Liberal Studies Courses 2011-2012
SUMMER 2012
Summer 2012 Registration Guide
AGING AND DEATH IN LITERATURE AND FILMS (LS 290.30)
Deborah T. Gold
Mondays, 6:00–9:00 pm, Perkins LINK 2-070
(begins May 16 – ends July 23; no class on May 28)
The purpose of this course is to examine the developmental phenomena that occur in old age and in death and see how they are represented in fiction, with emphasis on their presence in novels and popular film. The course is divided into several subsections. These will include “Theories of Aging and Death,” “Gender in Aging and Death,” “Physical and Cognitive Decline in Aging” and “Extending Life by Preventing Death.”
First, we will document real-life issues of aging and death through an examination of the age structures of developed and developing nations, focusing on the meaning of an aging population for the future of the U.S. As most deaths in the U.S. occur in older people, it is important to link these two phenomena on both theoretical and pragmatic bases. Keeping the themes of aging and death as constants over the semester, we will examine issues of retirement, relationships and love in late life and among the dying, off-time death, and modern medical intervention with dying patients. We will also discuss institutional differences (i.e., between nursing homes for aging and hospice for dying) and what twenty-first century America must do to prepare for the soon-to-be old and dying baby boomers.
Deborah T. Gold is Associate Professor of Medical Sociology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology, and Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University Medical Center, where she is a Senior Fellow of the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, Director of the Postdoctoral Research Training Program in the Aging Center, and Director of the Duke Undergraduate Program in Human Development. She also directs the undergraduate Leadership in an Aging Society Program. Gold received her B.A. in English and Latin from the University of Illinois, her M.Ed. in Reading from National-Louis University, and her Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University. Her primary research interests are in the psychological and social consequences of chronic disease in the elderly. She has done seminal research on osteoporosis and its impact on quality of life. Most recently, Gold’s research has examined race and ethnic differences in medication choices and patterns of decision-making in women with osteoporosis.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN AMERICAN? Immigration, Citizenship and Belonging (LS 290.87)
Noah Pickus
Mondays, 6:00-9:00 pm, 101 West Duke Building
Begins May 16 – Ends July 30 (no class on May 28 and July 16)
What does it mean to be, and to become, an American? This course uses novels, non-fiction prose, and analytic essays to explore these questions through the lens of immigration. It analyzes how immigrants have navigated the emotional, social, and political dimensions of belonging and citizenship in the United States and in other countries, how citizens have received them, and what the intersection of newcomers and native-born can teach us about belief in, and belonging to, America and other nations.
Core questions that animate the course include: What have immigrants had to give up, what have they received in return, and how have the demands of assimilation’s “brutal bargain” changed? To what degree do immigrants change or reinforce core notions of Americanness, and with what consequences? What is happening now as immigrants are increasingly able to live their lives both “here” and "there” as Americans are experiencing a loss of control over broader economic and political forces? How are the experiences of native-born and newcomers changing in both traditional gateway cities of immigration as well as in new destinations such as North Carolina? And what lessons can we draw with regard to immigration and integration policy?
Primary readings will be drawn from novelists such as Teju Cole. Russell Banks, and Richard Rodriquez. Each primary reading will be supplemented by selected scholarly readings on subjects ranging from multiculturalism and assimilation to immigration and refugee policy.
Course requirements: Regular participation, several short papers (2-3 pages each) and a term paper (10-12 pages).
Noah Pickus is the Nannerl O. Keohane Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Associate Research Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University. His publications include True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton University Press), which examines nationalism and the politics of immigration; Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield); and several policy reports including "Becoming American/America Becoming" and "Breaking the Immigration Stalemate: From Deep Disagreements to Constructive Proposals." He co-directed the Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable and has advised the Department of Homeland Security and other public and private organizations dealing with immigration and integration policy. Prior to joining the Kenan Institute, he was the founding director of the Institute for Emerging Issues and a faculty member at Duke and at Middlebury College. He received his Ph.D from Princeton University.
