A COURSE GUIDE for the HARVARD HUMANIST 2nd Edition Compiled in 2019 by AAI Staff, Interns, and Harvard Student Fellows Order of Contents Literature and Art………………………………………………………………..2 Foreign Cultures…………………………………………………………………3 The Classics……………………………………………………………………...6 The Occident……………………………………………………………………..8 Religion and Philosophy…………………………………………………………11 Historical Imagination…………………………………………………………....14 Government………………………………………………………………………16 Economy………………………………………………………………………….18 1 Literature and Art Bargaining with the Devil: the Faust Legend COMPLIT 180 Professor John T. Hamilton Goethe's tragic play and its themes: the problem of evil, the human will, forbidden knowledge, and the lust for learning. What’s Love Got to Do With It; Love and Poetry of the Middle Ages and Early Modernity COMPLIT 193 Professor Luis Giron Negron Jewish, Christian, and Muslim love poetry; a study of love's intersection with philosophy and theology. Opera MUSIC 20 Professor Carolyn Abbate Opera as a multimedia performance to invoke the passions, focusing on evolution over time, famous works, and attending live performance. Marcel Proust and his Times FRENCH 110 Professor Virginie Greene 2 A close look at Proust’s In Search of Lost Times, especially his interest in the visual arts, visiting several important art museums in Boston. Milton’s Paradise Lost ENGLISH 131P Professor Gordon Teskey The greatest long poem in English: Milton’s generation of the sublime, scene development, and characterization of Satan. The Politics of Storytelling RELIGION 1920 Professor Michael Jackson Addressing Hannah Arendt’s understanding of storytelling as a bridge between the private and public. Foreign Cultures Power and Civilization: China GENED 1136 Professors William Kirby and Peter K. Bol In China today we see a new country built on the bedrock of an ancient civilization. China’s re-emergence as a global economic power and political model has deep roots. From Rome to the Romanovs, from Byzantium to the Ottomans, on to the global empires of the West, all the great multiethnic empires of the world have come and gone, while a unitary, multi-national, Chinese empire has endured. The ancient Chinese ideal of a single, unified civilized world has had consequences. It was, and still is, a grand vision: all peoples unified under a single ruler and an integrated social order that finds a place for every person in security and harmony. It created the first centralized bureaucratic state; it institutionalized meritocracy; its economy became the world’s greatest market; its philosophies provided models of humane governance; its inventions spread across the globe. And yet in practice it has also been a story of conflict and control, of warring states and competing peoples. We will discuss how the choices China has made in the past bear 3 on the challenges it faces today, when a modern “China model,” with ancient roots, competes with the United States for global leadership. The Greatest Chinese Novel CHNSLIT 140 Professor Wai-Yee Li The Story of the Stone (also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber) by Cao Xueqin (1715?-1763) is widely recognized as the masterpiece of Chinese fiction. It is also a portal to Chinese civilization. Encyclopedic in scope, this book both sums up Chinese culture and asks of it difficult questions. Its cult status also accounts for modern popular screen and television adaptations. Through a close examination of this text in conjunction with supplementary readings and visual materials, the seminar will explore a series of topics on Chinese culture, including foundational myths, philosophical and religious systems, the status of fiction, conceptions of art and the artist, ideas about love, desire and sexuality, gender roles, garden aesthetics, family and clan structure, and definitions of socio-political order. Japanese Religions in the 20th and 21st Centuries JAPNHIST 120 Professor Helen Hardacre An examination of religion and society from the end of the Meiji period (1912) to the present. This course explores the meaning of the modern in Japanese religions, the development of the public sphere and religion's relations with it, religion and nationalism, and the interconnections of religion and social change with materialism, consumerism, pacifism, and spiritualism. Permanent Impermanence: Why Buddhists Build Monuments GENED 1083 Professors Jinah Kim, Yukio Lippit, Eugene Wang Everything changes. This is, in its simplest and most fundamental formulation, one of the essential teachings of Buddhism. Buddhist communities throughout history have preached, practiced, and written about the ephemerality and illusoriness of our everyday lives and experiences. Ironically, however, many of these same communities have attempted to express these teachings in the form of monumental structures meant to stand the test of time. Some of the world’s greatest cultural heritage sites are a legacy of this 4 seeming contradiction between the impermanence that is a central presupposition of Buddhist thought and the permanence to which these same monuments seem to aspire. If the world is