Core Course-Required of all students

450.749     Exploring the Liberal Arts: Ways of Knowing
What do we mean by the “liberal arts”–and why are they more important today than ever before? How do the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and arts compare and contrast in terms of their methods of acquiring, analyzing, and conveying knowledge? Are the “ways of knowing” for each discipline incremental or sudden—and why or when? In each class session, a leading Hopkins professor from literature, history, physics, psychology, and other departments discusses one of his or her books, articles, or works-in-progress. This course is required of all new students. For a list of specific topics and faculty, please contact the MLA Associate Program Chair.

Course Offerings

450.602     Opera: Drama Through Music
How does opera work dramatically? How does the text prefigure the music, and the music reflect that text? This seminar explores a varied group of operas from the point of view of their dramatic construction. Four of the operas are based upon prior literary sources: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835, Sir Walter Scott), Bizet’s Carmen (1875, Mérimée), Verdi’s Otello (1887, Shakespeare), and Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954, Henry James). A fifth opera, Mozart’s Così fan tutte (1790), will be studied for comparison, as an example of an opera without specific literary antecedent.
 

450.605     The Media and the Cold War
This course explores the complex relationship between politics, film, and television during the often frightening and unflattering years of the Cold War (1947–86). Students examine such topics as the role of the media in socialization, building patriotism, and rethinking the arms race. They also discuss how Hollywood became either the witting or unwitting voice of both political authority and dissent—and a major battleground during the McCarthy era. Films for class analysis include The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Manchurian Candidate, On the Beach, and The Cuban Missile Crisis.
 

450.609     American Art and Literature of the Nineteenth Century: From Yankees to Cosmopolitans
Ever since the Mayflower docked at Plymouth, Americans have measured themselves against the yardstick of European civilization—whether rejecting it altogether, clarifying their distinctness from it, or striving to become part of it. Students follow the evolution of American cultural identity in discussions of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Twain’s Innocents Abroad, and James’s The American, as well as paintings by the Peales, Cole, Homer, Eakins, Whistler, and Sargent. In doing so they note how the optimistic, independent, and self-confident Yankee gave way to the introspective, critical, certainly sadder, and perhaps wiser Cosmopolitan.
 

450.612     Great Ethical Philosophers
Are there absolute moral laws which dictate how one ought to behave, or is correct behavior relative to ever-varying circumstances? Is there a type of life that is best for all human beings? Ought one to promote solely one’s own self-interest, or does one have a duty to sacrifice for others? Students discuss how these and other ethical questions have been addressed by Plato in the 4th century B.C., Kant in the 18th century, and Nietzsche in the 19th century.

450.614     City, Economy, Community: Baltimore in the Nineteenth Century
Between 1800 and 1900 Baltimore grew from a frontier town with 25,000 people to a big city with 600,000. How did this happen? How did Baltimoreans deal with the tremendous changes that the 19th century thrust upon them? What kind of community emerged from the experience? This course explores Baltimore’s first full century by bringing together different historical approaches: economics and business, architecture and city planning, politics, population, and literature.

450.615     Society, Ethics, and Technology: Changes and Challenges
Contemporary philosophers, social critics, and futurists are concerned that the 21st century will bring unprecedented social and economic chaos, due in part to our rapid technological advances and our indifference to the changes they bring. This course analyzes such issues as the growing gap between "have" and "have-not" nations, depletion of critical resources, and overpopulation in the less-developed countries. Readings include works by Leo Marx, O.B. Hardison, Wendell Berry, Paul Goodman, and others.

450.617     Shakespeare’s Tragedies and History Plays
Why are Shakespeare’s plays more popular today than ever before? What do his tragedies and histories tell us about the Elizabethan Age—and, by comparison, our own? In this course, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and other tragedies are discussed as reflections of the paradox of spiritual victory through literal defeat. Students also explore the value systems and social hierarchy portrayed in such history plays as Richard II, Julius Caesar, and Henry IV (Part I). Finally the class examines the characteristics of the Shakespearean stage and the specific opportunities—as well as demands—that that theatre made on both the playwright and the playgoer.

450.622     History on Stage: European Romantic Drama
The Romantic movement in Europe, beginning in the late 1700s, accomplished a veritable revolution in drama. Authors like Schlegel, Goethe, and Schiller (e.g., William Tell) viewed the stage as a means of teaching national history and rejected the strictures of the classical dramatic "unities" as well as the prohibition against mixing comedy and tragedy. This course considers how authors as different as De Musset, Hugo, Shelley, Byron, and Manzoni incorporated historical research into their plays. Finally students examine the influence of the Romantic theatre on Italian opera (e.g., Rossini’s William Tell) until, by the end of the 19th century, historical topics were supplanted by social realism (e.g., Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana). Videos of selected scenes from the plays and operas supplement class discussion.