MEDIEVAL WORLDS (LS 290.44)
Thomas Robisheaux
Tuesdays, 6:00-9:00 pm, GLS Conference Room
Begins May 22 – End July 24
Few periods in the past capture the imagination of the modern public like the Middle Ages. This period was the beginning of modern Western civilization, the era that gave birth to modern Western ideas of society, culture, and self. Medieval knights, monks, and ladies, exotic and familiar at the same time, still populate our stories about war, love, and faith. Majestic Gothic cathedrals still speak to the modern visitor in a sacred language of image, symbol and story. In looking back on this era reflections about ourselves and modern culture are inevitable. Medieval worlds are with us still as windows to ways of thinking, feeling and being long since past and as distant mirrors of ourselves.
The course explores this earlier period of Western society through six disciplines or angles of vision. History - historical overview of the three medieval eras: early (500-1000), high (1000-1300), and late (1300-1500), with a focus on Europe’s most creative period ever, the twelfth century. The dynamism of the period will be examined through the Crusades. Literature - study of the medieval romance of as an expression of self-discovery, honor, adventure, and love. Readings include the fabled love letters of Abelard and Heloise and the great love story of Tristan and Isolde. Society and power - the close connection between the emergence of permanent institutions of church and state and the persecution of minorities. Religion - the monastic experience and the drive to define and defend Christian orthodoxy against heresy. Gothic architecture and engineering - how and why cathedrals were built, and how to understand their meaning; slide tours of St. Denis (Paris) and Chartres. Disease, medicine and historical change using the Black Death as a case study.
The following books may be purchased at the university bookstore. I have chosen these books carefully for their literary and cultural merits as well as their scholarly uses for us in the classroom. All of these books bear reading and re-reading long after the class has ended. In addition I will provide from time to time xeroxes of selected sources to deepen our understanding of particular issues.
Readings include: Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan; Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Europe; R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250; David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West; Betty Radice, ed., The Letters of Abelard and Heloise; Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral; J. Riley-Smith, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades; and Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart.
Thomas Robisheaux, Professor and the Fred W. Schaffer Professor of History, is an historian of late medieval and early modern Europe. His scholarly curiosity ranges from the world of lords and peasants in medieval and early modern Europe to Renaissance culture, magic, religion and science. He is author of The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village.
THE AGE OF EMPIRE (LS 290.70)
Susan Thorne
Wednesdays, 6:00-9:00 pm, GLS Conference Room
Begins May 16 – Ends July 25 (no class on July 4)
The U.S. invasion of Iraq has prompted considerable reflection on whether the world is now entering an age of American Empire. This course seeks to locate present-day discussions of U.S. foreign policy in a historical context. It surveys the history of Western imperialism from Columbus to the present, encompassing both colonial relations of formal political control and imperial relations that include informal influence.
Scholarly discussions of imperialism across the disciplinary spectrum typically emphasize the influence of the West on the Rest, of Western Europe and the United States on the colonized and formerly-colonized people of the so-called Third World.
This course reverses the gaze, so to speak, focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on the influence of colonized people, products, relationships, and practices on the major Western democracies. How did colonialism contribute to Western industrialization? How did colonialism make the developed world’s working classes “safe” for democracy? How has political culture in the overdeveloped world been affected by postcolonial migrations? To what extent was Western civilization itself a product of the colonial encounter? And, finally, what lessons might be drawn from the history of previous colonial encounters regarding the legal and ethical bases, as well as future prospects, of what some have begun to call the present age of American Empire?
Susan Thorne, Associate Professor of History, is a social historian focusing on Great Britain in the so-called modern period (from eighteenth century to the present day). Industrialization and imperial expansion figure prominently in her work.
THE ANIMAL-HUMAN BOUNDARY (LS 270.13)
M. Kathy Rudy
Thursdays, 6:00-9:00 pm, GLS Conference Room
Begins May 17 – Ends July 19
This course studies the implications and effects of current understandings of human identity, and how it forms our perceptions of other animals, the natural environment, and our own bodies. Over the last twenty years, the academy has engaged itself in rigorous interrogations of heretofore “natural” sites of difference. Formations such as gender, race, sexual preference, ethnicity once thought to be hardwired in the body are now being theorized as culturally constructed. The most recent addition to this scholarship challenges the distinction between human and non-human; the figure of the animal is coming into focus as the newest agenda in this project. Reflecting on how we treat other animals—and in particular our closest relatives, the great apes—can tell us much about what we think about ourselves. How far should we go in extending the boundaries of the human concept of morality? Do the subjectivities and emotional lives of other beings exist or matter? Does respecting only that which is similar to us imply that we only take our own human nature as the pivotal reference of value? If being human sets the standard of value for everything on earth, what are the consequences of such thinking for non-humans? How should we behave toward that which is radically different, and why? What we eat and what we do not eat, what we kill and do not kill, what we define as cannibalism and what falls outside that definition reveal insights about ourselves, our own bodies, and our own subjectivities.
