printer friendly pageHUMCORE 13: Humanities Core: Great Books, Big Ideas -- Europe, Modern (DLCL 13, FRENCH 13, HISTORY 239C, PHIL 13)
This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? This third and final quarter focuses on the modern period, from the rise of revolutionary ideas to the experiences of totalitarianism and decolonization in the twentieth century. Authors include Locke, Mary Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Primo Levi, and Frantz Fanon.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
HUMCORE 21: Humanities Core: Love and Betrayal in Asia (CHINA 21, JAPAN 21, KOREA 21)
Why are lovers in storybooks East and West always star-crossed? Why do love and death seem to go together? For every Romeo and Juliet, there are dozens of doomed lovers in the Asian literary repertoires, from Genji's string of embittered mistresses, to the Butterfly lovers in early modern China, to the voices of desire in Koryo love songs, to the devoted adolescent cousins in Dream of the Red Chamber, to the media stars of Korean romantic drama, now wildly popular throughout Asia. In this course, we explore how the love story has evolved over centuries of East Asian history, asking along the way what we can learn about Chinese, Japanese, and Korean views of family and community, gender and sexuality, truth and deception, trust and betrayal, ritual and emotion, and freedom and solidarity from canonical and non-canonical works in East Asian literatures. N.B. This is the second of three courses in the East Asian track. These courses offer an unparalleled opportunity to study East Asian history and culture, past and present. Take all three to experience a year-long intellectual community dedicated to exploring how ideas have shaped our world and future.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
HUMCORE 21Q: Humanities Core: Love and Betrayal in Asia (CHINA 21Q, JAPAN 21Q, KOREA 21Q)
Why are lovers in storybooks East and West always star-crossed? Why do love and death seem to go together? For every Romeo and Juliet, there are dozens of doomed lovers in the Asian literary repertoires, from Genji's string of embittered mistresses, to the Butterfly lovers in early modern China, to the voices of desire in Koryo love songs, to the devoted adolescent cousins in Dream of the Red Chamber, to the media stars of Korean romantic drama, now wildly popular throughout Asia. In this course, we explore how the love story has evolved over centuries of East Asian history, asking along the way what we can learn about Chinese, Japanese, and Korean views of family and community, gender and sexuality, truth and deception, trust and betrayal, ritual and emotion, and freedom and solidarity from canonical and non-canonical works in East Asian literatures. N.B. This is the second of three courses in the East Asian track. These courses offer an unparalleled opportunity to study East Asian history and culture, past and present. Take all three to experience a year-long intellectual community dedicated to exploring how ideas have shaped our world and future.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
HUMCORE 22: Humanities Core: Everybody Eats: The Language, Culture, and Ethics of Food in East Asia (CHINA 118, JAPAN 118, KOREA 118)
Many of us have grown up eating "Asian" at home, with friends, on special occasions, or even without full awareness that Asian is what we were eating. This course situates the three major culinary traditions of East Asia--China, Japan, and Korea--in the histories and civilizations of the region, using food as an introduction to their rich repertoires of literature, art, language, philosophy, religion, and culture. It also situates these seemingly timeless gastronomies within local and global flows, social change, and ethical frameworks. Specifically, we will explore the traditional elements of Korean court food, and the transformation of this cuisine as a consequence of the Korean War and South Korea¿s subsequent globalizing economy; the intersection of traditional Japanese food with past and contemporary identities; and the evolution of Chinese cuisine that accompanies shifting attitudes about the environment, health, and well-being. Questions we will ask ourselves during the quarter include, what is "Asian" about Asian cuisine? How has the language of food changed? Is eating, and talking about eating, a gendered experience? How have changing views of the self and community shifted the conversation around the ethics and ecology of meat consumption?