450.623     The World of Dante-Part I: Vita Nuova (New Life) and Inferno
On Good Friday of the year 1300, Dante began his visionary voyage in the Netherworld. Before being able to ascend the mountain of Purgatory and hence rise, as a living man, to Paradise, he had to go down within the earth, with Virgil as a guide, to visit Hell and learn about the ways of unredeemable sin. In this course we will study the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy Inferno—accompanying the close reading of the cantos with basic Dante scholarship and minor works by Dante such as the New Life and Letter to Cangrande della Scala. The course’s primary sources include readings from Virgil’s Aenaeid and from T.S. Eliot’s poetry and essays.

450.625     Bioethics: Philosophy and Biomedicine
This course draws upon key concepts in philosophical analysis, particularly ethical theory, to address the myriad of complex moral issues which arise in the biomedical field. Assigned reading includes, therefore, relevant works in philosophy by Aristotle, Kant, and Mill, as well as those by contemporary bioethicists. In this context students discuss such issues as death and dying, in vitro fertilization, human cloning, physician-assisted suicide, and experimentation with humans and animals. 

450.628     The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance—the first major intellectual movement of African Americans—flourished in Harlem and the Mid-Atlantic region between 1900 and 1930. It originated from the now-famous debate about whether the African-American’s best hope for success was a liberal-arts education as W.E.B. DuBois argued, or manual training as Booker T. Washington urged. Though the main focus of the Harlem Renaissance was on literature (e.g., Toomer’s Cane, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and poetry by Hughes, McKay, and Cullen), students also examine parallel developments in music and art.

450.630     American History as Fact and Fiction
Students compare and contrast commonly held interpretations of two notorious Americans—Aaron Burr and Mary Todd Lincoln—from the dual perspectives of the novelist and the biographer. The subjects are viewed within the context of their times in order to discover how perceptions of historical figures and past events often derive from imagination or questionable interpretation. Readings include Vidal’s Burr, Nolan’s Aaron Burr and the American Literary Imagination, Vidal’s Lincoln, and Oates’ With Malice Towards None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln.

450.636     Cultural Eras: The 1950s “Happy Days” or “Dark Ages”
Through the themes of conformity and conflict, this course examines the significant and enduring cultural shifts that took place in American life between 1945 and 1960. Basic images and ideas closely associated with the ’50s are challenged as the course considers a variety of topics from Ike to Elvis to McCarthy, the Beats, the Korean War, the Montgomery bus boycott, I Love Lucy, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, advertising, the Kinsey Report, the Cold War, the changing role of scientists, and the rise of the suburbs. Using interdisciplinary methods, the culture of the ’50s will be examined through history, film, literature, philosophy, television, poetry, and music.
 

450.640     U.S. Political Culture from 1877 to 1929: Inventing Modern America
From the end of Reconstruction (1877) to the beginning of the Great Depression (1929), American society was characterized by major paradoxes like the emergence of a powerful national identity beset by searing conflicts of race, gender, and class. This course explores the development of such cornerstones of modern political culture as industrial corporations, state and Federal bureaucracies, overseas imperialism, widespread migration and immigration, the labor movement, women’s suffrage, and civil rights movements. Students review several films (e.g., Birth of a Nation and Hester Street) and discuss both secondary and primary documents, including works by Theodore Roosevelt, Chief Joseph, Booker T. Washington, Julia Ward Howe, John Dewey, and George Santayana.

450.642 (A and B)     History and Aesthetic of Photography and History and Aesthetics of Contemporary Photography
Two course sequence. The first course provides an examination of major movements, issues, and developments in photography from the beginnings of the medium up to World War II. The second course is an examination of major movements, issues, and developments in photography from World War II up to the present. A student can take the second course without having taken the first.

450.643     Visions of Photography from Romanticism to Postmodernism
Concepts in the development of photography are considered in historical
context and in relationship to the larger sphere of art and literature

450.646     Crime and Punishment in the Literary Imagination of the West
The course analyzes major examples from the “canon” of Western literature and thought which, in a philosophically, culturally, and politically significant way, deals with the notions of crime and guilt and their counterparts, punishment and atonement. From the days of the Bible and of Greek antiquity to the present, the texts under investigation trace violations of the ethical, religious, social, or legal codes of their respective societies and the concomitant forms of rectification, redress, retaliation, retribution, and revenge that these societies hold in store for perpetrators. Texts considered include the Old Testament; major works by Sophocles, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Foucault; and examples from American “death row” poetry.

450.648     Popular Culture
This course provides a chronological overview of American popular culture, beginning in the 19th century with the minstrel show as the first distinctively American form of popular culture, and ending with the late 20th century international “pop culture industry.”