characterized by emptiness and the Self is illusory, how does one account for the prodigious volume of art and architecture created by Buddhists throughout history? This Gen Ed course takes a multicultural and reflective engagement with the challenges presented by this conundrum through a study of Buddhist sites scattered throughout time and space. Pertinent topics such as cosmology, pilgrimage, materiality, relics, meditation, and world-making will be explored. Through these Buddhist monuments in South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, students will learn about the rich, diverse world of Buddhist practice and experience. The Two Koreas in the Modern World GENED 1100 Professor Carter Eckert How and why did there come to be two competing and adversarial states on the Korean peninsula in our contemporary world, one a prosperous capitalist democracy of global reach, and the other an impoverished dictatorship, bordering on theocracy and almost totally estranged from the international community—both claiming exclusive rights to speak for the Korean people and the Korean “nation” as a whole? In this course, we will explore not only the two contemporary Korean societies, North and South, but also to Korea’s pre-modern and colonial periods, and to explore together the roles played by China, Japan, the United States, and Russia (Soviet Union) in shaping modern Korean history. We will look beyond the headlines to come to a more complex and nuanced understanding of the conflict on the Korean peninsula as one grounded in the history and legacies of the past hundred years. By showing the tumultuous changes, some good, some ill, on the Korean peninsula since the late 19th century, the course challenges us to confront the constantly shifting nature of historical forces, and to examine the ethical dimensions of particular historical choices. Readings will include primary source materials from each period, and assignments will culminate in a research paper or other capstone project that engages with the individual actors, historical forces, and global politics that have shaped the two Koreas. The Incas and their Empire GENED 1152 Professor Gary Urton The Incas forged an empire across altitudinal extremes and without writing, markets, and the wheel – all typical components of the standard conception of “empire.” How did they do it, and what made their civilization so different from other ancient empires? Did their empire’s collapse after the Spanish conquest eliminate the beliefs, values, and institutions 5 at the heart of Inca society, or might the Spaniards have been influenced by the Incas without knowing it? This course will engage you in conversations about empire and influence, power and defeat, contrasting what we know of the Inca Empire with our knowledge of other ancient civilizations, as well as the first global empire of early modern Spain. In addition to lectures, films and discussions, students will explore the cultural world of the Inca Empire through the hands-on study of ancient Peruvian artifacts in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Readings will include such texts as T. D’Altroy’s, The Incas (2015), on the nature and organization of the Inca Empire, and J. Sharman’s Empires of the Weak (2019), arguing against the long-held belief that European military superiority after 1500 was decisive in Europe’s global expansion. The Classics Introductory Ancient Greek I/Introductory Latin I GREEK I/LATIN I Professor Ivy Livingston Greek I is a starting point for those interested in learning to read ancient Greek. Participants will begin to gain direct access to the literature and culture of Greece through its writings. The specific dialect studied is that of Athens, which is the language of, e.g., Plato, Euripides, and Thucydides, as well as the basis for the language of the New Testament. History of Greek Literature I GREEK 112A A survey of early Greek poetry and prose, with readings from Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, and Herodotus. Discussions of genre in relation to performance, historical contexts, thematic (dis)continuities, oral tradition. The Ancient Greek Hero GENED 1074 Professor Gregory Nagy How to face death? Concentrating on this central human question, we will explore some of the greatest works of ancient Greek literature (in English translation). For 6 the Greeks, a special way to address the problem of death was to think long and hard about what they called heroes in their myths. Our purpose in this course is to extend that kind of thinking to the present. Assignments invite you to engage in personal reflections on the meaning of life and death in the light of what we read in Greek literature about the ordeals of becoming a hero. Horace: Satires and Epistles LATIN 111 Professor Richard Thomas Examines a selection of poems from both works in detail, to illuminate Horace's poetic development, attitudes to politics, patrons and power, and his philosophy of life. Ancient Greek Warfare CLS-STDY 118 Professor Natasha Bershadsky This course will introduce students to the history and myths of ancient Greek warfare.