Questions in this class will center on comparing and contrasting different kinds of destabilization. How is the deconstruction of gender both similar to and different from the ways we critique the human/animal boundary? Is saying that there are no universal truths that can be applied to all women everywhere similar to saying there are no universal truths that can be applied to all humans everywhere? The question of self in the world has been central to feminist thinking in a variety of national contexts and across various historical period; can that concept of self be extended to other great apes? To all non-human animals?
These questions will be spread across three related topics: the first examines the role of gender in the primate field studies from a number of different angles; here we will look at the high prevalence of women in the field and try to give an account for the impact women like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey have had on primatology, science studies, and animal studies. Second, we’ll examine the human animal boundary in relation to language apes; who are they, do they truly possess language, what does it mean to communicate across species? Finally, we will examine primate (and other large animal) conservation from a number of differing perspectives; most scientists agree that within the next 40 years, gorillas, chimps, orangutans, and bonobos will all be extinct in the wild, and we--humans--will be the only great apes left “free” on the planet. Is this a justification, then, to build more zoos and sanctuaries to save them from extinction? Do reintroduction programs really work? Or should we let them (as many animal rights activists suggest) die out with dignity?
Kathy Rudy is Associate Professor of Ethics and Women’s Studies. The author of Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: Moral Diversity in the Abortion Debate and Sex and the Church: Gender, Homosexuality, and the Transformation of Christian Ethics, she has published articles on abortion and reproduction, sexual ethics, feminist ethics, bioethics, and feminist theory.
STUDY ABROAD 2012
ART MARKETS: A PERSPECTIVE ON NETHERLANDISH ART & VISUAL CULTURE
Hans J. Van Miegroet
OXFORD UNIVERSITY: ENGLISH LITERATURE; HISTORY, POLITICS & SOCIETY; CREATIVE WRITING
SPRING 2012
BIODIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA (LS 270.24)
Jon Shaw and Paul Manos
Tuesdays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm
(4 on-campus meetings plus one week at Highlands Biological Station)
Complete syllabus with class schedule, travel dates, and additional fees (pdf).
North Carolina is a hotspot for biodiversity because of the rich variety of habitats and because the state was not covered by glaciers during the recent ice ages. This course will examine biodiversity in the southern Appalachian mountains of western North Carolina. We will have four class meetings during the winter and spring months (January to April) and then spend six (glorious) days at the beautiful Highlands Biological Station, which is situated in one of the richest areas of the southern Appalachians. Each day in the mountains we will visit natural habitats ranging from the protected cove forests along the Blue Ridge to subalpine Spruce-Fir forests. At the Station we will examine plants that we collect during our field trips. Lectures/discussions will deal with land use history in North Carolina, conservation of mountain biodiversity, and the ecology of natural ecosystems.
This course does not require an academic background in biology; enthusiasm for nature and spending some time outdoors will suffice! Moderate hikes will be included with an emphasis on hands-on experiences identifying plants and observing natural communities.
We require a series of 2-3 short (2-3 pages) essays and a term paper, and a journal that would include both scientific observations, e.g., ecological notes and species observed, and impressions.
Jonathan Shaw is a Professor in the Department of Biology. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of Michigan. Dr. Shaw's research is on the systematics, population genetics, and evolution of bryophytes. Some of his research interests have included the taxonomy and classification of particular groups of mosses, developmental anatomy, and genetic relationships among populations of very rare species. A current focus in the lab is the evolution of peatmosses (Sphagnum) and Dr. Shaw's field work tends to be in polar and high altitude environments. He has published some 175 scientific papers and has edited two books, one on the evolution of tolerance in plants to toxic metals in the environment, and one on the biology of bryophytes. Dr. Shaw taught for eight years at a liberal arts college (Ithaca College) before coming to Duke in 1996.