450.650     Cultural Eras: The 1960s
The Sixties. A collage of events, people, sights, sounds, and ideas immediately comes to mind. These powerful visual representations in many ways define the history of the sixties. In this course we will consider the images, memories, history, and legacy of the sixties through an interdisciplinary exploration using literature, art, history, politics, music, and film. Cultural identity is a key issue. Black, white, Vietnamese, astronaut, protester, journalist, soldier, woman, man, young, old, you. How do people see themselves within the context of larger cultural events and changes that many have labeled revolutionary? How did so-called ordinary Americans live their lives? Topics include, but are not limited to, presidential politics, the continuing Cold War, social movements (black power, civil rights, environmentalism, women’s movement), the Vietnam War, the space program, and popular culture (music, film, Barbie).

450.652     Understanding Modern Art
Paintings, prints, and sculptures represent the world as their makers see it. Some artists depict a world that is harmonious and beautiful; some depict a chaotic world; and some show a world that seems unrecognizable. No matter how the world is shown, every artist is attempting to convey complex messages. For millennia, artists communicated using the artistic vocabulary of realism. Then, a little over a hundred years ago, realism was replaced by a plethora of new artistic vocabularies and Modern Art was born. Understanding Modern Art is not a simple process. In the first place, the word “modern” doesn’t mean contemporary. In fact, Modern Art ended in the last decades of the 20th century, when the art world entered the Post-Modern period. In addition, not all artists working in the Modern period created Modern Art (which by definition must be characterized by innovation and social comment). Some artists moved in and out of modernist phases in their work. For example, the paradigmatic 20th century artist, Pablo Picasso, worked in five distinctly different styles, only some of which are modernist. A final complication is that Modern Art encompasses a series of distinct art movements which seem to have little in common with one another. This course surveys the phenomenon of Modern Art, beginning with its immediate 19th century precursors and ending with a quick look at what followed the Modern period. Among the movements to be studied are Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Super-realism, and Post-modernism.

450.653     Success: Wealth, Power, and Marriage in 19th and 20th Century America
Success is an amorphous concept, meaning different things to different people at different times. Business was a common vehicle for success for men in the 19th century. Women had no such option at that time and their success was often measured by whom they married. The 20th century, however, brought increasing pressure on business, challenging its use of wealth and power while opening new opportunities for women. This course will study the changing images of business success in American fiction and film of the 19th and 20th centuries. Readings may include the novels of William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Jack London, Henry James, Tom Wolfe, and others. Films present an equally wide opportunity for study and may include Citizen Kane, Chinatown, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Wall Street, and Disclosure.

450.657     Principles of Jungian Psychology: Film, Folktales and the Fantasies of Dreams
All cultures tell stories that reveal their understanding of life. These folktales arise out of the human unconscious. Jung believed that these stories can be the most direct way to access fundamental principles that shape human existence. This 15-week course will introduce the basic principles of Jungian psychology by using myths, folktales, and modern film to illustrate some of these human dynamics. Jungian psychology is noteworthy in that it primarily focuses on normal human behavior and dynamics. This psychology has been particularly useful to those of us in the second half of life who are integrating and making sense of the meaning and purpose of our existence. We are what we are becoming-not just what has happened to us. This will be a lively class of discussion, play, and storytelling that can change the way you understand your behavior.

450.658     Great Political Philosophers
What gives some persons the right to rule over others? How does legitimate government differ from tyranny? Does everyone have natural rights which must be respected? What is the best form of government? Down through the ages, political philosophers have discussed these and related questions. This course examines the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, and other political thinkers, and will consider their relevance to problems of today.

450.659     Religion and Politics in South Asia
Born of conflict and now locked in regional rivalries, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh share a common heritage. This course examines the processes of both change and continuity in the philosophical, religious, political-economic, and ethnic institutions, which have helped to shape not only the Indian subcontinent, but also the modern world. Special attention is given to such issues as sectarian fundamentalism, ethnic separatism, and national identity.

450.660     Key Themes in Comparative Politics
The course will be organized around three key themes: how people organize for politics, the power of ideas and institutions in politics, and role of identity in shaping politics. First, students will discuss agency and organization; that is, the ability and inability to act politically both individually and collectively. Students will discuss different approaches that explain why people do or do not act collectively. Examples are drawn from studies of civil rights, peasant resistance, and labor organization. Second, students discuss how agency and political outcomes, in general, are mediated by ideas and institutions. That is, how does the social and intellectual context within which groups are situated affect their ability to define collective goals and act upon them. Examples are drawn from political economy, studies of democratization, and supranationalism. Third, after considering these issues, students will discuss identity; that is; those politically important ascriptive and descriptive categories which identify “us” as a particular type of political agent. Students will consider class, ethnicity, and nation as sources of political identity and examine the impact of these identities on politics.

