161 - 170 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.

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 Balkans is a region that is often marginalized, even though throughout modern history it has stood at the crossroads between East and West and has been the locus of the major developments of the 19th and 20th centuries - the site of Great Power competition, the first de-colonization movements, the rise of the modern nation-state, the outbreak of the First World War, Nazi occupation and resistance, genocides, the rise of emancipatory communist regimes that have challenged the hegemony of the Soviet Union, the leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, and a challenge for democratization and western-based military intervention. Today the Balkans are a region where the European Union, Russia and the China vie for control. This course draws on a range of primary and secondary, literary, historical and policy sources as well as a range of scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the significance of the Balkans to global affairs in historical and contemporary contexts.

At a basic level, history is the study of change over time. But the modern discipline of history, as it was formed during the Enlightenment, radically changed conceptions of time itself: from something at times understood as cyclical or directionless to something linear and teleological. Modern history then prompted further reconceptualizations of time: Capitalism introduced new ways of valuing time; the Darwinian revolution introduced a new scale of earthly time; the world wars dented faith in the idea that time passed in the direction of progress; and now climate change has altered conceptions of time in a new way. This course examines evolving understandings of the medium of the historian's craft: what is time? We will examine poetic, scientific, literary, and geographical conceptions of time and trace time's modern history: how colonialism and capitalism produced new experiences of time, and anticolonial and anticapitalist critiques of those experiences. Throughout, we will consider how this history should shape the way historians think about change over time, in terms of questions of scale, human experience, and disciplinary purpose.

This course examines the history of evolutionary biology from its emergence around the middle of the eighteenth century. We will consider the continual engagement of evolutionary theories of life with a larger, transforming context: philosophical, political, social, economic, institutional, aesthetic, artistic, literary. Our goal will be to achieve a historically rich and nuanced understanding of how evolutionary thinking about life has developed to its current form.