Since the foundation of the Christian Church, when men and women first sought to live apart from popular society and devote their lives entirely to religion, monks and nuns have influenced heavily the development of Medieval art and architecture. Early monks and nuns lived as hermits in the mountains, forests and deserts. From the second or third centuries C.E., however, they gathered together to live communally in organized monasteries.  Like their predecessors, the hermits, these later monks and nuns claimed to live in abject poverty, but although they owned no personal possessions they often lived in communal splendor inside wealthy and well-decorated houses. Supplied with lavish churches, gleaming metalwork, sumptuous tapestries and vestments and colorful manuscripts, monasteries became the treasure houses of Europe and the targets of condemnation, arson and looting.     This course will explore the phenomenon of Christian monasticism from its earliest beginnings immediately after the death of Jesus through the modern era, concentrating especially on the pinnacle of the monasticism, the Middle Ages. We will read monastic rules in translation to understand the lifestyle of the monks and nuns, and examine their artworks, including manuscripts in the Lilly library and objects in the Indiana University Art Museum. We will also examine the phenomenon of modern monasticism, and compare it to its medieval origins.

Among the most compelling literatures of our day is that which records and seeks to interpret the Nazi war of genocide against the Jews. This course will introduce students to this literature and encourage them to reflect upon many of the profound questions it raises. Some of these questions will focus on literature’s role in the shaping of historical memory. How the past is represented and comes to acquire a future in collective memory will be a preoccupying concern. Other questions will focus on issues of the most serious cultural, intellectual, moral, ethical, and religious kind. For instance, if it is true, as Elie Wiesel claims, that at Auschwitz not only man died but also the idea of man, how do we now conceive of the human? What does a person become when nothing is any longer forbidden him? Why did law, art, intellect, and religion not defend against political barbarism? Is idealism of any kind still possible after Auschwitz? Is forgiveness possible? These and related questions will preoccupy us over the course of the semester.

The list of required readings includes the following:

• Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
• Jan Gross, Neighbors
• Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy
• Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
• Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
• Bernard Schlink, The Reader
• Elie Wiesel, Night
• Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower

In addition to the above, there will be some handouts of essays and poetry, and two or three films will be shown.

Written work for the course will include two medium-length papers (approximately 10-12 pages each) and one or two in-class examinations. These writing assignments are mandatory for all students. The final examination will be optional.

Strong writing skills will be a decided asset for students taking this course, so strive to do your very best to make sure your written work measures up to university standards. I will be assisted in this course by Katelyn Klingler, who will be available throughout the semester to meet with you regarding any questions or concerns you may have about the writing assignments.

Given the nature of the subject matter, this will be a demanding course. Students will be expected to do the assigned readings on time, attend all class meetings, and participate actively in class discussion. If you must miss a class session, please be sure to let me know in advance. Any more than 3 unexcused absences will lower your grade for the course.

**THIS CLASS IS OPEN *ONLY* TO FRESHMAN WELLS SCHOLARS**

For the class, I have selected materials that present a variety of topics and arguments, including immigration, race, class, and gender. Connections between our course and current and/or historical events outside the classroom will be evident during the class. Those connections require careful thought rather than being immediately obvious, but the ability to understand and analyze connections among ideas and events is a core skill in a liberal arts education and will stand you in good stead in your life beyond Indiana University (Adapted from language initially used by Rebecca Lave, Associate Dean for Social and Historical Sciences).

The novels we read vary in style and content, just as the authors vary in their race, ethnicity, gender, regional, and national background. All are concerned with the power of circumstance, however, and with the role difference, of, for example, class, gender, race, color and sexuality, play in shaping a person’s life.

The first book we will read is part of the transnational turn that is a key trend in 21st-century American fiction. That book, Americanah,_ _is as much concerned with the country in which its author was born, Nigeria, as it is with the United States. After Adichie, we will read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Part road novel, part prison narrative, part family tale, Ward’s novel offers a sometimes mythic account of African-American life. Our next read is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, which focuses on a bit part actor struggling against Asian and Asian American stereotypes. Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is set largely in a rundown section of a town that eerily resembles South Bend, Indiana. Taking place in a dilapidated building full of residents down on their luck, the novel rapidly shifts points of view. Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible is a climate change novel set in a large country house. While the parents ignore the weather around them, Jack, who is not a Christian, tries to interpret it through a children’s bible. With Mohsin Hamid’s A Reluctant Fundamentalist we are back in the world of transnational American fiction. The novel is told from the point of view of Changez, who is born in Lahore, educated at Princeton, and goes on to work as a financial analyst in New York. Changez moves back to Lahore after a disastrous love affair and witnessing 9/11. The book is told as a conversation between Changez and an American stranger, who may, or may not, be an American spy. We will end the class with a novel about the white working class, Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, a family novel full of love, loyalty, crack, violence, and death.

Range of method and content is one key to the class, then. I want us to think, too, however, about the connections between the books we read, our ability to connect, or otherwise, to the characters they portray, the different ways in which the novels explore their characters’ attempts to connect, and the connection between characters and the worlds in which they, and you, live. If you read the books in the way I want you to read them, you will put yourself in the heads of the writers you read, and the people you read about, however different they may be from you.

Readings

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
• Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
• Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown
• Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch
• Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible
• Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone

NOTE: Please buy physical copies of the books. No e-books allowed.

Writing Requirements Two essays that are between 1500 words and 1700 words long. 70% of the final grade. You may revise the first essay you write if it receives a grade below B+. If you decide to revise your first essay, meet with me to discuss how you should go about writing your revision. To be fair to people who received a B+ when they first wrote the essay, the highest grade you may receive for your revision is a B+. Note: Essays that do not meet the page requirement will be given a grade no higher than B-. 30% of your grade will be based on your blog posts. Three blog posts that will determine the remaining 30% of your grade.

What do we mean when we say that an event is “tragic”? Is a death more tragic if it is the result of a murder than if it happened by accident or from natural causes? Do we say it is “tragic” in order to make sense of it or as a way of saying that we give up explaining it? Is it an expression of absence of meaning or pointing toward a logic of a different order? Is tragedy linked to a sense of justice or does it respond to the lack of justice? What role do religion, politics and chance play in our perception of life’s misery? And why has tragedy always been so central to popular culture, from the public performances of ancient Greece to the rise and fall of present-day celebrities? Indeed, how can we explain the pleasure we get from regarding the pain of others? In this course, we will address questions like these, as a way to explore tragedy in its relation to life, art, death and hope.

Material studied will include world famous literary works from the Bible, Greek and neoclassical tragedy (Sophocles and Racine), twentieth-century tragedy (Miller and Beckett), examples from film and TV series (including the 1995 film by Mathieu Kassovitz, Hate; episodes from The Wire and Scandal), as well as critical texts related to the questions above, from Aristotle and Nietzsche to contemporary thinkers like Susan Sontag and Simon Critchley. Special emphasis will be put on the idea of tragedy in the twenty-first century, at once in our own lives, in critical writing and in artistic production (and pursued by the students in final research projects).

We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things … [and] things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private. Hence it was that this rumour died off again, and people began to forget it …; till the latter end of November or the beginning of December 1664 when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague …                                   Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (1722), regarding the Great Plague of London (1665)   Since Thucydides wrote about the plague of Athens (429-426 BC), Western cultural production has tended to cast plagues—and war—as precipitating a “world upside down” and ushering in the breakdown of “civilization” and its rituals, mores, and community-affirming structures. In early 2020, of course, the COVID pandemic suspended, upended, and transformed our own lives, while also overturning the veneer of today’s social order and bringing to the foreground questions of power and inequity that had long been marginalized. This course will examine historical and theoretical writings about and cultural representations of plagues and pandemics from ancient Greece through the present.             Through close readings of texts, we will study how they use representations of plagues and pandemics to lay bare questions of power: who wields it, how they grant or deny legitimacy and structure society and social roles, and the mechanisms (e.g., surveillance), discourses, and institutions that support and enforce (the) social order. We will also explore how the texts represent pandemics in order to probe questions of revolution, masculinity, loneliness, struggles for social justice, and more.

Our discussions will be grounded in questions such as: How have plagues been studied? How are they explained, and how does power operate within and through these explanations? How have they been represented in historical, literary, and medical texts? What effects do they have on social organization as well as the human organism? How do plagues exacerbate pre-existing social and political tensions, including othering and disparities in power and resources? What effects do plagues have on power (those who wield it as well as those who do not have it)? In particular, what implications do they have—in history and literature alike—for the State and its mechanisms of control, and how do State powers respond to plagues?

Accidents and catastrophes are dramatic events that challenge individual and collective life. They break the protective shields that ward off the threats surrounding us. Their impact calls upon psychological and cultural coping mechanisms and forces us to reconfigure our lives that will never be the same. How have cultures dealt with the unexpected breakdown of order and normality? This course imparts a critical knowledge about the models according to which narrations about these events are formed and asks how literature and film can help to cope with disasters.   Art has an immunological function: The stories we tell ourselves help integrate and make sense of what has previously mutilated us. They also anticipate possible future accidents and enable us to cope with them. In Modernity, accident and catastrophe – both previously interpreted as destiny – change their meaning. They stand for contingency and represent a risk inherent in our way of life. Urban spaces, modern working environments, and new means of transportation such as trains and the automobile make accidents more probable and ubiquitous. The course will examine how filmic and narrative representations integrate the disintegration and violence inherent in our world. Accidents are sources for artistic productivity. We will read short texts from the Bible, Montaigne, and Heinrich von Kleist to Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, and discuss films from Buster Keaton to Brian de Palma. The course is therefore also an introduction to major works of the Western literary and cinematic tradition.

Virginia Woolfe, Mrs. Dalloway, Oxford World Classics; ISBN 9780192859853

All other texts and materials will be provided on Canvas.

In this course we will travel the world to examine how artists and different artforms came together, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to shape our understandings of modernity and its relationship with phenomena and ideas such as: consciousness, perception, emancipation, reality, war, and oppression.

We will look at art and literature from a comparative perspective to reflect on these big topics, with a focus on the ethics of collectivity in artistic movements and groups, and how they collaborated to advance aesthetic and political projects.

Specifically, we will study Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Négritude, Brazilian Modernismo, The Harlem Renaissance, and Contemporary Existentialism. Our analysis will move across literature in its different forms (novel, poetry, essay), as well as painting, photography, film, and music; and we will look at artists from Brazil, Senegal, Martinique, Cuba, Mexico, France, Germany, the US, and Japan, among others.   The course dynamic will be a combination of lecture and discussion, and the major assignments are: 5 short papers (2 pages), the revision and reworking of one of the short papers into a final long paper (7-8 pages), plus participation and attendance.

This class meets with CMLT-C 256.

Title: Jazz and Its Contexts

This course will give students a broad view of what most of the world thought was one of America’s great contributions to society in the twentieth century: jazz.

We will explore the development of the music, both in terms of its social contexts and in terms of its formal devices. We will also spend considerable time looking at how jazz interfaces with other artforms: dance, visual art, and literature. We’ll listen to music and seek to learn how best to appreciate what jazz is doing. We’ll read stories, poems, and a novel, dip into some histories of jazz, and look at artworks and dance developments.

Here are some artists (musicians, writers, painters) we’ll get acquainted with: Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Sarah Vaughan, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, Esmeralda Spalding, and Brad Mehldau. Texts by Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Mezz Mezzrow, Amiri Baraka, and Nathaniel Mackey.

Requirements include two spot-check midterms, a presentation, and a final project.

Humans tell stories about themselves and their experiences to connect with others, share values, build relationships, and create kinship and friendship bonds. We all have stories to tell, but what makes stories compelling enough that others (i.e., strangers) would want to hear them or purchase them as books to read or listen to? What is the purpose – beyond entertainment – of stories of the self? How do memoirists shape their stories to advance a perspective or set of values? How important is authenticity: Does it matter that the events in the narrative really happened exactly as narrated? Does it matter if events are exaggerated or even made up?

In this seminar, we will read and discuss autobiographical texts that not only relate compelling stories, but also provoke questions such as those articulated above. We will also sample some key autobiographical texts in the Western tradition in order to give context to the more contemporary memoirs or autobiographies we study. Finally, students will complete a final project of their choosing, which may take several forms, including, but not limited to, a comparative analysis of two memoirs, an in depth study of one memoir and its contexts, or an essay where students create a short memoir of their own based on a flashpoint event in their lives.