450.663     Putting Maryland on the Map: The Cartographic and Geological history of Maryland.
With the new Maryland State Archives Atlas of Historical Maps of Maryland as a basic text, supplemented with reading from Simon Winchester’s The Map that Changed the World, and Miles Harvey's The Island of Lost Maps, a True Story of Cartographic Crime, this course will examine the history and importance of mapping of Maryland as means of understanding the sovereignty and economic development of America’s seventh state to ratify the U. S. Constitution. Included will be one or more field trips to experience first hand the finest collections of Maryland maps in public ownership.

450.672     The Idea of Home: Interior Spaces, Inner States
At the turn of the last century, while Freud and William James were exploring the mind, writers and painters began to use images of domestic space to represent the inner self. This course considers the relationship between the physical and psychological sense of home in fiction by Poe, Proust, and Huysmans, as well as the ideas of the Art Nouveau movement and painting by Degas, Vuillard, and Matisse. Students also discuss whether more recent explorations of inner states reflected, for example, in the fiction of Tyler and the painting of Rothko echo the fin-de-siecle retreat from urban invasiveness of the late-19th century, or suggest a more serious disharmony between the individual and Western society.

450.674     Modern American Fiction: Search for Identity
By the late 20th century, American fiction had liberated itself from English and European models in both subject and form. Rather than writing about just white, middle-class men, American novelists began to create working-class and marginalized characters. Students explore how our search for identity in a changing world is reflected in such original novels as Doctorow’s Ragtime, Dos Passos’s The Big Money, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Morrison’s Song of Solomon—and consider their impact on current social and cultural issues.

450.679     Shaping Character in Shakespeare’s Plays
This course will consider Shakespeare as a playwright in his own time with particular attention to his remarkable innovations in creating psychological dimensions for his dramatic characters. In lectures, readings, and discussion we will examine early modern concepts of psychology, as well as works by Plutarch and Montaigne that influenced Shakespeare’s approach to personality. Several plays well be analyzed closely, including Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Hamlet.

450.685     Encountering Islam/Islamic Encounters
This course will explore Islam as both a religion and a polity, considering critical moments of cultural encounter, such as Jerusalem in the 7th century, Spain in the time of Maimonides, the Crusades, the Fall of Constantinople, and pluralism in India today. Major architectural monuments, such as Haghia Sophia in Istanbul, Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Great Mosque in Cordoba, Alhambra in Granada, and the Taj Mahal in Agra, will be illustrated with slides to focus discussion on cultural meanings, then and now, as well as issues of cultural equity. Readings will be drawn from a range of authors, both historical and contemporary, to present a diversity of perspectives.

450.686     The American Revolution: Its History and Legacy
This course will explore the roots of the American Revolution, comparing the perspectives of England and the colonies on the causes, comparing the positions of Tories and patriots with the colonies, exploring the role of diplomacy during revolutionary years, following the evolution of government from confederation to a constitutional republic, reviewing the war years, and discovering the legacy of the revolutionary experience on the social, religious, economic, and political fabric of the new nation.

450.702     The History of the Book in the West: 400-1550
This course explores the development of the book from its inception in the Late Roman Empire (the 4th and 5th centuries) to the dawn of printing with Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type at Mainz in 1450. Students consider the book as a product of "new" technologies (e.g., the invention of moveable type), changing economic and social conditions (e.g., the rise of vernacular texts for a literate nobility), and religious and secular practices (e.g., books for monasteries, universities, and private houses). Through this course, students gain an appreciation of objects that are both key historical documents and very often, consummate works of art. Note: Since this course draws upon the resources of the Department of Manuscripts at The Walters Art Gallery, some class sessions will be held at the museum.

450.703     Theatre as a Force in Social and Political Change
Western drama has historically anticipated, accompanied, or commented upon revolutionary social and political change—helping us to understand its purpose, nature, and dynamics. In this course students learn how The Oresteia, King Lear, and Goethe’s Faust, for example, depict change on a grand scale from the old order to the new, while plays by modern dramatists (e.g., Ibsen, Brecht, and Miller) attempt to challenge and change an audience’s inner self and world view.

450.704     Plato, Geometry, and Islamic Art
Approaching the study of art through the figural tradition privileges the arts of Western Europe, India, and China. Less well known to many of us are the arts of the Islamic world. Using an experimental approach that combines literary criticism and philosophy with art history and an exploration of geometry, students will engage in various two-dimensional constructions to understand experientially aspects of Islamic art that inform a beauty of form, pattern, and structure. Readings will include sections from Plato’s Timaeus, commentaries by Aristotle, and several Neoplatonist writers, as well as philosophical writings by later Arab and Persian authors.

