Transfer Student Courses in RC Humanities (Division 865)

Fall Term, 1999 (September 8 - December 22, 1999)

To see what Transfer Student courses have been added or changed in RC Humanities this week go to What's New This Week.

Comparative Literature

Section 001 – Mandatory Film Viewings Wednesday evenings from 7-9:00.

Instructor(s): Fred Peters (fgpeters@umich.edu) , Hugh Cohen

Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (HU).

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

In this course we shall study foundational texts from the Greek, Old Testament, New Testament, and Medieval worlds and a number of modern works – books, essays, and films – that employ the themes and situations originally set forth in these classical works.

First, we shall examine literature central to the world view of four cultures that have helped shape and continue to inform modern Western consciousness and art. Our focus will be on questions and perspectives concerning the individual’s relationship to the divine order, to earthly society, and to the private self that are embodied in such works as: (I) Greek literature: Homer (The Iliad or The Odyssey); Sophocles (Oedipus, Antigone); Euripedes (Medea), Plato (Socratic dialogues); (II) Old Testament: (Genesis, Job); (III): The New Testament (The Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John); (IV): Medieval literature: Dante’s The Inferno, Gottfried’s Tristan.

In conjunction with these works, we will examine, where feasible, modern counterparts (or adaptations or recreations) of the classic stories or conflicts found in these classical texts. We will read essays and novels, and see films which deal with the same or similar-and perennial-ideas and conflicts. (We will also examine those values and experiences expressed in the original works that seem alien to modern consciousness.) Some of the modern works we will scrutinize are Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Max Frisch’s Homo Faber, Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

The chief merit of our approach, besides giving the student the opportunity to read and see important and exciting stories, is in the juxtaposing of the old and the new so as to make the student more appreciative of the rootedness in the past of many of our current ideas, problems, and situations. There will be two papers and a midterm and final exam.

Music

Section 001 – Mixed Choral Ensemble. (Drop/Add deadline=September 28). This course meets the RC Arts Practicum requirement.

Instructor(s): Katherine Fitzgibbon

Prerequisites & Distribution: (1). (CE). Offered mandatory credit/no credit.

Mini/Short course

Credits: (1).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

Four-part works from a variety of musical styles are rehearsed and prepared for performance in concert. Meets twice weekly. Vocal skills, sight singing, musicianship, and ensemble singing are stressed. No prerequisites, but a commitment to the group and musical growth within the term are required. No audition necessary. Meets the RC Arts Practicum requirement.

Arts and Ideas

Section 001.

Instructor(s): Cynthia Sowers (cindysrs@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: Sophomore standing. (4). (HU).

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

During the medieval period, a major revision of the representation of the body took place in Western art. The classical paradigm, in which the body occurs as a mathematical canon, an idea, or an illusion, is subverted, stood on its head, and sometimes repudiated altogether. Instead, the concrete physicality of the body – interior space as well as surface, internal organs as well as external appearance – becomes the starting point for such literary genres as confession, song, narrative, and meditation.

Very often, the body is projected into these genres as the imaginative landscape within which they unfold. Even more, the body and its organic transformations become the site of verbal and visual figuration; they generate a rhetoric. This refigured body does not always observe the syntax assigned to it by classical convention. Instead, it begins to speak an extravagant language: the skin is a book, tongues of fire burst from every side, hearts have ears, bellies have mouths, and genitals flourish an array of musical instruments. Nor are the well-bred hierarchies of classical decorum preserved; humiliation, decay, and the collapse of the body under the blows of violence, disease, and time, are all rhetoricalized with the intensity usually reserved for displays of power and invulnerability.

In Medieval Sources, we will explore this new representation of the body in both literature and the visual arts. This interdisciplinary approach will involve the close reading of texts and the careful analysis of images. Our goal will be to improve these skills, reading and looking, and to become both more sophisticated and more confident in the way in which we generate our own interpretations from the material.

Plato; Phaedo
Classical sources of early Christian art

Lives and Sayings of the Desert Fathers
The Life of St. Mary the Egyptian
Early Christian art of the Eastern Empire: Egypt, Syria, Constantinople

St. Augustine; Confessions
Byzantine art: Ravenna

Anglo-Saxon poetry
Iro-Celtic book illumination

Hildegard von Bingen: Songs and Sequences
Romanesque portals: Moissac
Romanesque sculpture: Reliquaries; The Throne of Wisdom

Marie de France; Lais
Gothic sculpture: the portal program of Chartres

Julian of Norwich; Revelations of Divine Love
Matthias Grunewald; The Isenheim Altarpiece

Arts and Ideas

Section 001.

Instructor(s): Herbert Eagle (hjeagle@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (HU). Laboratory fee ($50) required.

Credits: (3).

Lab Fee: Laboratory fee ($50) required.

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

See Slavic Linguistics, Literary Theory, Film, and Surveys 313.001.

