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.

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.

The class will study the history of the Roman republic in light of contemporary normative theory, and likewise interrogate the ideological origins of contemporary republicanism in light of historical concerns. The focus will be on sovereignty, public law, citizenship, and the form of ancient empire.

Greek was the dominant language in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) between the Hellenistic era and late medieval times, so for almost 1500 years. During that time, communities switched from native Anatolian languages to Greek, converted to Christianity, and eventually became citizens of the east Roman empire, with a Roman legal and ethnic identity. These changes left their mark on the Greek language, even beyond the religious sphere. Latin words entered it by the hundreds, it evolved a number of registers (e.g., archaizing Attic versus spoken demotic Greek), and came to be called ‘the Romaic language.’ A forms of this language, Romeyka, continues to be spoken in rural areas by communities that are today Turkish and Muslim. This course will survey the major historical and linguistic developments of Greek in Asia Minor and modern Turkey.

The Harlem Renaissance in literature and the arts is widely celebrated as a high-water mark of achievement in American culture. Although Chicago writers and artists are not as often grouped together, the juxtaposition of social realism with classical themes, tropes, myth, and genres constitute a particular movement. In this course, we will explore the tension between the social world of Renaissance authors, primarily from Chicago’s South Side, and their interactions with the classics as both legitimating and an edifice they could challenge and rebuild. We will read some of the works of, among others, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry. We will draw from the collections of the Smart Museum and other local resources to enhance how we see Chicago of the 1930s-1950s.