team? What explains the compulsion to invest financial and emotional resources in play and games?

Romantic love, it is often claimed, is an invention of the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary of sexual desire that is still current in the twenty-first century was authored in the twelfth and thirteenth, by troubadours, court poets, writers like Dante; even by crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. How did this devout society come to elevate the experience of sensual love? This course draws on primary sources such as medieval songs, folktales, the "epic rap battles" of the thirteenth century, along with the writings of Boccaccio, Saint Augustine and others, to understand the unexpected connections between love, death, and the afterlife from late antiquity to the fourteenth century. Each week, we will use a literary or artistic work as an interpretive window into cultural attitudes towards love, death or the afterlife. These readings are analyzed in tandem with major historical developments, including the rise of Christianity, the emergence of feudal society and chivalric culture, the crusading movement, and the social breakdown of the fourteenth century.

The Global Gateway course explores the history of Paris through its artistic and literary production from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. In this course, students will trace the cultural, artistic, political, infrastructural, and commercial changes over three centuries that made Paris, for a time, the capital of the modern world. Beginning with the Enlightenment, the course asks what aspects of Paris and its cultures of sociability were conducive to such knowledge production. Moving into the nineteenth century, students will examine how Paris became a main character in literature, as writers grappled with urbanization, industrialization, and the modernization of a city in transformation - whether by revolution, Haussmann's renovation of Paris, or commercial innovation with the birth of the department stores or "grands magasins." Finally, the course concludes with a reflection on significant eras of artistic production in Paris, from the Belle Époque to surrealism, World War II and the Occupation, Americans in Paris, postwar art and literature, and classic French cinema. In this course, students will engage with a rich variety of literary texts, secondary sources, and film. Students will also have the opportunity to work with materials in Special Collections from the Roxane Debuisson Collection on Paris History, including rare maps, commercial ephemera, photographs, postcards, billheads, and more. Readings may include texts by authors such as Mercier, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, George Sand, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola, Colette, Breton, Gertrude Stein, and Barthes. Course taught in English.