450.705     Art Collectors and Collecting
Using the museums of the Washington/Baltimore area as classroom, this course traces a dual path through the history of Art (particularly Renaissance to Modern painting) and the history of art collecting in the United States. The National Gallery will provide an overview of art history, and the Corcoran, Clark, Phillips, Freer, Hirschorn, Walters, and Cone collections will provide case studies. Issues of taste, who and what influence it, and the impact of private collections and the art museums that became their legacy of the development of American culture will be addressed. Particular attention will be paid to the choices made by individual collectors exploring the meaning and relevance of the works of art they selected to their own lives and also to the larger picture of American history during their lifetimes.

450.709     The World of Dante
As distant as late 20th-century America may seem from 14th-century Europe, the work of Italy’s greatest poet reveals universal insights into an individual’s political and moral obligations with respect to both the human city and the "City of God." These and other issues are explored within the historical context of early Renaissance Italy, as well as the classical and religious traditions (e.g., Virgil and Augustine) upon which Dante drew. Student discussion focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of Dante’s major works: The Divine Comedy (sections from Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise), The New Life (Dante’s account of his love for Beatrice), and On Monarchy (Dante’s political philosophy).

450:713     Shakespeare and the Film: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
This seminar will examine modern adaptation of Shakespearean tragedy in English, American, Russian, and Japanese films. Emphasis will be on the film as a medium for performing Shakespeare in our own time, and on the importance of Shakespeare’s plays to the East as well as to the West. In addition to considering the influence of native traditions on the interpretation of Shakespeare (such as that of the Kabuki theatre on the Japanese film), the seminar will analyze the styles and cinematic techniques of individual directors.

450.714     Progress and the American Environment
Free-flowing rivers, bountiful wildlife, and sublime vistas of distant mountains? Or unlimited energy, tidy neighborhoods, and economic prosperity? Unrestricted in what we can do with our own land or inhibited by regulations designed to protect the common good? This course examines American cultural attitudes toward wilderness and nature as they have evolved through history and are expressed today in social and political decisionmaking. Through historical case studies and a series of guest presentations involving such topics as the damming of wild rivers, land use for national parks or energy development, the national obsession with green lawns and lush gardens, disposal of the waste of an affluent society, and the challenge of invasive species, we will explore how cultural perspectives and faith in technological improvement influence resource use, representations of nature, and images of progress. Ideals for “beauty” and “perfection,” for example, shape how nature is depicted by artists and photographers just as it shapes representations of nature in zoos, aquaria, and television documentaries.

450.718     Faulkner’s Fiction: Beneath the Southern Façade
Although Faulkner’s fiction can be viewed as the historical culmination of works about the American South, it should also be placed in the larger artistic context of Shakespeare, Balzac, Melville, Twain, Conrad, Dickens, and Joyce. This course explores the development of Faulkner’s psychological themes and innovative techniques in representative short stories, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses.

450.719     The American Short Story
Of all genres in American literature, the short story explores most profoundly and directly the complex issues of culture, gender, class and race. Students examine thematic and technical developments from Irving’s "Rip Van Winkle" And Hawthorne’s "Rappaccini’s Daughter" to works as diverse as Wharton’s "Roman Fever," Faulkner’s "That Evening Sun," and Baldwin’s "Sonny’s Blues." Finally they discuss short fiction by Marylanders John Barth, Josephine Jacobsen, and Anne Tyler-and contemporary examples of the "short-short story."

450.720     American and British Poets from the Romantics to the Present
This course will examine the development of modernism in Anglo-American poetry while focusing on close readings of individual poems. Students will discuss Romantic concepts of transcendence in Wordsworth and Keats, Victorian skepticism in Arnold and Browning, and 20th-century ideas of alienation in selected works from the following group: Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Millay, Plath, Atwood, Rich, Dove, Soyinka, Ondaatje, Li-Young Lee, and Heaney. The class will include small–as well as large-group discussions.

450.727     Civilization and Its Discontents
Since the 18th century, a number of leading thinkers have argued that civilization itself, from its earliest beginnings in urban agricultural settlements, is fundamentally flawed; that such societies contain the seeds of their own destabilization, whether in the form of an unending conflict between rich and poor, or a tendency to render the individual neurotic. Are these assertions about civilization, in fact, true? Do they characterize only modern civilization? Or do they reflect problems inherent in the human condition—with or without civilization? To address these and related questions, students discuss Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Rousseau’s Emile, Becker’s The Denial of Death, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, DeLillo’s Underworld, and other works.

