LIT4689 Poetic Elegy: Shaping Cultural and Personal Loss
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsAn elegy is a poem of mourning, a lament that can express both private and public grief. Reading elegies offers insight into cultural attitudes towards life and death while featuring the resilience of poetic form. From antiquity to the present, poets have used this shaping form to memorialize, describe, reflect, critique, and witness. In this course we will examine the origins of the form and study pivotal poems and poets in its development. We will also explore the contemporary elegy-certainly in the shadows of 9/11 and the war in Iraq-both as a private expression of feeling and as a public need for decorum and custom. Texts may include poetry by John Milton, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Gray, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komonyakaa, Carolyn Forché, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, and Brian Turner, as well as lyrical prose elegies by Joan Didion and Philip Roth.
Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Level: Advanced Liberal Arts 4600 Requirement (UGrad),Advanced Elective (UGrad),Advanced Liberal Arts (UGrad)
- Course Number: LIT4689
- Number of Credits: 4
HUM4614 Postmodernism: Future Culture
4 Advanced Liberal Arts (Elective Abroad) CreditsThis course explores postmodern culture as a strange obsession with the future. Thus, we will use the captivating cityscape of Dubai-its unparalleled architecture, its accelerated movement and fragmented spatial organization, the provocative visual design behind its many tourist sites-in order to track crucial ideas of simulation, virtuality, and the spectacle in our postmodern era. Moreover, we will navigate contemporary works of literature, philosophy, film, and architecture while making several excursions into Dubai as a constructed cultural zone of the Middle East. Ultimately, this rare immersion in perhaps the most futuristic place on earth will provide us a dynamic outlook on how postmodern culture blurs the boundaries of reality itself.
Prerequisites: 3 Intermediate liberal arts courses (CVA, LVA, HSS, CSP, LTA in any combination) and admission into the course
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Level: Advanced Liberal Arts 4600 Requirement (UGrad),Advanced Elective (UGrad),Advanced Liberal Arts (UGrad)
- Course Number: HUM4614
- Number of Credits: 4
WRT4602 Practicum in Peer Consulting and Writing
Advanced Liberal ArtsStudents learn to act as peer consultants in writing and work on improving their own writing, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills. They accomplish these objectives by addressing their writing problems; writing extensively; developing criteria to evaluate the writings of others; studying various writing processes and theories of composition; examining pedagogical approaches to teaching writing; reading extensively about, and becoming acquainted with, the dynamics of peer tutoring; and working in the Writing Center as peer consultant trainees.
This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring
Prerequisites: Instructor permission
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Level: Advanced Liberal Arts 4600 Requirement (UGrad),Advanced Elective (UGrad),Advanced Liberal Arts (UGrad)
- Course Number: WRT4602
- Number of Credits: 4
ART4615 Racing Towards the Future: Early 20th Century Art
(Formerly VSA4615)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsBetween 1900 -1938, young artists grappled with enormous political, scientific, technological, and social disruptions that threw them headlong into the modern world. Styles such as Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressivism, Dada and Surrealism were their responses to changes in established ways of thinking and being that marked the beginning of the 20th century. Visits to The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Davies Museum of Wellesley College and the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, which have very strong collections from this period, will offer students the opportunity to directly experience this art.
Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Level: Advanced Liberal Arts 4600 Requirement (UGrad),Advanced Elective (UGrad),Advanced Liberal Arts (UGrad)
- Course Number: ART4615
- Number of Credits: 4
LIT 4601: Reading the City, Writing the Self: James Joyce's Dublin
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits
In this exploration of James Joyce's literary Dublin, we study Joyce's works as a springboard for your own creative non-fiction writing. This course combines expressive writing and literary analysis-and includes a week in Dublin itself!
