Common Courses

Common Course 108: The Courage to Be

What does it mean to act courageously in the 21^st Century?  Which crises, conditions, and causes most demand courageous action by individuals and groups? In what ways does modern, bureaucratic society make the contours of courage difficult to discern due to shifting notions of responsibility, evil, truth, justice, and morality? How do the scale and scope of courageous action change under different historical, cultural, and political contexts? Each of the five distinct classes in this Common Course will address these questions and more by approaching the concept of courage from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, exploring its many articulations from antiquity to our contemporary moment, and its relevance in fields such as law, literature, human rights, religion, politics, and philosophy. In addition to their distinct class syllabi, this cluster of courses share a core of common texts, each animating a different era, interpretation, or experience of courage from Plato to formerly incarcerated Nigerian writer Chris Abani, , Indian anti-colonial and nationalist leader Mohandas K Gandhi to comments by and poems about U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee, the lone dissenting voice in sending troops to Afghanistan after 9/11, among others.  In addition, the entire cohort enrolled in this Common Course will come together three times during the semester for guest lectures by contemporary exemplars of courage and for follow-up discussions meant to mingle the different class sections.  Finally, there will be at least one cohort-wide collaborative project whichwill engage the experimental humanities in order to think about courage, as well as smaller common writing assignments.

 

Course:	CC 108 A  The Courage to Be: Achilles, Socrates, Antigone, Mother Courage, Barbara Lee
Professor:	Thomas Bartscherer
CRN:	15983		Schedule/Location:		Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Albee 106
Distributional Area:		MBV Meaning, Being, Value LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4						Class cap: 22
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, beginning with Plato. Plato’s Socrates maintains that courage is one of the four excellences to be found in a good regime and in a good soul. But should courage be understood in 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? In this course, our discussion of courage will proceed through close readings of philosophical texts, both ancient and modern (Plato, Aristotle, Emerson, Tillich, Arendt) and imaginative representations in literature and film (Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Antigone, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Fugard’s The Island, Zinneman’s High Noon, Bertolucci’s The Conformist). Among other things, we will be asking whether and in what way it makes sense to speak of a single virtue, courage, as being manifest in varying circumstances and in different times and places, and what we may mean today when we characterize a person or an act as courageous.

 

Course:	CC 108 B The Courage to be:  The Face of the Other
Professor:	Joshua Boettiger
CRN:	15984		Schedule/Location:		Mon   Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 307
Distributional Area:		MBV Meaning, Being, Value  LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4						Class cap: 16
Crosslists: Jewish Studies, Philosophy, Religion

The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described ethics as the encounter with the face of the other. But what does it actually mean to encounter the face of another, especially in situations where we see that particular other as a threat – such as in Israel-Palestine or in our polarized American political landscape? What is at stake in our learning to endure this encounter without either fleeing from before the other or attempting to dominate them? These questions point to the possibility of cultivating a courage that comes directly out of lived relationship as opposed to ideology. Our course will begin with an investigation into the work of Levinas, whose philosophy developed directly as a response to the Holocaust, and bring his thought to bear on some of the more vexing issues of our time. We will also approach this conversation from different angles – exploring writings by William James and Hannah Arendt, as well as those of poets C.D. Wright, Ilya Kaminsky, and the contemporary Nigerian writer, Chris Abani, who writes that such encounters hold, “the recognition...that we all stand at the edge of the same abyss.”

 

Course:	CC 108 C  The Courage to be: Liberator or Leviathan: Law in the Liberal Arts
Professor:	Laura Ford
CRN:	15985		Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 205
Distributional Area:		MBV Meaning, Being, Value  SA  Social Analysis
Credits: 4						Class cap 22
Crosslists: Sociology

What does law have to do with justice? Do our laws regulating property and contract impact the work of artists and scientists? If lawyers tell stories in court, how do these stories work like novels and dramas to reflect and change who we are? How does the ideal of legal justice inspire or impede activism in the name of social justice? What kinds of courage, responsibility, and conviction might be required for people who choose to engage with law and legal institutions, whether as lawyers, lawmakers, judges, or simply as citizens? These are the types of questions that we will consider in this class. Building from Plato’s culminating text in political and social theory, The Laws, we will consider answers rooted in comparative history, in legal philosophy, in empirical social studies, and in the practical experience of lawyers, lawmakers, and political activists. The course will offer an introduction to sources of law and methods of legal research. But the course is driven by a more ambitious goal: to enable students to understand law as a “liberal art,” as a complement to their other studies at Bard, and as a vital locus for thoughtfully engaged citizenship.

 

Course:	CC 108 D  The Courage to be: Courage, Cowardice, and the Colonial Encounter
Professor:	Tara Needham
CRN:	15986		Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Barringer 104
Distributional Area:		MBV Meaning, Being, Value LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4						Class cap: 18
Crosslists: Literature; Human Rights

How does the individual situate themselves ethically if they perceive themselves or others as complicit in systemic injustice? How are individual friendships and political alliances formed under pervasive conditions of exploitation and oppression? What pressure is placed on notions of courage and its opposite—cowardice—under late Empire? We will ask and explore these questions through several texts which stage encounters between the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed, highlighting the fraught intersection of intimate and personal bonds with political demands and identities, and the courage these encounters can call forth. At the same time, we will study the challenges of depicting the courage of mass civil disobedience in relation to Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura, about one Indian village’s efforts to enact Gandhian non-violent resistance to Empire. Our focus will be primarily, but not exclusively on short stories and novels of the late British Empire, with special attention to texts of South Asia. Authors may include Albert Camus, Alice Perrin, Doris Lessing, Bessie Head, Mulk Raj Anand, EM Forster and George Orwell. Additional theoretical and historical texts by MK Gandhi, Albert Memmi, BA Ambedkar, and Hannah Arendt, among others, will allow us to consider a variety of political and philosophical strategies to address these difficult circumstances, with the very definition of what it means to be human often at stake.

 

 

Course:	CC 109  The Ethics and Aesthetics of New Technologies
Professor:	Krista Caballero, Susan Merriam, Dominique Townsend
CRN:	16323		Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 PM Barringer Global Classroom
Distributional Area:		MBV Meaning, Being, Value AA Analysis of Art
Credits: 4						Class cap: 18
Crosslists: Experimental Humanities

How does technology mediate what it means to be human? This course introduces students to the ethics, aesthetics, and use of new technologies and social practices involving technology. A key component will be a consideration of media and technology from across historical periods. We will focus on a range of subjects, including technology and identity, technology and the self, technology and privacy, technology and community, and technology and the environment. One of our central lines of inquiry will be: How have scientific, intellectual, and artistic experiments reshaped human experience in diverse historical and cultural contexts and how might they shape our shared futures? In approaching this question, we will be reading and writing on these topics, as well as engaging in hands-on explorations, such as a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, a re-design of the college lecture, collective mapping, and GIF self-portraits. Particular emphasis is placed upon thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries and approaching problems from multiple perspectives via collaborative projects and interdisciplinary practices of making.