What does it mean to have not just a career, but a career that is also a calling, a vocation? How does someone come to realize that they have found their calling? What moral concerns or challenges arise when one becomes committed to pursuing their calling as a leader ambitious for the good, whether religious, political, or professional? How do the demands of a calling affect the way in which someone seeking to fulfill their ambition to do good relates to others, whether those with whom they work, those they are responsible for, or those they love? Is it possible to lead well without having a calling, and if so, what does such leadership look like?
We will explore these questions through a quarter-long deep dive into a single novel, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Eliot’s characters – an ambitious young scientist/doctor hoping to make a major discovery, a wealthy woman dissatisfied with her life of luxury and yearning to find an outlet for her idealism, a banker convinced he is an instrument of God’s will, an intellectual writing a book he believes will make history called The Key to all Mythologies, an overseer trying to lead both workers and his feckless boss away from ruin and toward a better-managed farm – struggle throughout the novel with fascinating ethical dilemmas of many different kinds, all revolving around the basic question – just emerging in Victorian England, and still with us today — of how to commit, stay true to, and exercise ethical leadership in an uncertain world.
Our focus will be on Eliot’s story and the scenarios she presents in which characters face (or evade) ethical choices. To help us better understand how the characters, the narrator, and we ourselves come to grips with these situations, we will also read some short philosophical works about ethics.
The end of the world is one of the most durable of mankind’s obsessions. From prophetic texts of the ancient world to today’s fascination with zombie plagues, environmental disaster, and nuclear winter, the genre of apocalypse has proven an extraordinarily fertile way to give expression to religious, moral, political, and economic beliefs and anxieties. In this course we will explore what is both fearful and alluring about catastrophe on an unimaginable scale, as we read and view some paradigmatic apocalyptic works across a wide historical range. The course will focus on close attention to the aesthetics of individual works, locating those works in their historical contexts, and the theoretical analysis of the texts’ motivating concerns.
The project of nation building, of bringing a national identity into existence, is often regarded as a defining aspiration of many ancient and modern epic poems. Yet one of the many surprising things about Homer and his successors is how little nationalism their texts embody, in the sense of dehumanizing or “othering” those who do not share the ethnocultural identity whose heroes and great deeds their poems celebrate and memorialize. This course will examine some of the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Derek Walcott, as well as some works of history and philosophy, and draw out the ways in which compassion and connection manifest across lines of identity.
This course presents America’s major writers of short fiction in the 20th century. We will begin with Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” in 1905 and proceed to the masters of High Modernism, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Porter, Welty, Ellison, Nabokov, on through the next generation, O’Connor, Pynchon, Roth, Mukherjee, Coover, Carver, and end with more recent work by Danticat, Tan and the microfictionists. Our initial effort with each text will be close reading, from which we will move out to consider questions of ethnicity, gender and psychology.
This course offers an introduction to the intellectual, social, and political transformations that are reflected in the astounding explosion of artistic creativity that occurred in Florence in the years 1400-1540.
Sad, but true. Many folks who enjoy reading fiction, drama, and memoirs feel considerably less comfortable with poetry. Our course will address this anxiety head on. Through close-textual analyses and strategic contextual sorties, we will examine and experience why poetry has provided pleasure to peoples throughout human history. Our close-reading will engage traditional Forms-ballad, sonnet, villanelle, lyric, epic. Contextually we will explore cultures as disparate as Homeric Greece, ancient Tamil and Tang and Popul Vuh and Hebrew civilizations, and Native American and modernist works from the U.S. Our course will also foreground student writing, by way of two analytic papers, one poem of each person’s crafting, and individual tutorials.
This course offers an introduction to advanced study in the Humanities across a range of fields, including poetry, philosophy, fiction, and film. We will have three main goals. The first is to develop analytical skills common to the Humanities as well as those specific to each of our four fields, as we explore lyric poetry’s density of meaning, the subtle conceptual distinctions on which philosophy depends, narrative form and point of view in short fiction, and the roles of the camera and editing in film. Our second goal will be to move from the exercise of those skills in the give and take of conversation to their deployment in writing. Rather than one long term paper, the course requires three short papers, each of which will focus on a different field and its modes of analysis. To add focus to this wide disciplinary range, each of our texts will examine questions of ethics and identity. Our third goal will be to expand our ways of thinking about those central humanistic topics, as they take shape in relation to the different demands and opportunities of our four fields.
