Global Arc

Where does nature end? Where does culture begin? In this seminar, we will walk the contested borderlands claimed by both, exploring key works of literature, art, and film from the Middle Ages to the present that challenge, represent, perform, condition, and subvert our notions of morality and human conduct. Is nature cruel or edifying? Should human values be informed by botany? How can an earthquake become an act of natural justice? Is the environment a field of scientific study or a human-made reality? Studying these cases of European culture will force us to address ethical issues and moral judgments of lasting fundamental relevance.

This course examines the experience of the Jewish musician in Europe from the 17th-century through World War II. We will explore how Jewish music; which had so long isolated Jews from mainstream Christian society; would ultimately provide a path to inclusion; how anti-Semitism shaped the careers of Jewish musicians; and how notions about Jewish music fostered anti-Semitism. Topics include: Jewish musicians in early modern Italy; Sephardic Jews in 18th-century Amsterdam; Mendelssohn and the "sincere conversion"; Victorian London and her Jews; operetta, opera, and symphony in fin-de-siècle Vienna; music during and after the Holocaust.

Why do we continue to read politically incorrect novels? This seminar will analyze a selection of controversial masterpieces of European modern fiction, from Spain to Austria, that were deemed offensive. Some of them touch on issues that are still important to us, like race and ethnicity, while others touched on issues such as religion and national identity that were sensitive at the time but are less so today. We will read excerpts from Plato to Marx on the function literature plays in society. Is literature inherently evil, as Bataille suggested?

We will examine the ways in which Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists<\i> have morphed into modern and postmodern literature, focusing on the novelistic and lyric subversions of the original model. Adjustments to the standard narrative include biographies of wretched artists, artsy dealers, and aesthetically inclined criminals; texts set within the imagined world of a painting; tales privileging the instrument or materials over the artist; and dramatically rewritten or unwritten lives of the usual suspects. At stake here is less the figure of the artist than his or her disfiguration in the service of contemporary literature.

Filmmaking is a mural art. Due to the contemporary ubiquity of screens, our physical environment is increasingly eclipsed in the human experience. Yet vernacular filmmaking does not simply replace our physical nature, rather lets it emerge just as terroir wines reveal the natural environmental factors of winemaking without industrial tempering. Less industrial, more poetic film production can teach us a more respectful relation to our environment. Together with guest professors and filmmakers, we will study the interface of environmental and film studies through examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises.

This course focuses on major issues raised by but also extending beyond Holocaust survivor testimony, including the communication of trauma, genres of witnessing, the ethical implications of artistic representation, conflicts between history and memory, the fate of individuality in collective upheaval, the condition of survival itself, and the crucial role played by reception in enabling and transmitting survivors' speech.

Focusing on select primary texts from antiquity to the present, this seminar considers various attempts to delineate God's relation to politics from within the history of Western political thought, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the American Founding. Prominent politicians, public intellectuals, and religious leaders will also visit and offer lectures outside of the course.

This course examines the crisis of European subjectivity in the wake of WWII and the Holocaust. Such a crisis implicates not merely the concepts of Europe and the subject, but the very concept of the concept and thus entails a transformation of thought itself. Topics include crises of the subject and the human; the question of technology; the Franco-German relation; the Cold War; decolonization; exile and emigration; essay, aphorism, and lecture as anti-systematic modes. We will do intensive readings of texts from seven authors: Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, Franz Fanon, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Lacan.

Entwined with power and capital, architecture is inseparable from coloniality. In colonized lands, architecture concretized the European claim and facilitated systems of domination. But coloniality also influenced architecture of the metropole and catalyzed the international expansion of modernization. Tracing various phases of coloniality--from bureaucratic colonialism to postcolonial recovery--and scales of architectural design--climate, city, monument, and ornament--the course interrogates sites where European architecture colluded with colonial power, and reflects on the resistances that condition its legacy in colonialist expansion.

Explores the "individual" as produced through European rituals that crosscut national boundaries, yet grow out of particular local, regional, and national cultures. How is the individual formed in the rituals of modern expressive culture? What are the functions of dance, music, visual culture, political culture, local festivals, and sport? What are the rites of passage, consumption activities, free time (vacations, tourism), and work cultures? The course will analyze empirical cases and select social theoretical frames that try to explain the emergence and development of "the individual" in modern European life. One three-hour seminar.