Arts and Ideas

Section 001 – Texts of the Borderlands.

Instructor(s): Eliana Moya-Raggio (elmoras@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: A course in women's studies or Latina/o studies. (4). (HU).

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

This course brings to the forefront the abundant literary production of Latinas in the United States. The core of the work will comprise reading and discussion of works (essays, poems, narrative fiction) of Chicana writers, as well as women writers from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. Among the authors to be studied are Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, Judith Ortiz Coffer, Gloria Anzaldua, Helena Maria Viramontes, Elena Castedo, and Alicia Partnoy. Films and visual art by Latinas will supplement the literature in the course.

The works selected are richly textured, filled with cultural content, and embued with nostalgic evocation of what has been lost. Representing a broad range of Latina experience, they confront such issues as colonial domination and political and/or economic exile. All of the texts relate to the history of the Americas, and address the position of women within their own cultural/ethnic/racial group as well as within a dominant culture.

Students will be expected to keep a journal of their reactions to the works read or viewed and to write three substantial papers which reflect their ability in critical reading of the texts. They will also prepare and deliver seminar presentations on selected poetry in the course.

Comparative Literature

Section 001.

Instructor(s): Fred Peters (fgpeters@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: Junior/senior standing. (4). (HU).

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

This course will compare and contrast the presentation of several ideas that have fundamentally redefined Western man’s concept of himself in the last 100 years as reflected in four different disciplines (political science, philosophy, theology, and psychology) and three literary genres (drama, novel, and short story). These ideas center upon the rise of the totalitarian state, the emergence of “psychological man,” and the destruction of the concept of God as well as of all absolute value systems. How do the styles of each discipline and genre differ according to the writer’s aim and intended effect upon the reader? Can we isolate and describe the particular techniques (discursive and metaphoric) used, respectively, by the political scientist, philosopher, theologian, and psychologist to explain and convince? In particular, how does literature as a genre differ from the four other disciplines in its function as a “living laboratory” for the exploration of and experimentation with new visions of the self and society?

1. Literature and Psychology: Psychoanalysis in the Short Story. Theories of psychosexual development and the father-son conflict. Texts by Freud, Kafka.
2. Literature and Theology: The Irrational in the Novel. Man’s religious, mystical impulse in conflict with the logic of science and the demands of rational self-interest. Texts by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky.
3. Literature and Philosophy: Existentialism in the Novel. Nihilism and the concomitant destruction of Christian morality and the Western concept of self. Texts by Nietzsche, Sartre.
4. Literature and Political Science: Communism and the Drama. The ethics and psychology of communist revolution and terrorism. Texts by Marx, Lenin, Brecht, Sartre. Two examinations and one term paper required.

Drama

Section 001.

Instructor(s): Martin Walsh (narenlob@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: (4). (HU).

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

The aim of this course is to arrive at an informed understanding of the generally used term “Brechtian.” The course will feature an in-depth study of significant works from every phase of Brecht’s long career as playwright: (a) Early – Baal and Threepenny Opera; (b) Marxist – the Lehrstücke (Teaching Pieces), Exception and the Rule and The Measures Taken; (c) Anti-Fascist – Arturo Ui; (d) Mature, Post-war – Mother Courage and Galileo. These plays will be examined through lecture/discussion and in-class scene work in more or less equal proportions. Substantial portions of Brecht’s dramatic theory (from Brecht on Theatre) will also be included. Individual research leading to a class presentation on another work from the Brecht canon and focussing on a particular aspect of production (music, set and costume design, adaptations of classic works, the film and radio media, etc.) will be required together with participation in two staged-readings – Brecht’s version of Goethe’s Urfaust (midterm) and the radio play The Trial of Lucullus (end-of-term).

Comparative Literature

Section 001.

Instructor(s): Khan

Prerequisites & Distribution: A knowledge of Russian is not required. (3). (HU).

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

See Russian 451.001.

Drama

Section 001 – Modernist Masters.

Instructor(s): Martin Walsh (narenlob@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: Upperclass standing, Hums. 280, and three 300- or 400-level drama courses. (4). (Excl). May be repeated for credit.

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

This is an evening workshop in verse-speaking for writers, actors, and students of literature generally, based on the works of the Modernist masters: Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. (Excursions might also be made to W.H. Auden or Derek Walcott’s Omeros.) Students will be turned loose on these major modern poets. Passages will be selected weekly, “rehearsed,” and brought into class for presentation, critique, and coaching, whereupon pieces will be selected for further development (including dips into the critical literature) and repeat presentation. Stage-oriented vocal exercises based on Cicely Berry’s work with the Royal Shakespeare Company will be a regular feature of the course as students learn how to increase their vocal range and interest, how to “score” a text, and how to “deliver” a live performance. A repertory of verse performance-pieces will thus be evolved in the course of the term leading to an end-of-term, public “recital,” or perhaps a group performance of a longer work such as Eliot’s The Wasteland.