ECS 320/HIS 445 Professor D.S.T. Clark
Cultural Systems: Sight and Seeing in the Renaissance

An introduction to the visual culture of 16th and 17th c. Europe. Looks at how expectations about visual certainty and the reliability of the eye (the 'noblest' sense) were challenged by developments in medicine, psychology, natural science, magic, demonology religion, and philosophy. Concentrates on examples of visual artifice, fantasy, and illusion between the Reformation & the Scientific Revolution. Topics include: madness and melancholy, optics & natural magic, witchcraft, religious images, miracles, apparitions, skepticism, dreams, the theatre and Macbeth.
Tuesday 1:30 – 4:20

ECS 321 Professor Sunil Agnani
Cultural Systems: A Critical Genealogy of Ressentiment: Europe and the Colonial Experience

Nietzsche famously used the term "ressentiment" to diagnose the hatred of the weak for the strong. Rejecting his application of this to Christianity, others still invoke it to portray a psychology of the dominated (Max Scheler) or to describe a legitimate moral feeling connected with the sense of justice (John Rawls). We will trace a genealogy of this term from uses in moral philosophy (Aristotle, Kant) to its deployment in works by CLR James, VS Naipaul, Gandhi, and Frantz Fanon in order to understand resentment as a gap between the idea of freedom in the Enlightenment and the experience of freedom in the colonial and postcolonial world.
Thursday 1:30 – 4:20

ECS 330/COM 321 Professor Eileen Reeves
Communication and the Arts: Media and Literature

This course is devoted to the relationship of radio journalism to literature in the modern era, and will draw upon theoretical, historical, literary, and journalistic texts and transcripts. It will focus on the development of idea of communication, the aesthetic and practical limits of the radio and the novel, and the various ways in which this medium is conveyed in literary works depicting the fascist era.
Wednesday 1:30 – 4:20

ECS 345 Professor Brigid Doherty
Modernism and Modernity in Literature and the Visual Arts

A rigorous introduction to the history, theory, and criticism of modernism as it developed in European culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Case studies of major figures (Baudelaire, Manet, Rilke, Stein, Chaplin, Heartfield, Jünger) encompass range of approaches to literary, pictorial, and cinematic production and their relation to social, political, economic, and technological aspects of modernity. Attention to aesthetic as well as ethical dimensions of the production and reception of works of art in modernity, and to how technologies of modernity have been understood to transform the work of art.
Monday 1:30 – 4:20

• Course Offerings Spring 2004
• Course Offerings Fall 2003
• Course Offerings Spring 2003
• Course Offerings Fall 2002

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