Paul Manos is a Professor in the Department of Biology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Cornell University. Dr. Manos's research is on the systematics and biogeography of the flowering plants. His main research interest is the evolution of the oaks and their relatives, the hickories and walnuts. He has published some 40 scientific papers spanning many different families of flowering plants, often with an emphasis on geography. Dr. Manos has taught several plant biodiversity courses since coming to Duke in 1996.
THE UNCONVENTIONAL MEMOIR (LS 280.72) **not open to new students**
Margaret Sartor
Tuesdays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm (begins January 17)
The memoir is an increasingly diverse and evolving genre. This course is for students who want to write their story, to explore forms outside the conventional chronological and autobiographical narrative while also reaching for the highest standards of literary achievement. The goal of the course is two-fold: 1) Students will write stories out of their own history, attempting to tell those stories in ways that are personally meaningful but also able to communicate to a larger audience; 2) Via assigned readings and class discussion, students will become conversant in the larger issues and challenges of the memoir genre.
While working on their own memoir projects, students will examine the ways in which other writers have used essays, books, graphic novels, and even photobooks to tell personal stories. Over the course of the semester, students will explore questions of voice, point-of-view, subjectivity, truth and responsibility. Students are expected to look hard at the ways in which they define themselves and at the personal, social and cultural influences and iconography that shape and communicate personal identity. During the first half of the semester, only the teacher will read and critique student stories. In the second half of the semester, students will share their writing for critique by their peers within the class. Revisions are expected. At the end of the semester, students will turn in their best work for a final grade.
Each class meeting will involve a group discussion of the reading assigned for that week. Each week students will write a short response to the reading and two students will be asked to formulate questions and comments in advance to begin the class discussion. Some weeks, the instructor will make visual presentations of photographic books. These will complement the reading and the specific topics under consideration that week. In the latter part of the semester, students will be asked to read or present their own writing for discussion. Class participation is essential to a positive evaluation.
Margaret Sartor currently teaches at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Her critically acclaimed Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s (Bloomsbury USA, 2006) is a memoir of adolescence based on the diaries she kept as a girl. Her photographs – which address home, family, and personal identity – have been published in a number of books and magazines, including In Their Mother’s Eyes: Women Photographers and Their Children, A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South, Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, The Oxford American and The New Yorker. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, as well as other collections. As an editor, Sartor has published three books: Gertrude Blum: Bearing Witness, edited by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris, Their Eyes Meeting the World, by Robert Coles and edited by Margaret Sartor, and What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney, edited by Margaret Sartor and co-edited by Geoff Dyer. What Was True was chosen as one of the “Top Ten Photography Books of 1999” by the Village Voice. Sartor has curated exhibitions of photography at the International Center for Photography in New York, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
THE HISTORY OF SINCERITY (LS 290.83)
John Martin
Wednesdays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm (begins January 18)
Is sincerity a virtue? Do we really want others to know our thoughts or feelings? Do we genuinely desire to know the thoughts and feelings of others? These questions, still pressing today, took on a special intensity in the religious and cultural debates of the early modern period (ca. 1500 – ca. 1800). This course, interdisciplinary in approach, examines what we might call the “early modern ordeal of sincerity” and what this ordeal reveals about the making of the modern self. We shall focus, in particular, on the problem of how individuals in the early modern world understood what it meant to reveal (or to conceal) their internal thoughts, sentiments, or beliefs – a complex issue in the fields as diverse as love, politics, and religion.
Course requirements: regular participation and three short papers and a term paper.
Students will write close analyses of the material in two very short papers (one two, one three pages in length), one review of the literature (four pages), and one term paper on a topic of personal interest to be worked out with the instructor (about twelve pages).
