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IDS Courses Covering Literature, History, and Philosophy

IDS 171 01 Cultural Heritage I
The Middle Ages from Virgil to Dante
Gruenler, Curtis MWF 9:30 AM 10:20 AM

During the 1500 years between the birth of Christ and the Renaissance, the world as we know it today took shape through changes such as the rise of Christianity and Islam, the invention of romantic love, the formation of modern nations, and the interaction of Christian and classical thought. Yet even though this is such a formative time for our own culture, people saw the world much differently that we do. We will try to imagine medieval life and understand medieval thought through the lenses of history, literature, philosophy, and to a lesser extent theology, music, and art. Transporting ourselves to the past can give us a new perspective on the present and on big questions like what makes a good life, what it is to love, and how people can live together well in communities and nations. This will happen most powerfully through our encounter with great texts from this time such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, philosophical works by Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, the Lays of Marie de France, and above all Dante’s Divine Comedy, which we will read almost in its entirety. Students will write several short papers, one longer essay, midterm and final exams, and a commonplace book or group project.

IDS 171 02 Cultural Heritage I
Jews, Pagans, and Christians: the Ancient and Medieval Worlds Reconsidered
Tseng, Gloria MWF 11:00 AM 11:50 AM

From the heyday of the Roman Empire, when they were a small and vulnerable minority, to the “Christian centuries,” when the papacy was strong enough to rival kings, Christians lived and died in the historical and cultural contexts of their day. They were shaped and informed by their worlds even as they challenged the status quo. As they interacted with the worlds around them, they were in dialog with other cultural and religious traditions. This course will take us on a brief journey of the ancient and medieval worlds and introduce us to their questions and concerns. Emphasis will be given to meditative reading (i.e., texts that call for slow reading and contemplation), and we will consider what they have to say to us in our day in regard to spirituality and other issues of life.

IDS 171 03 Cultural Heritage I
Citizenship and the Good Life
Cox, John MWF 11:00 AM 11:50 AM

"Citizenship and the Good Life" surveys history, literature, and philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the early Renaissance with two ideas as the focus: What does it mean to be a citizen? What does it mean to live a good life? Beginning with Greek tragedy, the course includes readings from Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Virgil, Luke's Gospel, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, and Thomas More.

IDS 171 04 Cultural Heritage I
Jews, Pagans, and Christians: the Ancient and Medieval Worlds Reconsidered
Tseng, Gloria MWF 12:00 PM 12:50 PM

From the heyday of the Roman Empire, when they were a small and vulnerable minority, to the “Christian centuries,” when the papacy was strong enough to rival kings, Christians lived and died in the historical and cultural contexts of their day. They were shaped and informed by their worlds even as they challenged the status quo. As they interacted with the worlds around them, they were in dialog with other cultural and religious traditions. This course will take us on a brief journey of the ancient and medieval worlds and introduce us to their questions and concerns. Emphasis will be given to meditative reading (i.e., texts that call for slow reading and contemplation), and we will consider what they have to say to us in our day in regard to spirituality and other issues of life.

IDS 171 05 Cultural Heritage I
Real Life and the Good Life from Classical Times to Christian
LaPorte, Joseph MW 2:00 PM 3:20 PM

In this course, we will be keeping our eyes on ethical questions, particularly those pertaining to sex and gender, power, and still more broadly, how to live well. The readings for this course are in large part classics, texts that have through the ages been regarded as masterpieces that transcend their own times, and that have something important to say to people of various times and cultures. We will be looking at literature, philosophy, and history as well as some theology; we will be covering these disciplines as they apply to classical Greece and Rome, and then as they apply into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Because the course proceeds chronologically, we can see in a powerful way how later authors build on earlier ones. Something that particularly excites me about the course is the way it illustrates how Christianity, which became the dominant religion in the West, was born in a classical world and how Christians came to incorporate classical learning and culture from ancient Greece and Rome.

IDS 171 06 Cultural Heritage I
Real Life and the Good Life from Classical Times to Christian
LaPorte, Joseph MW 3:30 PM 4:50 PM

In this course, we will be keeping our eyes on ethical questions, particularly those pertaining to sex and gender, power, and still more broadly, how to live well. The readings for this course are in large part classics, texts that have through the ages been regarded as masterpieces that transcend their own times, and that have something important to say to people of various times and cultures. We will be looking at literature, philosophy, and history as well as some theology; we will be covering these disciplines as they apply to classical Greece and Rome, and then as they apply into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Because the course proceeds chronologically, we can see in a powerful way how later authors build on earlier ones. Something that particularly excites me about the course is the way it illustrates how Christianity, which became the dominant religion in the West, was born in a classical world and how Christians came to incorporate classical learning and culture from ancient Greece and Rome.