The Irish writer James Joyce is a towering figure in world literature, a writer who pushed boundaries of both form and content. In his stirring bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his sympathetic yet clear-eyed view of his hometown in the short story collection Dubliners, and his experimental and controversial epic Ulysses, Joyce captured ordinary lives in an extraordinary fashion. In this course you will read selections from all three works, exploring such themes as politics, love, and religion while simultaneously tracing the trajectory of Joyce's innovative style. Furthermore, and drawing inspiration from Joyce's narratives, you will pursue your own creative writing, as you will write personal essays remembering and reflecting upon your experiences and relationships. Finally, in the first week of the course, Dublin itself will be our classroom as we range from its museums to its pubs and traverse the same streets and parks and shores that Joyce and his characters inhabited, gaining all the while a rich and vibrant sense of the city's culture and history.
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Level: Advanced Liberal Arts 4600 Requirement (UGrad),Advanced Elective (UGrad),Advanced Liberal Arts (UGrad)
- Course Number: LIT4601
- Number of Credits: 4
WRT2000 Research Writing
4 Foundation Liberal Arts Credits
This course prompts students to put their theory of writing into practice through writing and composing in research-based genres for audiences in academic discourse communities. Students learn to recognize and adhere to the discursive and procedural conventions of particular communities of scholarly practice, and they examine and participate in modes of scholarly inquiry while learning about and engaging in best practices for finding, evaluating, and incorporating sources. Students produce scholarly arguments in essay form while exploring the roles that other textual forms can and do play in scholarship, and they continually reflect on how this work informs their theory and understanding of writing more generally.
Prerequisites: WRT1001
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Level: Foundation Liberal Arts (UGrad)
- Course Number: WRT2000
- Number of Credits: 4
HUM4612 Rome: Origins of Democracy, Imperialism and Human Rights
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits
At a moment when democracy is contested around the globe, why not return to the source?
This course invites students to revisit the origins of democracy through interdisciplinary study-philosophy, political theory, history, literature-in Rome, one of the places where it all started (at least for the western world). Significantly, this city/state was also one of the first empires, meaning that the Romans explored, conquered or colonized, and ruled and exploited other geographic territories. This course studies the original principles, processes, and representations of democracy from 1st century Rome, while also considering its role as an empire and linking both to human rights in their modern form.
If democracy aspires to equality and freedom, imperialism is its foil, a centuries-long program of conquest, racial and cultural superiority, and ongoing economic exploitation. Some might argue that the tension between them is precisely responsible for current global social, political, and economic challenges. Paradoxically-or not?-the two are deeply intertwined, and both inform the language and practice of contemporary human rights (for the better and for the worse, alas). Examining their earliest aspirations and most significant historical failures where they actually happened will help us to address the current problem of migration and asylum seeking in Europe as a limit to the "human" envisioned by human rights.
Consider this: We'll climb the Palatine Hill, site of the founding of Rome, while reading Virgil's account of that event in The Aeneid; study Shakespeare's Julius Caesar while visiting the Curia of Pompey, site of the Roman Senate (and, so they say, of Caesar's death); and experience the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica while learning about how the Catholic Church fueled the Roman Empire-and vice versa. We will visit ancient ruins and markers of cultures meditating on what they meant to those who made them, and to us, now, and we will relax along the banks of the Tiber listening to music in the evenings.
All along, we will address the profound questions of power, ideology, law, freedom, obligation, hospitality, cultural contact, and human rights that arise with our journeying. Perhaps most significantly, we will visit sites devoted to the lives and futures of migrants and refugees in Rome, one of Europe's key points of entry, as well as meeting members of non-governmental organizations working on human rights issues stemming from migration and other crises.
While experiencing the city and understanding its shifting identity as historical/tourist site and migration center, we will negotiate its spaces as ones where we can most powerfully witness and test ideas of democracy and rights for ourselves.
Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Level: Advanced Liberal Arts 4600 Requirement (UGrad),Advanced Elective (UGrad),Advanced Liberal Arts (UGrad)
- Course Number: HUM4612
- Number of Credits: 4
HUM 1001: Self as Global Citizen
3 Credits course for Humanities and Entrepreneurship Certificate Students Only
Building on the first two courses in the Babson College program in Entrepreneurial Leadership, Self as Global Citizen explores the self in social context and in relation to a set of 21st century issues and problems. We begin with an exploration of the notion of citizenship, focusing especially on philosophies of nationalism v. cosmopolitanism as well as contexts such as gender, race, and identity, and then expand our previous work on trauma and the self to explore the broader cultural transmission and political implications of trauma, including intergenerational trauma. From there, we examine crucial issues that face each one of us as global citizens: climate crisis, toxic cultures, forced migration, technology and artificial intelligence, mental health and the future of medicine.
Students will analyze and synthesize material in weekly close reading and writing assignments. The major course project is an individual case study and presentation for an idea to address one of the issues we have studied. This work will be undertaken with the mentorship of Babson College seniors who have studied Entrepreneurship extensively and are currently taking an advanced course in human rights.
Prerequiste: Course is for Humanities and Entrepreneurship students only
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Course Number: HUM1001
- Number of Credits: 3
LIT4616 Shakespeare's Sex
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsShakespeare's works have long held a privileged position in the histories of sex, gender, and eroticism. In this course, we will consider how Shakespeare helps us "think sex" in its various bodily, psychological, political, textual, and historical dimensions. What counts as "sex" in Shakespeare's world(s)? What desires, relations, and practices are rendered perceptible-and/or imaginable-through his poetry and plays? Which categories, identities, and emotions mattered when Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined sex and its meanings, and how do these align with, and diverge from, those which inform our present lives and erotic relations? To explore these and related questions, we will read four major plays and two works of poetry: Romeo & Juliet, Othello, As You Like It, Cymbeline, The Rape of Lucrece, and selections from The Sonnets. Drawn from across the Shakespearean canon, such works will allow us to consider how differences of genre and literary form shape erotic possibilities, as well as how issues of race, gender, status, religion, reputation, and ethnicity intersect with sexual meanings, both in that era and our own. To enhance our appreciation of these works and their erotic possibilities, we will routinely consider modern, cinematic adaptions of the plays we read, as well as select screen biographies (Shakespeare in Love, All Is True). Finally, we will attend to the curious case of Shakespeare's sex: not only what we know-and don't know-about the playwright's (sexual) biography, but why his erotic relations continue to arouse interest and speculation, some four hundred years after his death.
Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Level: Advanced Liberal Arts 4600 Requirement (UGrad),Advanced Elective (UGrad),Advanced Liberal Arts (UGrad)
- Course Number: LIT4616
- Number of Credits: 4
LIT4609 Shakespearean Bodies
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits
What kinds of bodies are represented in Shakespeare? Which bodies "matter," to whom, and on what terms? How are embodied meanings forged and contested on the Shakespearean stage, and how are such meanings informed by differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion, and bodily ability? In this course, we will consider how Shakespeare helps us think about bodies in their various material, political, textual, and historical dimensions. To do so, we will read six major plays: Antony & Cleopatra, The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Pericles, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus. Drawn from across the Shakespearean canon, these works will allow us to consider how differences of genre enable and constrain certain kinds of bodily thinking, as well as how issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and violence intersect with bodily meanings, both in that era and our own. To enhance our appreciation of these works, we will routinely consider modern, cinematic adaptions of the plays we read, as well as relevant works of literary criticism. Throughout, we will discuss the relevance of these works to our understanding of bodies today; consider how modern conceptual categories can inform and inhibit our understanding of bodies past; and explore how stage drama, as a representational medium which privileges the performed body, allows us to think about the various processes through which human bodies assume cultural meanings.
Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)
- Program: Undergraduate
- Division: Arts and Humanities
- Level: Advanced Liberal Arts 4600 Requirement (UGrad),Advanced Elective (UGrad),Advanced Liberal Arts (UGrad)
- Course Number: LIT4609
- Number of Credits: 4