John Jeffries Martin joined Duke’s Department of History in 2007 after twenty-five years of teaching at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. John grew up on St. Simons Island, GA, attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard. John’s primary area of study lies in the history of identities – religious, social, and personal – and how social and cultural factors contribute to “the way that we are in the world.” He has explored this topic in his Venice’s Hidden Enemies and, more recently, in Myths of Renaissance Individualism. He is currently writing a book on the history of sincerity. Part history of the human heart, part history of how we express ourselves to others, this current project aims, above all, to illustrate how some of our most basic assumptions about who we are and how we interact with others are conditioned by larger historical forces – from, for instance, the printing press and emerging nationalisms to Cyberspace and globalization.
PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI NARRATIVES (LS 290.84)
Ylana Miller
Wednesdays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm (begins January 18)
Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which now dates back to developments over more than one hundred years ago, is noteworthy for the level of international engagement that has accompanied it throughout. It is also marked by particular challenges for those who seek to study its history because the telling of that history has itself been a battleground on which competing narratives seek to explain the experiences of participants as well as to make sense of the conflict itself from various points of view. The audience for such narratives is therefore not only that of each national group, but also the wider international community with interests in the area.
This course is designed to explore these narratives within historical perspective and to develop understanding of the ways in which they have contributed to shaping all efforts at resolution of the conflict. In the past, the different narratives were generally seen only as polarizing and requiring choice between them. In more recent decades, some scholars and activists have worked to bring these narratives into conversation with one another. This class will offer an opportunity to learn more about these developments as they are visible in historical documents and studies, literature and film. Written assignments will provide an opportunity to develop research and analytical skills.
Ylana Miller (Ph.D. Berkeley) is visiting Associate Professor in the Department of History and a graduate of the Duke-UNC Psychoanalytic Institute. She teaches a range of courses on the history of the modern Middle East, including “Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict” as well as “History of Zionism and the State of Israel.” Dr. Miller has published Government and Society in Rural Palestine – 1920-1948 (University of Texas Press), and her current research project is Constructing a Framework: How US-Israeli Relations Defined the Meaning Given to Victory in 1967.
THE EMANCIPATION OF MUSIC (LS 280.14)
Larry Todd
Thursdays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm (begins January 12)
We take for granted the familiar instrumental music that resounds in our concert halls - “classical” tradition of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms, for example. But the creation, of say, Haydn's Farewell Symphony (1772), Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (1808) or Chopin's Preludes (1839) raised, each in its own way, serious questions about the very meaning and purpose of music.
For centuries, music and the other arts had been viewed as imitative in nature; that is, a musical composition did not stand alone but was thought to depend on (and reflect) some external object or meaning. In the latter eighteenth century a fundamental shift away from this imitative theory occurred. Music no longer acted as an imitative art; rather, it became, in the aesthetic of the romantics, an expressive agent that generated its own meaning. And, music took on more and more independence, until, in the nineteenth century, it emerged as an absolute art. These developments paralleled, in their broad outlines, the creation of our familiar canon of concert-hall music.
This course traces how music won its emancipation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The approach will combine a study of well-known works by major composers from Haydn to Brahms with broad readings in aesthetics and criticisms to set these works in their historical contexts. This approach will enable the class to define two fundamental questions that bear on the meaning of music: is music a self-sufficient art, or is music a referential art? These provocative questions, though admitting no easy answers, inform attitudes toward music to this day, and are relevant to discussions of a wide variety of music, whether traditional “art” music, jazz, popular music, or film music.
R. Larry Todd, Arts & Sciences Professor and former Chair of the Music Department, has written extensively about music of the nineteenth century. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow of the John Hope Franklin Center and National Humanities Center, he is the author of Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, named best biography of 2003 by the Association of American Publishers. His new biography, Fanny Hensel, the Other Mendelssohn, was released by Oxford University Press in 2010.
THE SELF IN THE WORLD (LS 260.02) **new student requirement**
Dr. Donna Zapf and Dr. Kent Wicker
Thursdays, 6:00 – 9:00 pm (begins January 12)
How have people within Western culture made sense of themselves, their experience, and their place in the world of others? What new insights can we gain on those identities and meanings through disciplinary methodologies of history, the sciences, the arts, or the humanities? How are those concepts influenced by values and contexts – whether of family, region, religion, class, race, or gender – that we inherit from our culture?
