Transfer Student Courses in Institute for the Humanities (Division 394)

Winter Term, 2000 (January 5 - April 26, 2000)

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

Section 001 – Analytical History of Jazz to 1945. (3 credits). Meets with Music Theory 482 and 582. Prerequisite: Music Theory 351 and permission of instructor

Instructor(s): James Dapogny (jdapogny@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: Advanced undergraduate standing. (1-4). (HU). May be repeated for credit.

Credits: (1-4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

Through listening, transcribing, and reading, students will examine the nature, history, and constructive principles of jazz in its first fifty years.

Section 002 – Emptiness, Deconstruction, and Renga Poetics. (3 credits). Meets with Japanese 553.001

Instructor(s): Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen (qmz@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: Advanced undergraduate standing. (1-4). (HU). May be repeated for credit.

Credits: (1-4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

Renga (linked poetry) is a sequence of 100 verses composed extemporaneously by a group of poets during a session lasting several hours. The most popular form of poetry in Japan in the medieval and early modern periods, it may be compared to musical improvisation in lacking a single theme while maintaining shifting webs of continuity between verses (and poets) from beginning to end. The most famous renga masters were Shinkei, Sogi, and later, Basho, and their sessions consisted of monks, samurai, merchants, and nobility.

In this seminar, we will study how renga structure differs radically from individual poems and learn the conditions that make it possible. In particular, we will examine the nature of the link or relation between verses in order to raise issues of meaning, construction, and deconstruction and the problem of the subject as seen from the Zen Buddhist concepts of emptiness and non-dualism, as well as the Derridean thought of différance. In other words, we will seek to understand how renga became disseminated as a Buddhist practice of mental liberation and why it resonates with contemporary postmodern notions of mind and meaning. Readings will consist of renga sequences (including one by Octavio Paz et al.) in English translation, and relevant translated excerpts from Buddhist, philosophy, and critical sources.

Requirements: one oral presentation and a term paper.

Prerequisites: none except interest; open to undergraduate and graduate students.