Global Arc

PHY105 is an advanced first year course in classical mechanics, taught at a more sophisticated level than PHY103. Care is taken to make the course mathematically self contained, and accessible to the motivated physics student who may not have had exposure to an introductory college level physics course. The approach of PHY105 is that of an upper-division physics course, with more emphasis on the underlying formal structure of physics than PHY103, including an introduction to modern variational methods (Lagrangian dynamics), with challenging problem sets due each week and a mini-course in Special Relativity held over reading period.

Parallels 104 at a more sophisticated level, emphasizing the unification of electric and magnetic forces and electromagnetic radiation. To enter this course, students must have done well in 103 or 105. 103 students must attend the lectures on special relativity given in reading period as part of 105. Three lectures, one class, one three-hour laboratory.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Japanese films held the attention of large international audiences, seeming to parallel the emergence of Japan from the disasters of the Pacific War and its aftermath. Recognition in film competitions drove directors such as Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi to international stardom, and reflected back upon the domestic box office. This course will engage with several of these major films to learn how they interrogated the ethical and moral complexity of postwar Japan and its broader international significance. Comparisons with Hollywood, French and Italian films of the era.

Introduction to Comparative Literature for departmental concentrators. What is it to read comparatively across languages, disciplines, and media? How does Comparative Literature relate to a globalized world with its many cultures, languages, and literatures? What is the place of translation in this picture? We will address these questions by both looking at Comparative Literature as a historical institution and as a site at which disciplines, methods, and positions blend and clash. Readings from a wide variety of texts: fiction, poetry, travel writing, theory, history; consideration of other media such as visual culture and music.

A course in the formative issues of contemporary critical theory. Questions of the relationships between literature, philosophy, aesthetics, and linguistics will be treated with regard to the rise of modern philology, new criticism, hermeneutics, speech act theory, semiotics, structuralism, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and poststructuralism. Readings in Auerbach, Spitzer, Brooks, Wimsatt, Schleiermacher, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Austin, Burke, Frye, Propp, Saussure, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Jameson, Adorno, Derrida, de Man. One three-hour seminar.

This course investigates the question of ethics and culture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What is the relationship between culture and ethics? How does the conflict permeate everyday life, and how do Palestinian and Israeli artists, writers and filmmakers respond? How have they pushed aesthetic and ethical limits in representing extreme violence and loss? How does the cultural imagination transgress borders or challenge one-sided understandings of responsibility? Course material includes feature film and documentary film, literature, memoir, visual art, photography, theater, dance, rap music, and cookbooks, all in English translation.

A historical introduction to literary theory from Plato to the present. By reading philosophers, critics, and creative writers, students consider issues such as mimesis, imagination, religion, sexuality, and ethics, noting how each casts light on our understanding of literature and its cultural roles. Past terms and current problems are related to an inquiry into the nature--and the power--of literature through the ages. Students will read critical works from Plato and Aristotle, through Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Benjamin, Derrida, and Achebe, as well as poetry and plays by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Brecht. One three-hour seminar.

Caught between Russia and the West, traded off among European empires, the peoples of Eastern Europe are again independent in the postcommunist era. For them, surviving the 20th century became, literally, an art. After a geopolitical introduction to the region, students will read modern proseworks from the Polish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian traditions, including novels cast as national epics during times of total war, as fantasy or science fiction, and as the tragicomedy of everyday life. Five films built off these novels will be screened during the course. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The emergence and development of the major forms of the novel as seen in the works of Cervantes, Mme. de Lafayette, Diderot, Laclos, Goethe, Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, Turgenev, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. Emphasis is placed on the novel as the expression of human relationships with individuals and with society. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Using Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a paradigm of the major thematic and technical preoccupations of the novel, lectures offer detailed interpretations of Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, Swann's Way, and theoretical speculations on symbolism, stream-of-consciousness, linguistic structures, psychoanalysis. Two lectures, one preceptorial.