In this introductory course for the MALS degree, we will read provocative texts ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, in order to discuss aspects of the modern self and what we take for granted when we think of individual identity, subjectivity, authenticity, and autonomy. Our exploration of human identity and the relationship of self to others will be informed by the perspectives of various academic disciplines. Our goal is to explore how scholars think, read, and write, with particular attention to: 1) the critical analysis so vital to graduate level work, and 2) the reading and writing skills necessary for interdisciplinary study.
Class work will include readings, discussion, short papers, and one long research project.
Fall 2011
THE SELF IN THE WORLD (required for all new students)
Donna Zapf and Kent Wicker
Wednesdays, 6:15 8 8:45 pm (LS 260.03) or
Thursdays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm (LS 260.02)
How do people make sense of themselves, their experience, and their place in the world of others? What new insights can we gain on those identities and meanings through the disciplinary methodologies of history, the sciences, the arts, or the humanities? How are those concepts influenced by values and contexts—whether of family, region, religion, class, race, or gender—that we inherit from culture and society?
In this introductory course for the MALS degree, we will read an interdisciplinary range of historical and contemporary texts in order to discuss aspects of the modern self and our preconceptions and differences that arise when we think of individual identity, subjectivity, authenticity, and autonomy. Our exploration of human identity and the relationship of self to others will be informed by the perspectives of various academic disciplines. Our goal is to explore how scholars think, read, and write, with particular attention to: 1) the critical analysis so vital to graduate level work; and 2) the reading and writing skills necessary for interdisciplinary study.
Class work will include readings, discussion, short papers, and a research project.
DIGITAL DURHAM AND THE NEW SOUTH (LS 290.71)
Trudi Abel
Mondays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm
This course gives students the chance to explore Durham’s past through analog and digital archival material. Through digitizing historical and cultural materials and researching in archives and public repositories, students will create new interpretations of Durham’s history and present these to a wider public through new media. The course will focus on the social, cultural and economic history of Durham in the late 19th through the early 20th centuries. Students will use tools such as Google Earth, Excel, and blogging tools to explore the history of Durham as an urban space. No prior technology experience is expected. Course participants will submit weekly responses to the readings on our course blog, contribute to class discussions, develop an introductory assignment on a primary source, a research project proposal, and create a final research project/paper with a new media component.
Trudi Abel is a cultural historian who directs the Digital Durham Project (http://digitaldurham.duke.edu) at Duke, a web repository for primary sources relating to Durham from the post-Civil War decades to the present. She has worked extensively with several research assistants from the MALS program to transcribe materials for the Digital Durham web site. She has also taught Consumer Culture in America for the MALS program.
THE LEGEND OF KING ARTHUR IN LITERATURE AND FILM (LS 280.76)
Ann Marie Rasmussen
Mondays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm
The legend of the “Once and Future King,” Arthur of Camelot, has for centuries fascinated poets, artists, writers, and most recently filmmakers. In this course students view or read a selection of different versions of the Arthur legend, beginning with modern films and working backwards through time, until, in the final week of class, they read the earliest surviving, sixth-century witness to the legend. In investigating this body of material, students will engage with its re-creation, mutation, and transmission over time. Focusing on the themes of leadership, gender, and love, students explore how each work understands Arthur and his milieu and the implications of each unique vision for the political and cultural worlds in which it originates. Students will approach these questions through discussions of both content and form, considering the ways in which the formal aspects of the works shape meaning. Students will improve their skills in reading and interpretation by grappling with older texts that challenge modern expectations of fiction, acquire a deeper knowledge of the wealth of Arthurian texts from the past, acquire a more nuanced understanding of the medieval world, and gain an appreciation for the modernity of present-day adaptations on the Arthurian legend.
Course requirements include seminar participation, a variety of formal and informal writing assignments, and graded papers (TBA but including close readings and research).
Required Texts:
Parzival and Titurel by Wolfram von Eschenbach (Oxford’s World Classics)
The Romance of Arthur by James J. Wilhelm, new expanded edition (Garland Publishing 1994) (=RA). We read a number of selections from this anthology, whose chapters feature excellent introductions.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo. Trans. J. R. R. Tolkien (Ballantine)
Idylls of the King by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Ed. by W. J. Rolfe (Dover)
All other reading assignments will be posted to the electronic course site.
