The Courage to Be: Achilles, Socrates, Antigone, Mother Courage, Barbara Lee

Professor: Thomas Bartscherer  

Course Number: CC 108 A

CRN Number: 10330

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Henderson Comp. Center 106

Distributional Area:

LA MBV  Literary Analysis in English Meaning, Being, Value   

Crosslists: Human Rights; Literature

In 2001, Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the sole member of the United States Congress to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force that formed the legal foundation for military action in Afghanistan, and subsequently, many additional deployments of the U.S. military. Her vote was praised by many as courageous, and condemned by many others. Lee was celebrated in a poem by Fred Moten as “the unacknowledged legislator.” What is courage? In this course, we shall approach this question both directly and obliquely. We begin with Homer’s Iliad and with philosophical accounts from 5th century Athens. Should courage be understood the same way in all contexts? Is a warrior’s courage the same as that of a philosopher or a legislator? Who is truly courageous, the one who defends the regime, the one who critiques it, or both? Is the courage of Hektor or Achilles the same as that of Socrates or Antigone? Our discussion will proceed through close readings of philosophical texts and essays, both ancient and modern (Plato, Aristotle, Tillich, Arendt, Baldwin, Abani) and imaginative representations in literature and film (Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Antigone, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Fugard’s The Island,Bergman’s Shame). We will be asking, among other things, whether and in what way it makes sense to speak of a single virtue, courage, being manifest in varying circumstances and in different times and places; whether and in what sense courage brings people together or sets them apart; and what we may mean today when we characterize people or acts as courageous. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

The Courage to Be: Courage in the Universities

Professor: Maxim Botstein  

Course Number: CC 108 B

CRN Number: 10331

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

HA MBV  Historical Analysis Meaning, Being, Value   

Crosslists: German Studies; Philosophy

What are the responsibilities of educational institutions and their members in times of political or social crisis? What are the forms that spiritual or intellectual courage (and cowardice, opportunism, and human frailty) take in such a context, and what relationships do thought and action, intellectual rigor and moral virtue, have to each other? This course will explore these questions, and others like them, by examining the responses of German and American universities and academics to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and McCarthyism in the 1950s, respectively. We will read the works of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Carl Schmitt, with an eye towards the context which shaped their thought and philosophy, as well the writings of less well-known students and scholars who grappled with the same difficult questions in dark times, and did what they could to shape one of the most important institutions of the modern era -  the university. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Courage To Be: The Freedom to Write

Professor: Jana Mader  

Course Number: CC 108 C

CRN Number: 10332

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

MBV SA  Meaning, Being, Value Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Human Rights; Literature

When we think of courageous writing, we may think of reporters on the front lines: taking notes while bullets rain from the sky, interviewing civilians in the rubble of destroyed communities. But courage also goes beyond the battlefield: undercover investigators infiltrate an organization or an individual from the inside to hold those in power accountable, such as in cases against organized crime groups like the Mafia or religious organizations like the Catholic Church. In a military dictatorship with censorship, as in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, writing a poem on a particular subject led to exile or imprisonment. In this course, we will explore different forms of courageous writing: from investigative journalism to undercover investigations to writing under censorship or in exile. We will critically examine the political context of different time periods, from ancient governments to contemporary times in various countries, e.g., the U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy, Iran, France, South Africa, etc. Texts include Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House, Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, Nadine Gordimer’s Burger's Daughter, Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Ida B. Wells’ Anti-Lynching Campaign, Günter Wallraff’s The Lowest of the Low, and poems by Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich Heine. We will also take a look at the role of PEN America and its Freedom To Write Award, the history of book banning and book burning, and the ethical implications of undercover investigations. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Courage To Be: Black Contrarian Voices

Professor: Thomas Williams  

Course Number: CC 108 D

CRN Number: 10333

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

HA MBV  Historical Analysis Meaning, Being, Value  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Human Rights; Literature

Though many racists and anti-racists engage and portray “black” thinking and sensibility as homogenous, for as long as there has been a tradition of black thought in America there has also been a robust and formidable thread of contrarianism and heterodoxy to defy it—even to deny there is such a thing as “blackness” (or whiteness, for that matter) to begin with. It has become a cliché to pay lip service to the notion that "blackness is not a monolith," and yet so many of us continue to speak and act as if it were.  In this common course, which will be comprised of shared texts as well as the work of iconoclastic and independent black thinkers—from Zora Neale Hurston, Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison to Barbara Fields, James Baldwin and Adrian Piper—we will examine the question of what it means to create and define the self in a shared world that too often imprisons us all in ready-made categories. We will explore the tension between the courage-to-be-with and the courage-to-be-apart, specifically focusing on the idea of acting in common and the intellectual and moral courage it takes to stand alone and the price of prioritizing self-authenticity over consensus and group cohesion. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Carbon and the Humanities: Energy and Animality

Professor: Alex Benson  

Course Number: CC 119 A

CRN Number: 10334

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA MBV  Literary Analysis in English Meaning, Being, Value  D+J Difference and Justice

Focusing on American literature, this course section asks about the poetics of animal encounter in contexts of extraction. Among other nonhuman others, we will think about whales, moving from nineteenth-century fiction related to the whale-oil industry, to the aesthetics of whale-song in twentieth-century environmentalism, to the science of whales’ bodies as carbon sinks. More broadly, we’ll read works of poetry, critical theory, and science fiction that variously imagine the ethics of a multispecies world, asking how these imaginings intersect with histories of energy and ecology. Authors considered will likely include Elizabeth Bishop, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin, Herman Melville, Anna Tsing, and Gerald Vizenor.