IDS 171 07 Cultural Heritage I
Freedom, Justice, and the Good Life
Portfleet, Dianne TR 9:30 AM 10:50 AM

This course will focus on 4 specific time periods in history: 5th-century B.C. Greece, 1st-century Rome, beginnings of Islam and its expansion, and Dante's Florence. In each of the historical, philosophical and literary readings, we will be focusing on the themes of freedom, justice and the good life. The last half of the semester will be spent reading the Dante’s complete Divine Comedy and expanding on all of the ideas introduced in the earlier writings.

IDS 172 01 Cultural Heritage II
Good, Bad, and Evil
Petit, Jeanne MWF 9:30 AM 10:20 AM

What makes a movement, an idea or a person good? How can we judge whether a political system or a poem is bad? Is there such a thing as evil, and how do we know it when we see it? These questions have been debated for centuries in Western societies, and in the process, new systems of thinking and understanding have emerged. This class will use the lenses of history, literature and philosophy to explore the ways men and women in the Western world have shaped the meanings of good, bad and evil. We will also consider how these debates from the past influence on the ways those of us in the 21st century think about religion, politics, economics, gender, morality, war and our very selves.

IDS 172 02 Cultural Heritage II
Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism
Perovich, Anthony MWF 1:00 PM 1:50 PM

While the French Revolution was one of the major events of modern history, the buildup to it and the fallout from it are of equal interest, and all three will be examined in this course. This section of IDS 172 is a “three-discipline” interdisciplinary course: it will focus on European history, literature, and philosophy from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. Special attention will be paid to the intellectual movement known as “the Enlightenment,” to the Revolution itself and the Napoleonic period that ensued, and to the Romantic movement that sprang up alongside the Revolution and continued beyond it. Figures to be read or studied will include Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Napoleon, and Hegel. The connections of the main themes of this course to other cultural and historical developments, such as the Scientific Revolution, the American Revolution, and the rise of nationalism, will also be explored.

IDS 172 03 Cultural Heritage II
Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism
Perovich, Anthony MWF 2:00 PM 2:50 PM

While the French Revolution was one of the major events of modern history, the buildup to it and the fallout from it are of equal interest, and all three will be examined in this course. This section of IDS 172 is a “three-discipline” interdisciplinary course: it will focus on European history, literature, and philosophy from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. Special attention will be paid to the intellectual movement known as “the Enlightenment,” to the Revolution itself and the Napoleonic period that ensued, and to the Romantic movement that sprang up alongside the Revolution and continued beyond it. Figures to be read or studied will include Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Napoleon, and Hegel. The connections of the main themes of this course to other cultural and historical developments, such as the Scientific Revolution, the American Revolution, and the rise of nationalism, will also be explored.

IDS 172 04 Cultural Heritage II
Authority and the Individual
Lunderberg, Marla TR 12:00 PM 1:20 PM

How do you define yourself as an individual? And how do you relate to the many different authorities in your life? When someone (parent, spiritual leader, government authority or dorm resident director) lays down a rule, do you respond positively? Break it as a matter of principle? Toe the line but grumble? Do you react differently to different kinds of authority? When two kinds of authority conflict, how do you respond?

In this course, we will examine how others have seen their relationships to the many authorities in their lives. We'll cover a great range of time and a great variety of kinds of thinking, from Luther's distinctions between spiritual and secular authorities, to Shakespeare's exploring the power held by colonial authorities, to Confucian emphasis on family ties. We'll cover texts from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, from literature, history, and philosophy, from Western and Asian traditions. We will consider texts as they relate to their particular moment in history and as they relate to each other.

Perhaps you'll see yourself in some of these thinkers. Perhaps you won't. Yet whether you agree or disagree with them, digesting what they have said can allow you to examine closely what you think.

IDS 172.05 Cultural Heritage II
From Reformation to Revolution
Gibbs, Janis MWF 1:00 PM 1:50 PM

The theme of this interdisciplinary humanities course is “From Reformation to Revolution.” The dynamic which will guide our investigation is change. Change is an important dynamic in human societies. At different times in history, men and women have developed ideas, technologies and movements which have challenged prevailing authorities, shifted people’s understanding of the truth, and changed the world. Changes can be minor, or they can be radical. They can improve existing institutions, or replace them entirely. We sometimes call changes “reforms.” If the changes are profound enough, we call them “revolutions.” How do people foster change? How do they react to calls for reform? What transforms reformation into revolution? What leads people to develop revolutionary changes, or to adopt them? How and why do other people resist reform or revolution? How can people transform the extraordinary energy of revolutionary movements into the energy required to build and maintain new institutions? Do we use the term “revolution” too easily? What is a “reform”? When does a change become revolutionary?