All films are on reserve at Perkins Library and can be viewed there. They are generally available for rent at video outlets as well. We will discuss a selection of the following films: Lancelot du Lac; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Excalibur; The Fisher King; King Arthur.
Ann Marie Rasmussen is a professor of the German Studies at Duke University, where she has taught since 1988. She received her B.A. from the University of Oregon and her Ph.D. from Yale University. In the spring semester 2011 she was Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Visiting Professor of Medieval Studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Dr. Rasmussen's scholarship and teaching focus on medieval studies and gender studies. She is the author of Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature (1997), co-editor of Medieval Woman’s Song (2002, with A. Klinck) and co-author of Ladies, Whores, and Holy Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany, with Introductory Essays (2010, with S. Westphal-Wihl). She has published articles and essays on a wide variety of topics, including “Wandering Genitalia: Sexuality and the Body in German Culture between the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity” (2009), and she is currently researching late medieval cultures of obscenity and writing a book with the provisional title “Sex on Show: Medieval Sexual Badges.”
THE UNCONVENTIONAL MEMOIR (LS 280.72) **not open to new students**
Margaret Sartor
Tuesdays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm
The memoir is an increasingly diverse and evolving genre. This course is for students who want to write their story, to explore forms outside the conventional chronological and autobiographical narrative while also reaching for the highest standards of literary achievement. The goal of the course is two-fold: 1) Students will write stories out of their own history, attempting to tell those stories in ways that are personally meaningful but also able to communicate to a larger audience; 2) Via assigned readings and class discussion, students will become conversant in the larger issues and challenges of the memoir genre.
While working on their own memoir projects, students will examine the ways in which other writers have used essays, books, graphic novels, and even photobooks to tell personal stories. Over the course of the semester, students will explore questions of voice, point-of-view, subjectivity, truth and responsibility. Students are expected to look hard at the ways in which they define themselves and at the personal, social and cultural influences and iconography that shape and communicate personal identity. During the first half of the semester, only the teacher will read and critique student stories. In the second half of the semester, students will share their writing for critique by their peers within the class. Revisions are expected. At the end of the semester, students will turn in their best work for a final grade.
Each class meeting will involve a group discussion of the reading assigned for that week. Each week students will write a short response to the reading and two students will be asked to formulate questions and comments in advance to begin the class discussion. Some weeks, the instructor will make visual presentations of photographic books. These will complement the reading and the specific topics under consideration that week. In the latter part of the semester, students will be asked to read or present their own writing for discussion. Class participation is essential to a positive evaluation.
Margaret Sartor currently teaches at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Her critically acclaimed Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s (Bloomsbury USA, 2006) is a memoir of adolescence based on the diaries she kept as a girl. Her photographs – which address home, family, and personal identity – have been published in a number of books and magazines, including In Their Mother’s Eyes: Women Photographers and Their Children, A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South, Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, The Oxford American and The New Yorker. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, as well as other collections. As an editor, she has published three books: Gertrude Blum: Bearing Witness, edited by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris, Their Eyes Meeting the World, by Robert Coles and edited by Margaret Sartor, and What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney, edited by Margaret Sartor and co-edited by Geoff Dyer. What Was True was chosen as one of the “Top Ten Photography Books of 1999” by The Village Voice. She has curated exhibitions of photography at the International Center for Photography in New York, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TERRORISM (LS 290.34)
Martin Miller
Wednesdays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm
The purpose of this course is to explore the historical roots of modern political violence. Contrary to popular belief, terrorism is not a recent phenomenon traceable to extremist factions or pathological individuals. It has, in fact, been an integral part of the policies of many governments and societies around the globe for centuries. Terrorist organizations can be found in ancient Israel, twelfth century Islam, and fourteenth century India. Theories of achieving a more just society through the tactical use of violence abound in Western Europe long before the French revolution among both authorities in power and insurgents who desire it. In the nineteenth century, however, modern terrorism emerged out of these earlier traditions and coalesced into the structure and ideology with which we are familiar today.