Carbon and the Humanities: Petrofictions

Professor: Elizabeth Holt  

Course Number: CC 119 B

CRN Number: 10335

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Languages Center 115

   Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 301

Distributional Area:

LA MBV  Literary Analysis in English Meaning, Being, Value  D+J Difference and Justice

These sessions center on petroleum, to articulate an aesthetics of petroleum through a study of journals, literary texts and films of the middle of the twentieth century in relation to the oil industry production booms.  We will think materially, considering petroleum’s many uses in making and distributing a film or text, as well as the centrality of avant-garde design and modernist aesthetics to oil industry publications globally.  From the beginning, we will ask what it is to read this mid-twentieth century abundance from our uncertain present in a changing climate. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Carbon and the Humanities: Afterlives of Coal in Anglophone Literature and Culture

Professor: Daniel Williams  

Course Number: CC 119 C

CRN Number: 10336

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Languages Center 115

   Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

LA MBV  Literary Analysis in English Meaning, Being, Value  D+J Difference and Justice

The British Empire was underwritten by carbon. With the rise of steam technology, a dramatic shift in sources of energy—from natural flows (sun, wind, water) to fossil stocks (coal)—powered economic acceleration and imperial expansion from the nineteenth century forward. These sessions study the literature and culture of Britain’s carbon-driven empire through the lens of fuel. We will examine the coal imagination of the Victorian era (and beyond) in poems, prose, and paintings, to reflect on the social and ecological damage wrought by our reliance on fossil sunshine. We will read stories and journalism from elsewhere in the postimperial Anglophone world, including South Africa, Nigeria, and India, to see how carbon dependency has shaped literature, culture, and politics. And we will ponder tales of alternative fuels, to think about literature as itself a source of energy and change. Authors may include William Blake, John Clare, Christina Rossetti, Vernon Lee, Rokeya Hossain, Ben Okri, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Seamus Heaney, Amitav Ghosh, and others.

Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel/Palestine

Professor: Michelle Murray and Ziad Abu-Rish

Course Number: CC 120 A

CRN Number: 10629

Class cap: 30

Credits: 2

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Reem Kayden Center 103

Jan 29 – March 26

Distributional Area:

HA SA  Historical Analysis Social Analysis   

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Politics

This course will critically explore the ongoing conflict between Israel/Palestine with a focus on Gaza, and the vocabularies we use to understand it.  The Hamas attacks of October 7th and the Israeli military response have sparked intense debate and renewed interest in some of the most contested ideas that organize our politics, society and culture:  What are the conditions of possibility in Israel/Palestine that have led us to this point?  How does the frame of “war” shape our understanding of this conflict, and what forms of political violence does this frame legitimate or render invisible?  How have concepts like self-defense, terrorism, genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, and others been used to understand the current situation?  To answer these questions and others, this course will use the framework of “keywords” to interrogate the vocabularies we use in the conversations we have with each other about this conflict.  Keywords are short essays that explore the meaning–and importantly, the shifting meaning–of important terms in our culture and society.  They are meant to help individuals understand the concepts and ideas they encounter in their daily interactions with others and observe in our public discourse, to map controversies and disagreements about them, and to treat these terms as sites of unresolved contestation.  The Keywords for Our Times course initiative aims to bring faculty from a range of disciplines together to help students understand the histories of and contestations around important concepts and ideas that define our contemporary moment, and to stimulate informed dialogue within our community. 

Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel/Palestine

Professor: Michelle Murray and Ziad Abu-Rish  

Course Number: CC 120 B

CRN Number: 10630

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Reem Kayden Center 103

Distributional Area:

HA SA  Historical Analysis Social Analysis   

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Politics

This course will critically explore the ongoing conflict between Israel/Palestine with a focus on Gaza, and the vocabularies we use to understand it.  The Hamas attacks of October 7th and the Israeli military response have sparked intense debate and renewed interest in some of the most contested ideas that organize our politics, society and culture:  What are the conditions of possibility in Israel/Palestine that have led us to this point?  How does the frame of “war” shape our understanding of this conflict, and what forms of political violence does this frame legitimate or render invisible?  How have concepts like self-defense, terrorism, genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, and others been used to understand the current situation?  To answer these questions and others, this course will use the framework of “keywords” to interrogate the vocabularies we use in the conversations we have with each other about this conflict.  Keywords are short essays that explore the meaning–and importantly, the shifting meaning–of important terms in our culture and society.  They are meant to help individuals understand the concepts and ideas they encounter in their daily interactions with others and observe in our public discourse, to map controversies and disagreements about them, and to treat these terms as sites of unresolved contestation.  The Keywords for Our Times course initiative aims to bring faculty from a range of disciplines together to help students understand the histories of and contestations around important concepts and ideas that define our contemporary moment, and to stimulate informed dialogue within our community.