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Fall 2000 Arts and Humanities (E103)
E103 Who Wrote the Bible? (3 cr.) (Marks)
Was it Moses? Was it God? Was it a prophet or a priest in the time of King
David, or a college of scribes in exile in Babylonia? Or do readers themselves
complete the writing of the texts they read? What does it mean in the age of
relativity to entertain multiple, or even conflicting viewpoints? Focusing on
these and similar questions, this course will explore the diversity of biblical
writing while introducing students to the excitement of literary analysis
through exercises in close reading. Mid-term and final exams will be
supplemented by weekly response papers (1-2 pages) on assigned themes.
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E103Why Do We Tell Stories? (3 cr.) (Dolby)
We know that stories are entertaining, but are there other reasons for
telling stories? Are there functions besides entertainment when people tell
legends, fairy tales, fables, family stories, or our own personal experience
stories? We will explore what some of those other functions are—along with
examining why the stories are so successful as entertainment. Readings will
include Aesop's fables or the Norwegian fairy tale collection East o' the Sun
and West o' the Moon. We shall examine some of our own family stories and
some familiar urban legends. You will have an opportunity to collect stories
from friends and relatives and write about the possible functions those
narratives serve. The objective of this course is to increase awareness of the
functions stories serve in our lives and develop effective analytic strategies
for writing about them
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E103 The Hero in History: Russian Fiction
and Social Context (3 cr.) (Durkin)
Works of Russian literature, from the earliest period of Russian culture to
the twentieth century, selected for their relevance to a central concern of much
of Russian culture, the definition of a heroic figure and the relation of such a
figure to the historical development of Russia. In the context of the Russian
cultural tradition, the attempt to define a hero or heroine has often drawn on
figures derived from earlier Russian literature and culture. Works by Pushkin,
Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and others will be examined. Literary and historical
topics will be supplemented by visual material. In various short written
projects, students will have the opportunity to explore interrelations among
works of literature and between the readings and non-literary materials.
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E103 Images of Jesus in Western Culture (3 cr.)
(Brakke)
Who is (or was) Jesus of Nazareth? The mysterious suffering messiah in the
Gospel of Mark or the divine messenger of self-awareness in the
"heretical" Gospel of Thomas? The manly preacher of capitalist
ambition in Bruce Barton's novel The Man Nobody Knows or the reluctant and
tempted Son of God in the movie The Last Temptation of Christ? This course will
not try to answer the question of who Jesus "really" is or was.
Instead, we will study how different cultures in western history have produced
different images of Jesus that reflect the issues and values of their times.
Requirements will include two tests and a few short papers.
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E103 Images of Japan (Jones, S.)
From ancient picture scrolls to current films, manga comics, and industrial
and fashion designs, the Japanese are recognized for their skill in visual arts.
More importantly, the entire history of Japan's culture is characterized by an
extraordinarily strong tendency toward conveying ideas and stories in pictures
and performances rather than in words. The course will introduce students to
Japanese culture through the images it has created, train them in close
"picture reading," and help them think about interactions between
American and Japanese cultures in images they have created of each other. Basic
materials include classical paintings, calligraphy, and theatrical spectacles as
well as current films, manga, animated videos, TV programs and advertisements.
Students are required to attend two film showings in the evening besides the
lecture and discussion sessions. There will be two quizzes in addition to a
midterm and a final examination.
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E103 The Language of Advertising (3 cr.) (Fowler)
Advertising is a perpetual fact of everyday life. As members of modern
American society, we are constantly exposed to it, and increasingly our work
calls for us to create it. In addition, advertising is inherently a laconic
medium; and therefore its language must be at once highly effective (to
communicate its purposes effectively in just a few words, or a few paragraphs)
but also rather subtle. This course treats advertising as a laboratory for the
exploration of applied language usage. Course goals include: to recognize and
diagnose "button-pushing" by its producers; to appreciate the
interaction between language and other aspects of advertising (typography,
graphics, photographs, color, etc.); and to understand our general use of
language better through examination of this highly distilled medium.