450:731     American Composers of the 20^th Century: Ives, Gershwin, Copland, and Bernstein
The musical legacy of this quartet of composers is, simply put, the notion that Americans can and have produced an art music competitive with that of their European counterparts. Classes first focus on the coming of age of the American composer and, afterward, study the art of four individuals whose contribution to music in America is as yet unmeasured. Although students examine the historical context of the music of Ives, Gershwin, Copland, and Bernstein, primary emphasis is on their melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, contrapuntal, and formal aspects.

450.736     Romanticism in Music
So overwhelming was the contribution of the musical romantics of the nineteenth century that over half the repertoire of the major symphony orchestras, major opera houses, and major recitalists of our time consists of “romantic” music. This course features an overview of the romantics through detailed study of canonic works. While the aesthetic conflicts of the romantic age will be considered, the course emphasizes the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, textual, and formal stylistic traits that make the romantics what they are. Texts for the course consist of the music itself. Students are advised to purchase recordings.

450.737     Culture, Communications, and Technology
This course explores, in historical perspective, the emergence of new ways of receiving, communicating, and recording information, which have formed the basis of the Information Age. The class examines media as diverse as writing, photography, cinema, television, and computers. Students discuss attempts to look more deeply into nature in order to transmit information by means of the telescope, microscope, radio, and Internet. Films and videos supplement readings by Plato, Galileo, Alpers, Boorstin, McLuhan, Sontag, and others.

450:740     Film and Public Memory
Both the feature film and the film documentary have the power to shape public perceptions of key historical events and individuals in U.S. history and culture. This course examines the film as a form of public history replacing "real" history with a constructed, mediated version that more often reflects current controversies and cultural dramas through an exploration of the past. We will explore the presentation of historical figures like Bonnie and Clyde, the wars (Dr. Strangelove, Platoon), analyze films that depict the nation’s past (John Ford’s west in The Searchers), and examine visions and perceptions of the future embodied in futuristic films like Star Wars.

450.742     Gilgamesh: The World’s First Epic
An examination of the development of both the character of Gilgamesh and the composition of epic narrative in ancient Mesopotamia, beginning with the earliest Sumerian Gilgamesh stories of the third millennium B.C. The bulk of the course will consist of a close reading in English of the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic, focusing on its concerns with homosocial bonding, human sexuality, and mortality. Some attention will be paid to the influence of Gilgamesh on Greek epic, and the reception of Gilgamesh in the modern world since its recovery in the late 19th century.

450.743     The Idea of Freedom
Since the time of the Greeks, Western thinkers have been deeply concerned with the issue of whether human beings are merely cogs in an impersonal cosmic machine over which they have no influence, or whether they can control their individual destinies in some way. Students consider this perennial conflict between determinism and free will by examining philosophical, theological, literary, and psychological writings by such thinkers as Sophocles, Aristotle, Augustine, Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Gide, and Skinner.

450.745     King Arthur in Legend and Literature
After reviewing early evidence for King Arthur, students discuss "the Matter of Britain," the stories and legends surrounding Arthurian figures that appear in Welsh tradition and French romance. In addition to reading the romances of Chretien de Troyes and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, students investigates the appropriation of the Arthurian story in subsequent literature, including works by Tennyson, T.H. White, and recent writers.

450.750     The Artificial Human in Science, Myth, and Literature
The changing concept of the "artificial human" sheds light on our view of human nature and its relationship to science and myth. Known in contemporary culture by various names (robot, android, and replicant), the artificial human has achieved a measure of possibility and reality in recent times. The works of philosophers (John Searle), writers (Isaac Asimov), and filmmakers (Ridley Scott) will guide the study of the evolution of the artificial human since World War II.

450.751     The Evolution of Modern Music
This course will examine the changes that occurred in musical thought, circa 1890-1914, by considering representative works of first echelon composers. These will be analyzed stylistically, meaning the focus of the course will be the language of music: melody, rhythm, harmony, form, timbre, and so on. The philosophical/aesthetic changes that brought the changes into being will also be discussed the focus will be music itself and the new craft(s) that set into play the whole notion of "modern" music.
 

450.753     The Idea of the South in American Literature
The American South continues to cast a powerful mystique—though its meaning can vary considerably. Whose version of the South is recorded? How do we even define “the South”? What racial, sexual, and cultural tensions lie behind the fabled magnolia trees, white-pillared mansions, and mint juleps? Since literature has always captured the complex realities beneath deceptive appearances, this seminar explores such questions in works by Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Toni Morrison, and others.

