CLCV

It's traditional for the humanities and sciences to be regarded as different fields—non-overlapping magisteria, to adapt Stephen Jay Gould's term. But is this true? In this class we examine the role of the humanities in science. Eight faculty from elsewhere in the university will also come to speak about the sciences and humanities in their own work. Join us as we try to think more broadly about the impact of humanistic thought.

The release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey invites a return to Homer’s enduring epic. In this course, we will read the poem closely alongside Nolan’s film, using key characters and episodes to explore themes of coming of age, desire and excess, sexuality, food, slavery, love, loss, and homecoming. We will also examine the poem’s rich afterlives in literature, visual art, and cinema, tracing how successive generations have reimagined Odysseus and his world.
Beyond the poem’s literary and historical contexts, we will consider how The Odyssey intersects with questions in psychology, anthropology, business, and political life, particularly through its explorations of war, trauma, leadership, ambition, and human acquisitiveness. No knowledge of Ancient Greek is required.

The east Roman polity (aka Byzantium) lasted for over a thousand years, from around 300 to 1453 AD. Situated at the meeting point of Europe and Asia, it faced down countless challenges to its existence, mustering the resilience, cohesion, and adaptibility necessary to rebound from repeated shocks while retaining its identity as an Orthodox Roman society. Meanwhile, other states and empires around it collapsed, fragmented, or changed out of recognition. “Byzantium” has often been studied as a case-study in decline and fall, but this course will flip the script and search for the sources of its resilience. How were its rulers able to tax subjects efficiently with little resistance? Why did its structures of governance never fall into chaos? Why did subjects not seek to break away or carve out separatist domains? The course will have an experimental and exploratory quality, as these questions have not been studied systematically in the scholarly literature.

It's traditional for the humanities and sciences to be regarded as different fields—non-overlapping magisteria, to adapt Stephen Jay Gould's term. But is this true? In this class we examine the role of the humanities in science. Eight faculty from elsewhere in the university will also come to speak about the sciences and humanities in their own work. Join us as we try to think more broadly about the impact of humanistic thought.

Since the (western) 18th century, it has been normative to separate humanities and the sciences. The institutional side of this divide is reflected on college campuses, where there is little intellectual exchange between these areas. This course seeks to challenge that separation by (1) familiarizing ourselves with the history that led to it; (2) exploring materials from Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Foucault; and (3) studying points of intersection such as metaphor in science, science fiction, the Turing Test, humanistic medicine, the cyclical nature of scientific ideas since antiquity, and the metaphysics of science.

What has the story of Persephone meant to different people at different times? Is there a “story” of Persephone, or are there many stories—and if the latter, how can we make sense of this diversity of material? How can we use narratives and rituals connected with Persephone to study mythology and religion in antiquity more broadly? How have scholars and artists in the modern period interpreted Persephone? What options are available to us, as students and scholars of the ancient world, for thinking about Persephone, and what significance does Persephone have for us today?

This course combines close-reading of ancient literary texts with an introduction to the study of mythology. Students will read such texts as “The Homeric Hymn to Demeter” while also being introduced to traditions of interpretation of the Persephone myth from antiquity to the present. The myth of Persephone acts as a case study for larger methodological questions: how we study mythologies of the past, and how they continue to shape our thinking today.

The figure of the outlaw looms large in the political and literary imaginations of the Roman and American empires. But what is an outlaw? What does it mean for the law that some people are outside of it? What, if anything, makes violence within the law different from violence without it? How does the rhetoric of legality and criminality implicate ideas of gender and ethnicity? We will explore these questions (among others) using methods from ancient history, literary criticism, and political theory, as we range from historical scholarship and ancient novels to modern films and musical albums. All readings will be in English. No prior training in Roman history required.

Myth is essential to how humans make sense of the world: our foundational stories explain the nature of the world; they justify and explore social and sexual difference; they teach and test the limits of human agency. The course will survey contexts and uses of myth-making in the ancient Mediterranean world. We will also explore the many traditions of critique and anxiety about myth-making, among philosophers, literary critics and religious authorities.

Is solitude a good thing? In this course, we will explore how the poets and philosophers of archaic and classical Greece thought about aloneness, particularly the powers and perils of solitude for the individual and the community. We will read portions of Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, together with excerpts of ancient philosophy, with an aim of thinking through the relationship between individual and community, which is fraught with tension in so many time periods and cultures. We will also reconsider our understanding of the ancient Greeks as primarily “public” in their motivations and values, in light of the array of possibilities offered by solitude in many of these texts.

Embracing the condition of not knowing as a pathway to freedom is at the core of two ancient philosophical schools now commonly known as Skepticism and Daoism. This course is a literary and philosophical comparison of two highly sophisticated texts in these traditions: the Greek Outlines of Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, which records the teachings of Pyrrho, founder of the Hellenistic Skeptic school; and the Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi, which records that teacher’s anticonventionalist and paradoxical counsels for achieving a life of “free and easy roaming.” Course readings are all in English, and no knowledge of the classical Chinese and Greek languages or their philosophies is needed, but separate meetings can be scheduled for students interested in reading either of these texts in the original.