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E103 Nonviolence and the
Struggle for Freedom (3 cr.) (Larson)
Nonviolence as an ethical principle and a strategy for social change is one of
India's great contributions to world thought. It became most well known through
the life and work of M. K. Gandhi during India's struggle for independence from
British imperialism, but its roots and basic formulation go back to the ancient
traditions of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain spirituality. We will examine the role
and function of nonviolence as an idea and strategy in India's cultural heritage
and will ask these basic questions: How has the notion of
"nonviolence" (ahima) shaped the ethical and political texture of
India's culture, and to what extent can the idea and its practical
implementation function outside of the Indian environment? The influence of
India's notion of nonviolence on the American civil rights movement and the
Solidarity movement in Poland will also be examined. Requirement: a creative
essay about student experiences of nonviolence and/or violence. Readings:
Gandhi's autobiography, The Bhagavad Gita, Larson's India's Agony Over Religion,
and Chapple's Non-Violence to Animals, Earth and Self in Asian Traditions.
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E103 Beauty and the Beast: Literary
Classics in Popular Culture (3 cr.) (Zarifopol-Johnston)
This course examines twentieth-century popular culture versions of literary
classics, including movies, TV adaptations, musicals, plays, and comic strips.
We will address the fact that most remakes are movies and we will ask the
question "What aesthetic or thematic changes are triggered by the
alteration in the medium of expression?" Many of the literary
"classics" were popular in their time. What constitutes a classic and
what is popular culture? We will define the relationship between the two. We
will read classics by Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and
Anton Chekhov, and we will view famous remakes such as Disney's The Hunchback of
Notre Dame, Batman, Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein, Nikita Mihalkov's Dark Eyes,
and Clueless. Students will write three 4-page papers.
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E103 American Best Sellers
and Their Movies (Gutjahr)
We will explore novels that have sold an extraordinary number of
copies in the US. Beginning with Susanah Rowson's, Charlotte Temple, and
ending with Mario Puzo's, The Godfather, students will consider
the reasons behind, and influence of, popular novels in the US. We will examine
issues such as how might one define the term "best seller," who writes
these books, publishes them, reads them, and how are they distributed. Students
will learn how to examine books as complex entities whose production and
reception involves a host of forces and figures, including authors, editors,
booksellers, book clubs, librarians, movie moguls, politicians, and teachers.
Students will learn what role certain popular novels have played in changing our
language idioms, fashions, politics, notions of gentility, sexual mores,
etiquette, and religious values.
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E103 Quantum Mysteries for Everyone(3 cr.) (Dickson)
Underneath our world of familiar objects is the strange quantum world. We
will begin by performing several experiments, to see just what is so strange
about the quantum world. Then, following in the footsteps of physicists like
Einstein, we will think critically about the philosophical puzzles raised by
those experiments, and some proposed solutions to those puzzles. Our aim is to
learn to think about science and the philosophical challenges that it faces,
while also respecting its amazing success. No prior knowledge of physics or
mathematics is presumed. There are several short writing assignments and a
web-based project.
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E103 Landscapes of the Mind: The
Meanings of Nature in Chinese Art (Nelson, S.)
Rivers are the arteries of the landscape, wrote an eleventh-century Chinese painter; rocks are its bones,
foliage its hair, mists and atmosphere its mood and character. A tall pine is
like a virtuous prince, a great mountain like a host among guests. Spring hills
smile flirtatiously; winter hills seem melancholy and drowsy. There's more, but
you see the point: to this painter and to many others throughout Chinese
history, landscape is full of character, meaning, and expression--a living
thing. As Western art has focused on the human face and figure, Chinese artists
have been preoccupied with mountains and valleys, streams and waterfalls, trees,
flowers and bamboo. And in their paintings of these subjects we can read ideas
about the workings of the cosmic system, about the nation and national culture,
about society and community, and about the individual.
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E103 A Question of Love (3 cr.) (Mickel)
In this course, we shall explore our understanding of the various emotions
and relationships we cover by the word love. As a basis for understanding the
different aspects of love in human relationships as represented in western
tradition, we shall read and analyze an anthology of fundamental passages from
several classical and medieval works, ranging from Plato and the Bible to Ovid
and the "Romance of the Rose." We shall use our discussion of these
texts to analyze the representations of love in two medieval romances,
Chretien's "Erec and Enide" and Gottfried's "Tristan," one
seventeenth and one eighteenth century French novel, "The Princess of
Cleves" and Dangerous Liaisons, an English novel of Jane Susten, Sense
and Sensibility.
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E103 Telling Tales
Downunder (Lloyd, R.)
In 1836, a ship called "The Stirling Castle" was wrecked
off the coast of Queensland, Australia, at a stage when the nearest white
settlement was the infamous penal colony of Moreton Bay. The captain’s wife,
Eliza Fraser, together with the crew, reached a large sand island now named
Fraser Island. There, according to Eliza, the crew were killed by Aboriginals,
while she herself was taken on as a slave. Eventually the tribe crossed to the
mainland, giving Eliza to another tribe at a corroborree. Here she met an
escaped convict, who had been accepted by one of the women of the tribe as the
white ghost of her dead husband. He helped her escape and led her back to the
penal colony, where she was meant to plead for mercy for him. He took fright and
fled back into the bush, eventually returning to tell his version of the tale.
Eliza told 3 versions at least of her story, giving it as a performance in fairs
in London. Numerous versions of the story exist, in literature, in ballads, in
art, in music, and in theater. A film was made of the story, but the rights have
been sold to Hollywood and the video has not been released. We will explore
various versions of this story, and make our own, in an attempt to judge the truth.
Required Reading: Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves; David Malouf,
Remembering Babylon; and a class packet. Students will also be expected
to use the web site (www.indiana.edu/~herstory). Assignments: two essays
(including outline, first draft, and any necessary rewrites), a class
presentation, at least two contributions to on-line class discussions, and a
version of the story in any form that you choose (painting, poem, play, series
of photographs, musical composition, short story, ballet, web site etc). The
final exam will consist of an analysis of a passage, and an essay.
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E103 The Meaning of Life: Existential Perspectives (3 cr.) (Spade)
This semester we will concentrate on two important figures in the
existential tradition: Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. Main themes will
include: human freedom and "criterionless choice," the existence or
non-existence of God, the nature of belief, the structure of human
consciousness, the notion of an "unconscious" mind, human emotions,
self-deception and morality. Two lectures and one discussion section per week.
Readings will be from: Kaufmann, Existentialism From Dostoevski to Sartre
(a collection); Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Sartre’s weird novel, Nausea.
There will be short weekly quizzes, two essay-type examinations and several short papers.
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E103 The Vietnam War in
Literature and Memory (3 cr.) (Wiles)
The Vietnam War was a turning point in American history—our longest war,
our anti-communist war, the only war we lost—and it has had a great influence
on literature, film and popular culture in the decades since the 1960s. This
course will investigate how the war has been remembered in various artistic
media, and it is designed to bring students from the present generation into
closer contact with the legacy of the Vietnam era. We will read fictional
accounts and factual memoirs of the war; most of these books were written by
combatants themselves, and a few of the authors are Vietnamese. We will also
discuss several popular films that depicted the war, and contrast them with
other visual images that have become imprinted on our culture’s collective
memory—images ranging from wartime photography to the "look" and the
iconography of war memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Monument in Washington.
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E103 The Literature of the '60s (3 cr.) (Ziegler)
Bob Dylan accurately characterized the '60s when he wrote The Times They
Are A-Changin'. Those who were making the changes were students. Questioning
the authority of parents, teachers, clergy, police, and government officials was
standard practice as young adults experimented with drugs, redefined standards
of sexual relationships, questioned university academic policies, supported
racial equality, and protested the government's involvement in Vietnam. Books
such as On the Road, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest, The Fire Next Time, The Bell Jar, Goodbye Columbus, The Things
They Carried, Dispatches, and Everything We Had! are used to
introduce students to the changing times of the '60s. Note: This course is
reserved for students residing in the Living Learning Center at Collins.
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E103 Magic, Science, and Art in
Africa(3 cr.) (McNaughton)
Why do so many Americans and Europeans see science as being very different
from art, while so many Africans find those differences negligible? This course
will explore the complex and extremely interesting interconnections between
science, magic, and art in Africa, and examine how they have become disconnected
in the West. Our point of departure is the vast array of African art types that
so many books and museums call fetishes and spirit manifestations. All those
sculptures with nails and knife blades sticking in them seem like magic to
Westerners, but they are something quite like Western science to Africans, and
this class will explore why. We will meet a spectacular array of deities and
spirits and hopefully gain a richer comprehension of how humans deal effectively
with life's important experiences. In the process we will expand our sense of
art's roles in the world, and see how complex societies plan social and
spiritual strategies and make sense of the world and respond to intellectual and
social challenges aesthetically.