450.754     Writing Systems of the World: Origins, Forms and Functions
An investigation of the phenomenon of writing, the circumstances of its invention, and its development and spread. We will attempt to define the difference between writing and other semiotic systems, and then explore various non-alphabetic (cuneiform, Egyptian, Minoan, Maya, Chinese) and alphabetic (Semitic, Greek, Roman, Indian, Korean) systems of writing, as well some recently invented writing systems (Cherokee, Vai).

450.755     Evil From Greek Tragedies to Gothic Tales
Writers of all genres and periods have been fascinated by the motives and manifestations of evil, as well as individual strategies for combating it and artistic implications of expressing it. In reading representative works from Greek tragedies to Gothic tales, we will consider the definition, nature, and operation of evil; the causes or enabling factors of evil (personal and historical); the consequences of evil (e.g., suffering, revenge, personal growth); the strategies for characters—and readers—to handle evil and the implications of writing about evil for literary form (e.g., positive and negative effects on characterization, structure, and tone). Works for discussion include Euripides’ Medea, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and short fiction by Poe, Hawthorne, and James.

450.756     What is History?
How do historians evaluate evidence and draw conclusions about the past? How persuasive is the thesis of Simon Schama's Dead Certainties that "the asking of questions and the relating of narratives need not ... be mutually exclusive forms of historical representation," and that history ultimately must be "a work of the imagination"? After probing these and other issues, and writing their own 'histories' based upon the document packets, students focus on Allen Weinstein's Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case to discuss whether historians can ever determine "the truth" no matter how rich the evidence. This course is intended to be an introduction to the resources and tools for history available on the internet and the World Wide Web, as well as a reflective exercise on the meaning of history.

450.757     Women at the Dawn of History
Women appear in the earliest documents of history, dating back to the invention of writing around 3100 B.C. This course examines the condition and roles of elite and ordinary working women, as portrayed in the literary, religious, legal, and administrative records of the ancient Mesopotamians (Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians) from 3100 B.C. until the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 B.C. Students discuss such topics as marriage and the family, harem life, sacred prostitution, goddesses, and women in the workplace. Readings about the ancient world, modern feminist theory, and gender studies include Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy, Frymer-Kensky’s In the Wake of the Goddess, and Dalley’s Myths from Mesopotamia.

450.758     The Idea of the City: From Tribal Village to Regional Metropolis
This course focuses on the history and future of the city in America with emphasis on the growing dichotomy between the desire for dispersed settlement and the need to conserve available resources. Students explore the proposition that the economic and political units of tomorrow will be regional city-states like Raleigh-Durham and Baltimore-Washington. They also discuss examples of cities like Baltimore and Cleveland that have revived themselves as traditional "cities" with long-established geographical boundaries. Guest lecturers include public officials and others who have helped to shape urban public policy.

450.759     The Art of the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages—from the death of the last Roman Emperor in 476 to the dawn of the Italian Renaissance in the early fourteenth century–was characterized by Byzantine icons, Carolingian manuscripts, and Romanesque sculpture. How did a distinctively Christian art grow from pagan roots? How did Medieval art develop and diverge over time in both the East and the West? What transcendent values unite medieval art whenever and however it appeared? Students discuss these and related questions in order to explore how a revolutionary new belief shaped a millennium of material culture. This course will meet at the Walters Art Museum and be based extensively on its rich medieval holdings, which rank second in the US only to the MET in NYC.

450.760     Beethoven and His Age
Beethoven’s profound influence on the music of succeeding generations is as yet unmeasured. The main focus in this course is analyzing works from all periods of Beethoven’s life in terms of melody, rhythm, harmony, and other aspects of musical style. Attention is also devoted to those contemporary developments—such as the French Revolution—which affected Beethoven’s sensibility and made possible his appearance as a radically new kind of musician.

450.764     Medicine in the Ancient Near Eastern and Classic Worlds
This seminar examines the practices of medicine in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel, as well as classical Greece and Rome. The primary emphasis is on early ideas about health and disease. Students discuss such issues as the practice of surgery, methods of hygiene, knowledge of contagion, definitions of illness, and concepts of ritual purity. Readings include primary texts surviving from ancient Near Eastern documents (e.g., Egyptian papyri and Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets), as well as the Hippcratic treatises and other medical literature from the Greco-Roman world.

450.765     The Politics and Culture of the Holocaust: A Paradigm of Genocide
This course examines genocide through a study of the Holocaust, both as a paradigm of state supported mass destruction and as a unique catastrophe that continues to generate prodigious amounts of literature in such fields as sociology, philosophy, psychology, fiction, and theology. To understand better a writer’s dilemma in trying to communicate horrors that defy imagination and reason, students discuss Wiesel’s Night, Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Fink’s A Scrap of Time, Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, and other works. The class also analyzes films such as Imsdorf’s Indelible Shadows and the video of the Wannsee Conference.