The course will proceed chronologically. We shall first read portions of the ancient and medieval discussions of "tyrannicide," and analyze the earliest insurgent groups dedicated to terrorism. The core of the course will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the emphasis on trends in Western Europe, Russia and America. Distinctions will be made throughout between state terrorism and insurgent movements dedicated to the use of violence. The course will conclude with an analysis of the American terrorist organizations of the 1960s and of the subsequent rise of Islamic jihadi violence.
Readings will include both sources (Voices of Terror edited by Walter Laqueur) and authorities (The History of Terrorism by Gerard Chaliand) mainly in the period between the French Revolution and 9/11. Students will also view a number of documentary films, including the secretly produced “Underground” (1974) in which members of the radical Weather Underground seek to examine and explain their terrorist acts. There will be two papers, one at midterm and on at term’s end.
Martin Miller received his Ph.D. in Russian history at the University of Chicago and has taught at Stanford University and the New School for Social Research in addition to conducting visiting seminars in Paris, Venice, and Istanbul. He has been a member of the History Department at Duke since 1970. Dr. Miller has conducted archival research in Russia and Western Europe, and has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including two from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published four books and numerous articles on the revolutionary movement in Russia, including Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (Yale, 1998), which has been translated into French and Spanish. Dr. Miller is currently completing a new book on the foundations of modern political violence.
CRIME AND THE CITY (LS 290.88)
Susan Thorne
Thursdays, 6:15 – 8:45 pm
The enduring power of Charles Dickens’ representation of urban crime was recently on display in the critical response to The Wire, an HBO television series hailed as the “greatest television series of all time.” Critics on both shores of the Atlantic have described the series, which aired 2002-2007, as “Dickens for the 21st Century.” The series is a graphic representation of the horrendous violence generated by the war on drugs in Baltimore, Maryland, the “murder capital” of the United States. It is difficult to imagine a world further removed from the Victorian nostalgia of the Dickens presented in Masterpiece Theatre much less Hollywood productions of Oliver Twist and Bleak House, the two novels to which the series is most often compared. And yet, again, Dickensian references abound. The New York Times, reviewing the series on its op-ed page no less, even went so far as to claim that “If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch The Wire, unless, that is, he was already writing for it.”
This course embraces the comparative invitation in these reviews. It juxtaposes tales about crime in two cities separated by two centuries of time and cultural space: early Victorian London and present day Baltimore, Maryland. What are the similarities as well as differences in the representation of crime in The Wire’s Baltimore and Dickensian London? Liberal Studies is the perfect setting for an inquiry that is by necessity interdisciplinary. We will be utilizing the techniques of literary and media studies, comparing the genres as well as the motifs that structure Dickens’ novels and the television series written by Ed Burns and David Simon. We will also be locating these texts in a range of contexts. These include the Victorian history of crime, policing, and penal philosophies and contemporary criminology; journalism (David Simon, like Charles Dickens, learned about crime on the streets by working as a newspaper reporter); and childhoods on the streets. In addition to these comparisons, we will also try to account for Dickens’ enduring relevance, the longevity of Dickensian ways of seeing crime, childhood, and the city. Why—and how—does Dickens continue to matter?
Requirements:
Students will view selected episodes of The Wire while reading selections from Charles Dickens’ journalism and Oliver Twist. In addition to these primary sources, students will survey interdisciplinary scholarship relating to urban history and urban sociology, the history of crime and criminology, newspaper history, history of childhood and education, and, finally, literary criticism and media studies.
Students will submit weekly paragraph to page reactions to each week’s reading assignments on discussion board forums (10%). Students will also write three short papers: a 3-5 page book review (20%); a 5-7 page historical analysis of a Dickens’ novel (30%); and a 7-10 page paper on Dickensian aspects of The Wire (40%).
Susan Thorne received her Ph.D. in History in 1990 at the University of Michigan and joined the History Department at Duke University in 1991. She is a social historian focusing on Great Britain in the so-called modern period (from the eighteenth century through the present day). Dr. Thorne is particularly interested in how ordinary men and women are affected by the operations of power in their everyday lives. Industrialization and imperial expansion figure prominently in her work. Her book Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th Century England (Stanford University Press, 1999) explores the foreign missionary movement's influence on popular perceptions of empire and race in nineteenth-century England. She is now working on the social history of orphaned children in Britain and the empire from the eighteenth through the early twentieth century.