We will study a series of changes between the late fifteenth century (i.e. late 1400s C.E. ) and the early 19th century (1800s C.E. ). Major topics include the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. While we will not consider all of the important, or even all of the revolutionary, changes that have occurred during this period, we will be looking at a variety of kinds of change: religious, political, intellectual, technological, social—and of course, combinations of these kinds of change, since none of them exist alone.

This course is also an introduction to three disciplines within the humanities—history, philosophy, and literature—and to the connections and distinctions between them. We will use a variety of sources to discuss reformations, revolutions, and the people who made them, joined them, resisted them, and were swept up by them. Literature, philosophy and history give us different, though related, ways of understanding the process and the experience of reform and revolution in human history.

IDS 172.06 Cultural Heritage II
From Reformation to Revolution
Gibbs, Janis MWF 11:00 AM 11:50 AM

The theme of this interdisciplinary humanities course is “From Reformation to Revolution.” The dynamic which will guide our investigation is change. Change is an important dynamic in human societies. At different times in history, men and women have developed ideas, technologies and movements which have challenged prevailing authorities, shifted people’s understanding of the truth, and changed the world. Changes can be minor, or they can be radical. They can improve existing institutions, or replace them entirely. We sometimes call changes “reforms.” If the changes are profound enough, we call them “revolutions.” How do people foster change? How do they react to calls for reform? What transforms reformation into revolution? What leads people to develop revolutionary changes, or to adopt them? How and why do other people resist reform or revolution? How can people transform the extraordinary energy of revolutionary movements into the energy required to build and maintain new institutions? Do we use the term “revolution” too easily? What is a “reform”? When does a change become revolutionary?

We will study a series of changes between the late fifteenth century (i.e. late 1400s C.E. ) and the early 19th century (1800s C.E. ). Major topics include the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. While we will not consider all of the important, or even all of the revolutionary, changes that have occurred during this period, we will be looking at a variety of kinds of change: religious, political, intellectual, technological, social—and of course, combinations of these kinds of change, since none of them exist alone.

This course is also an introduction to three disciplines within the humanities—history, philosophy, and literature—and to the connections and distinctions between them. We will use a variety of sources to discuss reformations, revolutions, and the people who made them, joined them, resisted them, and were swept up by them. Literature, philosophy and history give us different, though related, ways of understanding the process and the experience of reform and revolution in human history.

IDS Courses: Literature and History

IDS 174 01 Cultural Heritage II: Lit/Hist
Health and Healing in the Western Tradition
Hagood, Jonathan MWF 11:00 AM 11:50 AM

This course will examine the Western cultural heritage from the perspectives of health and healing. In order to comprehend the relationship between health, healing, and literature, students will consider a wide range and number of genres as well as a diversity of voices from many times and places. These readings will address the human experience of illness, beginnings and endings, trauma and recovery, coming to terms, and the cost of healing. In addition, students will uncover the detailed history of the development of the modern health care sector and give particular attention to aspects of gender, medical specialization, and the health professions. While the course is designed to deepen students’ understanding of the rich cultural heritage supporting contemporary perspectives on health and healing, it will also challenge students’ pre-existing beliefs and opinions concerning the human body, its wellbeing, and the role played by society and individuals in health and healing.

IDS 174 02 Cultural Heritage II: Lit/Hist
Indigenous: Native American Literature and History in (What Came to Be Called) North America
Montano, Jesus MWF 12:00 PM 12:50 PM

Chronologically our course begins at the height of the Aztec Empire and proceeds through the colonial period, the ages of nation building and manifest destiny, and finally ends in the Now. In order to avoid the pitfalls of a straight linear chronology, however, our route will begin in modern Mexico with the Zapatista and other indigenous movements. We will proceed back into history, going through the nationalism and colonial periods all the way back to the eve of the Conquest in Mexico. At this point we will venture across the Border, and while staying in the past, we will explore Native American creation stories and the various ways in which people made sense of their relationships to each other, to the world, and to the divine. We will continue on this road, traveling from the early period of contact with Europeans toward the US colonial period and then to the era of expansion and Manifest Destiny. Our course will end by examining modern Native American authors who look back toward the past as a way of discussing modern US issues. The goal of our travels is to understand our cultural inheritance, sometimes through the lens of Western European thought and culture but most time in juxtaposition to it, through the disciplines of history and literature. We will look carefully at governmental treaties and historical events, as well as the thoughts and ideas governing both inter-cultural and intra-cultural dialogue.