450.766     Literature and Science
Although literature and science represent different disciplines, they also evidence startling and increasingly significant relationships. Even basic literary categories—like narration, genre, and metaphor— have been profoundly affected by both scientific methodology (e.g., experiment and objectivity) and specific scientific fields like evolution, artificial intelligence, and chaos theory. Students discuss essays by Matthew Arnold, Alfred North Whitehead, I. A. Richards, and others to discover their importance for such authors as H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Don DeLillo.

450.767     Black and White in 19th-Century American Fiction
Historians have described slavery as America’s original sin, a period from which time will never fully distance us. This course examines the representation of slavery through a series of intertwined, contrasting perspectives in American fiction preceding the Civil War. We will be listening to different voices—those of blacks and whites, and men and women—as they talk about a common problem whose legacy is very much with us. The course will have two main units, on the sentimental tradition and slave revolt. Authors include Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Frank Webb.

450.769     The Dead Sea Scrolls: An Ancient Library Recovered
The Recovery of a massive Ancient library from caves near Khirbet Qumran in the Judaean Desert has been described as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in modern times. Seminar participants read the scrolls themselves in English translation to learn more about the Jewish apocalyptic in the Greco-Roman Period. Jewish apocalyptic is important not only as a lost chapter in the history of Judaism, but also as the spiritual and intellectual context out of which Christianity emerged. Topics include the circumstances of the scrolls’ discovery, theories of their origins, their historical context, and the ongoing controversy over publication rights.

450.776     The American West: Image and Reality
The American West has always exerted a profound influence on American life and thought. This course examines the importance of the frontier in 19th-century history, as well as Americans’ changing perceptions of how the West was settled. Topics include the conflict between whites and native Americans, the role of women on the frontier, the development of "civilizing" institutions like churches and schools, law-and-order justice, and the timeless distinctiveness of the West. Readings include Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay about the importance of the frontier, Julie Jeffrey’s Frontier Women, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Ox-Bow Incident.

450.779     Euripides: The Most Tragic of the Greek Playwrights
Why did Aristotle’s Poetics praise Euripides (485.406 B.C.) as the best interpreter of the tragic genre in Greece? How did the nature of his tragedies differ from those of Aeschylus and Sophocles? Why are they, despite their cynical and often brutal subjects, among the most often performed plays today? Students address these and related questions by examining how Euripides constructed his plots and characters around myth and politics, psychology and sexuality, and reason and religion. Plays under discussion include the Bacchae, Helena, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Trojan Women, Hippolytus, and Medea.

450.780     Science, Technology and the Environment: Changes in the Land
Rachel Carson tried to persuade us about the importance of the balance of nature, but the chemists she fought asserted that human destiny was to dominate and control nature. Both sides claimed to have scientific wisdom on their side. This course examines the relationship of humans to nature in the age of ecology. Students investigate the ideas of environmental writers and scientists from the early 19th century to the present, with emphasis on American environmental problems. Popular writing ranges from Thoreau’s Walden to John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, and scientific writing from Darwin’s Origin of Species to E.O. Wilson’s Biophilia.

450.787     Angst, Alienation, and Absolute Freedom-Expressions of the Existential Experience in 20^th Century Literature and Thought (formerly The Existential Experience)
No single intellectual or cultural movement has had more of an impact on the twentieth century than existentialism, with it emphasis on angst, alienation, and absolute freedom. After exploring its philosophical basis in the works of Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Heidegger, students discuss the following literature: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Kafka’s The Trial, Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Camus’ The Stranger, Sartre’s No Exit, and Ellison’s The Invisible Man.

450.792     The Classical Style of Music
This course deals with music-melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, and form. Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Schubert created some of the finest music that Western civilization has ever produced. In fact, their accomplishment was of such brilliance that today we refer to their work as classical.

450.796     Civility and Civilization
Is civility necessary to civilization? What do philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists say about both? This course examines the refinement of manners in selected societies—ancient and modern—and the ideological debates underlying that process. Students focus on the relationship between democracy and civility in the United States from its post revolutionary years to the present. Readings include Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Elias’s The Civilizing Process, and Kasson’s Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth Century Urban America.

Capstone

After completing eight, nine, or ten courses, MLA candidates will complete the Capstone Requirement. The graduate project counts as one course, while the master’s thesis is the equivalent of two courses and typically takes two semesters to complete. The Portfolio Option is taken along with the student's tenth course and is non-credit. For more information click on the following options.

Internships

450.850     Internship at the Walters
This is a competitive internship program. One or two intern positions are available for the Spring. For application information contact Melissa Hilbish at mhilbish@jhu.edu or 410-516-4640.
Prerequisite: History of the Book in the West and permission from the Associate Program Chair.