Last offered: Spring 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, Writing 2
HUMCORE 33: Humanities Core: Global Identity, Culture, and Politics from the Middle East (COMPLIT 33, DLCL 33)
How do we face the future? What resources do we have? Which power structures hold us back and which empower us? What are our identities at college in the Bay Area? In 1850s Lebanon, Abu Faris Shidyaq faced all these same questions (except the last one; he was a Christian magazine editor). In this course we will engage with claims about identity, culture, and politics that some might say come from the "Middle East" but that we understand as global. Ganzeer's graphic novel is as much for California as it is for Egypt. Ataturk's speech is about power and identity just like Donald Trump is about power and identity. In Turkish novels and in Arabic poetry, the people we engage in this course look to their pasts and our futures. What happens next? This is the third of three courses in the Middle Eastern track. These courses offer an unparalleled opportunity to study Middle Eastern history and culture, past and present. Take all three to experience a year-long intellectual community dedicated to exploring how ideas have shaped our world and future.future.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
HUMCORE 52: Global Humanities: The Grand Millennium, 800-1800 (DLCL 52, HISTORY 206D, JAPAN 52)
How should we live? This course explores ethical pathways in European, Islamic, and East Asian traditions: mysticism and rationality, passion and duty, this and other worldly, ambition and peace of mind. They all seem to be pairs of opposites, but as we'll see, some important historical figures managed to follow two or more of them at once. We will read works by successful thinkers, travelers, poets, lovers, and bureaucrats written between 800 and 1900 C.E. We will ask ourselves whether we agree with their choices and judgments about what is a life well lived.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
HUMCORE 111: Texts that Changed the World from the Ancient Middle East (COMPLIT 31, JEWISHST 150, RELIGST 150)
This course traces the story of the cradle of human civilization. We will begin with the earliest human stories, the Gilgamesh Epic and biblical literature, and follow the path of the development of law, religion, philosophy and literature in the ancient Mediterranean or Middle Eastern world, to the emergence of Jewish and Christian thinking. We will pose questions about how this past continues to inform our present: What stories, myths, and ideas remain foundational to us? How did the stories and myths shape civilizations and form larger communities? How did the earliest stories conceive of human life and the divine? What are the ideas about the order of nature, and the place of human life within that order? How is the relationship between the individual and society constituted? This course is part of the Humanities Core:
https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
HUMCORE 112: Great Books, Big Ideas from Ancient Greece and Rome (CLASSICS 37, DLCL 11)
This course will journey through ancient Greek and Roman literature from Homer to St. Augustine, in constant conversation with the other HumCore travelers in the Ancient Middle East, Africa and South Asia, and Early China. It will introduce participants to some of its fascinating features and big ideas (such as the idea of history); and it will reflect on questions including: What is an honorable life? Who is the Other? How does a society fall apart? Where does human subjectivity fit into a world of matter, cause and effect? Should art serve an exterior purpose? Do we have any duties to the past? This course is part of the Humanities Core:
https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Krebs, C. (PI)
HUMCORE 113: Order, Patterns, and Disorder in Early China (CHINA 163A)
This course explores the human impulse of order-making and its limits in the specific context of Early China. Since antiquity, the Chinese civilization displayed constant efforts to understand the natural world and human society, to seek patterns from the numerous and the diverse, and to fathom individuals¿ positions in the world and the proper ways to respond to all its complexity. Such attempts manifested in a cosmology with an emphasis on the resonance between the human and the natural realms, the prescription of ideals for behaviors and morals, the persistent pursuit and celebration of refined patterns in expression, and the state¿s construction of order through policies and cultural projects of standardization. Yet, despite the efforts of order and control, there had always been a strong tendency of anarchy, unveiling how much the seemingly prevailing structures could not contain. The course will probe into ancient philosophy, dynastic histories, literature, and arts to trace these efforts of establishing order and their consequences. The materials will also lead us to contemplate the other side of the story: What was left out? What were the restrictions? What if one failed to conform? Were any advantages found in disorder? This course is part of the Humanities Core:
https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Egan, R. (PI)
;
Jia, Q. (PI)
HUMCORE 121: Ancient Knowledge, New Frontiers: How the Greek Legacy Became Islamic Science (CLASSICS 47, COMPLIT 107A)
What contributions did Arabic and Islamic civilization make to the history of science? This course will read key moments in Greek and Islamic science and philosophy and ask questions about scientific method, philosophy, and religious belief. We will read Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Haytham, and Baha al-Din al-Amili, among others. What is the scientific method and is it universal across time and place? What is Islamic rationality? What is Greek rationality? Who commits to empiricism and who relies on inherited ideas? This course is part of the Humanities Core:
https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Key, A. (PI)
;
Netz, R. (PI)
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