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E103 Ebonics: The Controversy over African-American English (3 cr.) (Davis)
This course deals with the controversy over Ebonics
(African American Vernacular English). There is the basic question of just what
is Ebonics. Is it a separate language, a dialect, slang, bad grammar, or really
not a distinct entity? There is the issue of its portrayal in the popular media.
There is also the matter of its origins and history. Are its origins traceable
to the language systems of Africa, or is it a variant of Southern English?
Further, there is a practical question of how to approach the education of
African American children whose home speech is Ebonics. Should a goal in the
education of these children be the purging of Ebonics so that it does not
interfere with the mastery of Standard English, or should Ebonics be used as a
vehicle for learning Standard English? This course will deal with these and
other issues through readings, films, group discussions, writing assignments,
and lectures. The course grade will be based on homework assignments, discussion
participation, and three exams.
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E103 Who Am I? Race, Gender, and Identity (3 cr.) (Senchuk)
Our conceptions of ourselves and how we live with others in our society are
powerfully influenced by notions of race and gender. These notions and their
influence upon us will be explored from a wide range of perspectives—especially
biological, psychological, literary, and philosophical. The aim of this course
is to help students gain insight into their own lives as members of a racially
divided and gender-structured society. Students should gain greater awareness
and understanding of the racial and gender issues that confront us in our
everyday lives. Students will be encouraged to think more critically, usefully,
and—perhaps most important—responsibly about those issues.
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E103 The Daoist Body (3 cr.) (Bokenkamp)
Daoism [also spelled "Taoism"], the only organized religion ever
to have arisen in China, is known as "the religion of immortality."
This is because the express goal of Daoism is to teach its followers to merge
bodily with the Dao, the basic life-force of the universe, and thus become xian
[often translated "immortals"]. But of course Daoists did die. Modern
scholars of the religion, unable to locate any clear expression in Daoist texts
concerning the immortality of the soul, are thus presented with a puzzle. Given
that traditional Chinese civilization was in all other ways extremely practical,
how could such an apparently irrational, death-denying, religion ever have
arisen there? In this course, we shall examine traditional Chinese views of the
body through Daoist scriptures, images, stories, and meditations in an attempt
to discover what the attainment of xianhood meant in flesh and blood, as well as
spiritual, terms to early Chinese Daoists.
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E103 Critical Thinking About
Folk Belief: On Television, Video & Film (3 cr.) (Johnson)
Contemporary America has become a nation of television, video, and cinema
watchers. People under 45 were born into a society in which television has been
around all their lives. Television has conditioned the general public into
accepting what they see, hear, and read uncritically, accepting whatever appears
without thinking that a point of view may be argued, or that making money may be
the main motivation behind many "documentaries." In this course, I
propose to deal with a number of issues of folk belief and world view reinforced,
debated, propagated and disseminated by television and related media.
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E103 Star Trek and Religion (3 cr.) (Weaver)
Star Trek and Religion is an introduction to the critical study of religion
by way of popular culture. It is possible to find episodes whose themes are
hostile to religion, much like the writings of David Hume, Karl Marx, and
Sigmund Freud. We can also find episodes that take a more constructive approach
to religious belief, sounding sometimes like William James, Clifford Geertz, or
even like medieval mystics or modern cosmologists. We will use the Star Trek
cluster (Original Series, Next Generation, DS-9, and Voyager) to explore these
ideas and the course reader will introduce you to the writings of classic
critics of religion, mystics, and constructive thinkers who combine some
insights from modern physics with religious ideas.
Each week will have four components: lecture, episode watching, short quiz
(on the ways in which the episode resonates with the theme of the writings) and
some opportunities for tutorial work. Each student will be required to write a
short term paper using an episode to find religious themes and explore them.
Class attendance (like work assignments on a starship) is required. Students do
not need to know anything about Star Trek or about the academic study of
religion. This course will introduce you to both.
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E103 Women and Nazi Culture (Sieg)
In Germany, as elsewhere, men have been particularly fond of asking the
question: "What is Woman?" This history of attempts to define the
essential nature and social status of women has traditionally tried to confine
their activities in a domestic space from which they are not allowed to stray
without running the risk of betraying their "true femininity." We will
examine texts and films by men and women authors and directors to see how the
notions of gender and femininity have been constructed and in what way women
have been able to respond to these constructions. The purpose is not to identify
heroes and villains, but to examine social forces that often prove to be
stronger than the resistance offered, and that in many ways are operating under
different labels. Topics to be discussed include romantic love and friendship.
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