IDS Courses: Literature and Philosophy

IDS 175 01 Cultural Heritage I: Lit/Phil
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
Allis, James TR 12:00 PM 1:20 PM

With Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, we are presented with two of the great metaphors of life, a battle and a journey. In this class, we will read, in translation, these two epic poems which are sometimes said to have “fed” the Western imagination more than any other works in the last 2700 years.

We will begin the course reading the Iliad. The poem has sometimes been described as the greatest war story of all time. Plutarch tells us that Aristotle's pupil Alexander kept the book "with his dagger under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge." Yet while military commanders throughout history have studied this poem of the Trojan War to avoid Agamemnon's errors and to follow Odysseus' tactics, the poem is vastly more than a "war story." With extraordinary rhythms of language and unparalleled metaphors, Homer vividly gives us a “poem of the human condition.” We will explore Achilles’ shame, rage, and withdrawal from human interactions, a culture of honor and glory, the human confrontation with mortality, the relationships between gods and humans, the meaning of courage, the strength of fate and the possibilities for human freedom, the desire for justice and vengeance, the need to keep fighting in the face of certain defeat, acts of friendship, loyalty, and generosity, the heroism of Hector, the complexity and sorrows of war along with the longings for tranquility and peace, the tragedy of Troy, the sorrow of loss, Achilles’ return to battle, the losing and regaining of humanity.

Then we will turn to the story of Odysseus’ ten year journey home from the Trojan War in the Odyssey. Here, too, we find much more than a “story of a journey,” though part of the excitement of the work is the wonderful presentation of Odysseus’ adventures and trials. We’ll investigate the meaning of home and the longing for home, the importance of hospitality in an often inhospitable world, the temptation to find release in death and the strength to resist that temptation, relations between women and men, husbands and wives, parents and children, again the relations between gods and humans and the role of fate, the significance of truth, lies, and deception in pursuing one’s goals, the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope and Odysseus’ killing of the suitors to regain his home. Throughout the story, we will see Odysseus’ continuing struggles to move ultimately from chaos to order.

All are welcome; no background in Greek language or culture is presupposed. The only prerequisite is a certain willingness to explore how it is that in a language we no longer know exactly how to pronounce, this poet Homer, from a world of which we have but the vaguest ideas, incredibly and wonderfully found a way to give us these stories of our human lives, containing, as one recent commentator has put it, “every secret happiness and every hidden sin."

Philosophy Courses

PHIL 230 01 Cultural Heritage I
Ancient Philosophy
Bassett, Gregory TR 1:30 PM 2:50 PM
Western philosophy from its beginning to the Middle Ages, including such figures as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and St. Augustine, through a study of primary texts. Partial fulfillment of the Cultural Heritage requirement.

PHIL 232 01 Cultural Heritage II
Modern Philosophy
Allis, James MWF 11:00 AM 11:50 AM
One of the central characteristics of the modern age in the West has been the rise of science and technology. Developments in science and technology have transformed the material conditions of life and increased the opportunities and possibilities for many. Today science and technology play hugely influential roles in contemporary society and world affairs.

In this course, we will explore such questions as: How did modern science begin? What is distinctive about modern scientific knowledge, and how might its approaches to the natural world and human reason contribute to its extraordinary success? How do the efforts of science and technology influence our understanding of ourselves as humans and our possible relations to God?

Yet even as the successes of science and technology continue to amaze us and shape our ways of living, ethical questions about the work of science begin to arise. For example, science and technology give us considerable power over the natural world, but how are we going to use that power (e.g., nuclear energy and genetic engineering)? How might we begin to figure out good and not-so-good uses of that power? Science and technology may help us realize lives of greater convenience and comfort (e.g., an expanding number of gadgets), but do science and technology help us to achieve lives that are genuinely better and happier? Science and technology provide us with opportunities that previous generations did not have, but are we truly freer in any meaningful way? While science and technology continue to give us incredible insights into the workings of human beings and our world (e.g., evolutionary theory and the neurosciences), at the same time more questions emerge about our human place and purposein the world and about the existence of God.

History Courses

HIST 130 01 Cultural Heritage I
Introduction to Ancient Civilization
Staff, TBA TR 9:30 AM 10:50 AM
The course will focus on significant developments in history from its Greek origins through the Renaissance. It is designed to introduce the student to the discipline of history and can be used to fulfill part of the cultural heritage requirement.

HIST 130 02 Cultural Heritage I
Introduction to Ancient Civilization
Staff, TBA TR 1:30 PM 2:50 PM
The course will focus on significant developments in history from its Greek origins through the Renaissance. It is designed to introduce the student to the discipline of history and can be used to fulfill part of the cultural heritage requirement.

HIST 131 01 Cultural Heritage II
Introduction to Modern European History
Johnson, Fred TR 12:00 PM 1:20 PM
The course will focus on significant developments in modern European history from the Renaissance to our own time. It is designed to introduce the student to the discipline of history and can be sued to fulfill part of the cultural heritage requirement.

HIST 207 01 Cultural Heritage I
World Civilization I
M’bayo, Tamba MWF 9:30 AM 10:20 AM
This introductory world history course surveys developments in human civilization in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe from prehistory until about 1500. It employs comparative methods to investigate cultures and societies that developed in different parts of the world, and it examines the ways in which world societies have interacted in the past. It fulfills the Cultural Heritage I requirement and is flagged for cultural diversity.

English Courses

ENGL 231 01 Cultural Heritage I
Literature of the Western World
Verduin, Kathleen MWF 8:30 AM 9:20 AM

"The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation— return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the realm of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948)

English 231 is a course in the classics: the texts that form the foundation of western—that is, European—literature from the beginnings of written history to about 1600. From Gilgamesh and Homer (the ancient world) through Dante’s Inferno and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (the Middle Ages) to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and the plays of the Mexican nun Sor Juana (the Renaissance), we will trace the development of literary expression, learn to surmount its difficulties, and recognize its continuing presence in the way that even we perceive our world and ourselves. Obviously it’s impossible to cover so many centuries with anything like thoroughness, but we make a valiant effort to investigate works either artistically superior or most representative of the culture that produced them. While the contentious climate of postmodern opinion now challenges the whole concept of “the classics,” most students who give these texts a careful reading come to confirm their value as embodiments and transmitters of all that is best in our tradition. To give a thread of continuity to this wide-ranging foray into the literature of the past, we will follow the recurrent themes of nature versus culture, male versus female, and action versus contemplation, and we will confront in particular the mighty archetype, persistent from Gilgamesh to Superman, of the hero’s journey. What gets these heroes going? What do they seek? How do their journeys lead them into the strangest of all regions, the human mind? And can their journeys tell us something, even at the distance of centuries, about the journeys we ourselves must undertake? These are some of the questions that will concern us this semester. Four credit hours.

(Note: This course fulfills half the Cultural Heritage core requirement. Since English 231 is an “ancient” course, it should be paired with IDS 172, or with a history course and a philosophy course, one of which must be History 131 or Philosophy 232. The three-course option is recommended particularly for majors thinking of doing graduate work in English.)

ENGL 233 01 Global Literature
Cole, Ernest MW 1:30 PM 2:50 PM
The contact between western societies and the so–called “Third World” has led to the creation of a number of discourses that have shaped and continue to shape the literary cannons of both societies and the relationship between scholars and writers of the two distinct traditions. This initial contact has led to, for instance, the discourse of imperialism and its representation of indigenous peoples and societies as “other” or “different.” The socio-cultural and political assumptions that go with these labels have shaped western consciousness of other peoples as well as contributed to the emergence of a body of work and criticism that seek to deconstruct western hegemony, control and domination by writing back to former colonialists and their literature.

This course would focus on how former colonized societies from Sub-Saharan Africa to South Asia, the Caribbean and South America react to this discourse of “otherness” and their attempts at de-colonization and promoting their political and cultural independence. In the process, this form of literature would “write back to empire” by addressing issues as destruction of indigenous cultures, representation of otherness, identity, alterity, and gender.

Thus, in this course, we would examine works that cover a considerable period of growth and development in time and place in Global Literatures from Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds in Africa to George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin in the Caribbean. Within this historical framework, we would trace the impact of westernization on it the literature, and its reconfiguration of colonial perceptions of indigenous societies in the process of writing back to empire.

Selected Texts
1. Lewis Nkosi: Mating Birds
2. Luis Alberto Urrea: The Devil’s Highway
3. Endo, Shusaku: Silence
4. George Lamming: In the Castle of My Skin
5. Norman R. Shapiro: Negritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean