Fall Semester 2000 Courses |
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Biology |
Chemistry |
Classics |
Comparative Literature | |
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Art Ruth Kolarik: AH 111 "The History of Architecture" (AP:A; 2 units of Humanities credit) Click here for full description This introductory architecture course offers an excellent avenue into the ‘chaos and order’ theme as it involves such a range of social, political, technological and environmental issues, as well as demanding close consideration of form and function. The course explores the ways in which architecture has given order to human activities and values from pre-history to the present. Discussion points and research topics include: human habitations and patterns of living; urbanism and social organization; sanctuaries and religious belief; government buildings and political organization; commercial architecture and economic systems. Important ‘concentrations’ within the course focus upon American architecture as an expression of American culture, regional architecture as it reflects local values– issues such as city planning, suburban sprawl and the "new urbanism," and the architecture of college campuses as a mirror of educational institutions. A two-block single-instructor course. |
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Biology Werner Heim: BY 100 "Studies in Biology: Order and Chaos Among the Organisms" (1 unit of Natural Science credit; 1 unit of General Studies credit) Click here for full descriptiom This course will consider questions such as: Is there order among the organisms? What are the evidences for such order? How did such order arise? Can that order be explained on a naturalistic basis or is a supernatural explanation required? Can order arise in a system where novelty arises by chaos/chance? How is order maintained in the face of disturbances, including chaotic disturbances? How does deep time affect an orderly system? The course will consider biological evolution, including some of the underlying science and evidence, and the position of the theory of evolution as an explanatory system. The relative epistemological and metaphysical positions of the theory of evolution and various creationist hypotheses will be explored. The theory of evolution is the best available explanatory device for the present state of biological diversity. Furthermore, it is the basis of modern attempts to see order in and bring order to the tremendously large and diverse set of objects we call organisms. Its underlying scientific bases include geology and genetics, and an understanding of the evidence for and against it should be in the repertoire of all liberally educated persons. A two-block single-instructor course. |
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Chemistry Howard Drossman, CH 107 / CH 108 "Chemistry of the Environment: Seeking Order in Chaos on the Sub-Microscopic Level (Introductory Chemistry I & II)" (2 units of Natural Science Lab credit) "The laws of thermodynamics control the rise and fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of nations, the movements of commerce and industry, the origins of wealth and poverty, and the general welfare of the human race…" "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe…"Chemists come to understand the environment at the sub-microscopic level by creating models that enable them to discover order in chaos. This two block introductory chemistry class covers the concepts of the standard general chemistry sequence by learning how chemists contribute to an increased understanding of environmental problems. Many complex environmental problems that seem chaotic are often made less so by the use of systems models. A better understanding of environmental problems will be gained by learning how chemical principles are used in models of environmental system behavior. We will explore various Earth systems through the use of computer models with the STELLATM program. The problems we will consider in this class include global warming, ozone chemistry, automobile air pollution, the search for sustainable fuels, the carbon cycle and the chemistry of color vision. Class includes writing assignments, research-based laboratories, computer modeling and an exploration of personal learning styles. This is a chemistry class! Students with a good high school background in chemistry and algebra and an interest in environmental problems are encouraged to apply for this class. Those with an interest in chemistry but without adequate preparation should consider the alternative FYE class taught by Sally Meyer (EV 120 / CH107). This class earns students credit for the Chemistry 107 & Chemistry 108 general chemistry sequence which is required for the chemistry, environmental science and biology degrees at Colorado College. Students who place out of Chemistry 107 may seek one credit for an introductory environmental science class (EV 120). Class Text: Introductory Chemistry (Michael Munowitz) Class includes the following modules developed by the ChemConnectionsTM Consortium:
What Should We Do About Global Warming? (T. Brauch, S. Anthony & E. Longley) How Might We Cure Color Blindness? (H. Drossman, K. Kester & K. Morgan) Where Has All the Carbon Gone? (H. Drossman) Why Does the Ozone Hole Form? (T. Ferrett & S. Anthony) Does Reformulated Gasoline Reduce Air Pollution? (H. Drossman & W. Tikkanen) Sally Meyer, EV 120 / CH 107 "Basic Environmental Science: The Entropy Crisis" (2 units of Natural Science Lab credit) This course, which includes 2 units of Laboratory credit, will provide students with a fundamental understanding of the "Natural Laws" that will limit and govern human behavior in the near future. The course will take a qualitative look at the limits of energy transfers based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Students will also study and discuss the present and future state of the environment with an emphasis upon chaos and order. Students will conduct independent research based on readings, class discussion, and an extended schedule of field trips. Laboratory, computer and field projects will emphasize basic physics, chemistry, and geology/hydrology. Course texts include The Second Law: Energy, Chaos and Form by P.W. Atkins, Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World, Jeremy Rifkin, and The Energy-Environment Connection by Jack Hollander. ‘Energy and the environment’ is an excellent topic to help guide you to the area that interests you the most and in which you will do independent research. The scheduled field trips will allow the class access to people and resources in many areas as work begins on course-related research projects. A set of linked one-block courses that must be taken together, with a single instructor. |
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Classics Marcia Dobson and John Riker: CL/PH/HY 116 "Greek History and Philosophy" (AP:A; 2 units of Humanities credit) Click here for full description "Without chaos in your soul, you cannot give birth to a dancing star"This is the second oldest interdisciplinary course at Colorado College and one that is ideal for exploring order and chaos. We will begin by examining ancient ritual culture and seeing how the world (any world) is the emergence of order from chaos. We will witness the chaos of the Trojan War and Achilles’ attempt to initiative a new order of justice. We will follow Odysseus through a world of recurring chaos and the resurrection of order in his homecoming. We will then follow the order/chaos theme as it appears in the metaphysics underlying historical events in Herodotus, the process philosophy of Heraclitus, and the denial of change in Parmenides. We will see what happens when the tragic heroes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides attempt to control the irrational forces of human destiny. We will then understand why Plato defines evil as chaos and attempts to create an indestructible order for the mind and state. Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics can be understood as attempting to balance the chaos of the self and matter with the ordering principles of reason and God. When we turn to Greek themes as they appear in modern Western culture, we witness chaos flowing back into an overly ordered world in Goethe’s Faust and find Nietzsche celebrating chaos as the ground for creativity. We will end with a remarkable text by Heidegger that will teach us how thinking, as distinct from reasoning, can transcend the chaos/order duality in apprehending the truth of Being. A team-taught, two-block course that may be taken as either Classics, Philosophy or History (and if history, than it provides 2 units of Social Science rather than Humanities credit). |
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Comparative Literature Owen Cramer, Francoise Paheau, William Davis and Corinne Scheiner: CO 100 Introduction to Comparative Literature (AP:C–meets either the AP:A or the AP:B requirement; 2 units of Humanities credit) What is literature? What are genres? How should they be read, interpreted and evaluated? What social and personal functions does writing have? How is writing related to oral tradition? How do writers compare themselves to others (admiration and imitation, rejection, transformation)? Why do they also compare their fictional characters to monsters, gods, and beasts? As a First Year Experience with the theme "Order and Chaos" this course will address literature’s role in ordering unformed or chaotic experience (genre as a way of creating events and forms in the flow of consciousness). It will also consider a number of literary representations of chaos (the literal chaos "yawning gap" of Greek epic cosmogony; the tohu v’ bohu "formless void" of Genesis) and its evolution into or creative replacement by order (Greek kosmos); also representations of chaotic interventions in ordered life: return of watery disorder in Noah’s flood, Vergilian storm, or Odyssean or Beowulfian passage; medieval tropes of the suspension of rational control in magic and infernal experience, Romanticism’s celebration of the childlike, the primitive and the dream, tragedy as the "unexpected dysfunction of the functional", comedy as its flip-side; the novel as a playground of disruptive voices and transgressive explorations. A team-taught, two-block course. Alberto Hernandez: CO 118 "Order and Chaos in Art" (AP:A; 2 units of Humanities credit) Click here for full description Since very early in the history of our Western philosophical tradition and up to the present, art has often been debated in terms of order versus chaos, and has been considered a privileged arena on which to probe ethical questions. The border between what is beautiful and what is good is a fertile ground for students beginning a liberal arts education. In addition to sharpening their awareness of the fact that even such intimate feelings as the aesthetic experience are theoretically constructed, students will be encouraged to articulate different approaches to account for the artistic phenomenon. An important connection between things personal and things political will come to the fore. A two-block single-instructor course. |
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Comparative Literature and History Peter Blasenheim and Ibrahima Wade: HY 110 / CO 200 "An Introduction to African Civilizations: Histories and Literatures" (2 units of AP:B; 1 unit of Social Science credit and 1 unit of Humanities credit) These two ‘linked’ blocks will provide a survey of the history and literature of Africa. The theme of this year’s First Year Experience, order and chaos, is particularly appropriate for a two-block African survey. Indeed, coping with problems of social order and social chaos explains the emergence of traditional states in Africa more than two millennia ago, the first topic we will study in Block One of this course. Once we periodize African history we will examine major historical themes from a variety of primary and secondary sources and from the perspective of the several social science disciplines. Specifically, the class will look at how pre-colonial Africans organized their social worlds and their polities and why, when, where and how these social worlds and polities evolved, developed and/or fell apart. We will examine the impact of Islam, of European contact and Christianity, of the internal and external slave trade, and of colonialism and political independence on individuals, societies and polities. Block 2 will focus on many of these same issues and themes but from the perspective of traditional and contemporary African writers from the continent’s several regions. African literature deals with the confrontations between indigenous tradition on the one hand and colonialism, Arabo-Islamization, Westernization and modernization on the other. Yet traditional Africa has been kept alive in literary narratives, surely one way of constructing order out of chaos. More recent means to the same end–the ideologies of Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and the African Personality–will also be studied in the novels, poems and drama of Anglophone and Francophone Africans. The class will include reading and discussion and we expect our students to do analytical writing. Final research projects will focus on issues and themes covered in the two blocks. A set of linked one-block courses that must be taken together. |
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English Dan Tynan: EN 203 "Tradition and Change in Literature: The Hero" (AP:A; 2 units of Humanities credit) For the benefit of their societies, heroes traditionally have forayed out of the orderly comforts of culture and reason into the chaotic, fiery underworld of the irrational and evil. This course will examine the changing definitions of heroism and the possibility that the modern world holds no place for heroes; or, that heroes have no place in the modern world where chaos ultimately rules. Readings will include, among other texts and films, Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. A two-block single-instructor course. |
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General Studies Bill Davis, Director: GS 101 Freedom & Authority (AP:A; 2 units of General Studies credit) Freedom and Authority" was the first interdisciplinary course at Colorado College and has been taught here for over 40 years. "Freedom and Authority" is a two-block interdisciplinary course focusing on the conflict between the freedom of the individual and the limits imposed on this freedom by the state and its laws, by religious institutions and scriptures, and by attitudes of the society in which we live. As an interdisciplinary course, it studies literary, philosophical, religious, historical, and scientific texts in a thematic context. It focuses on four main themes: personal authority, social authority, political authority, and religious authority. Behind all of these themes are questions such as: What constitutes personal identity? What are the sources of our individual values and commitments? How much of what we are can be traced to ethnic and cultural background? What should one do when conscience and laws conflict? How does the individual relate to the group? How do authority and power work to constrain and mold individuals? How do sources of authority legitimate themselves? Through reading, writing, discussion, and critical thinking we will grapple with these and other questions surrounding the human condition. A two-block course with one instructor in each block; one grade will be given for the course as a whole (for both blocks together). Section OneKeith Kester and Joseph Pickle: GS 204 "Ordering Chaos? Scientific and Religious Strategies" (AP:A; 1 unit of Humanities credit and 1 unit of Natural Science credit) Both science and religion seek meaning in the nature of things. Both use strategies to tease order out of chaos, understanding out of confusion. Order has been imagined, discovered, and imposed in both traditions. Both have to take seriously things that "don't fit." In science chaos is represented in such concepts as entropy, pollution, randomness, error and mutation. In religious creation myths order is created out of chaos, but chaos remains as part of religious understandings of impurity, evil, and sin. This course will explore the ways in which scientific and religious communities have developed theories of knowledge, and cosmological systems of meaning. The course will highlight the development of the theory of evolution and its elaborations in genetics and ecology, exploring their philosophical and theological implications. Readings will include selected cosmological myths, Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, John von Neumann, Rachel Carson, Jacob Bronowski, Jacques Monod, Thomas Kuhn, A. R. Ammons, and Martha Nussbaum, as well as field projects in bio-diversity and the geologic history of the Garden of the Gods. 2 Units. A team-taught, two-block course. Ruth Barton, Dick Hilt, Mike Siddoway; GS 242 "Woof and Warp: The Weave of Science and Literature" (AP:A; 2 units of General Studies credit) Click here for full description This course will explore interconnections between science and literature, focusing on ways in which they try to make sense of order and chaos. Sometimes scientific theories influence literature; sometimes literature raises questions that influence culture and lead to exploration of new areas by scientists. We will consider various scientific fields (from geology to medicine), but the course will concentrate on ways in which the physical sciences, mathematics, and literature all explore aspects of order and chaos. We will read works from Archimedes and Euripides to the present, dealing with scientists and mathematicians such as Euclid, Kepler, Newton, Cantor, Godel, Turing, and Einstein, and with what is sometimes call the new science of Chaos. Literary works will include fiction, drama and poetry by writers such as Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Calvino, Borges, Stoppard, Pynchon, Yeats, Hopkins, Williams, Stevens and Ammons. Although welcome, no advanced mathematics is required. A team-taught, two-block course. |
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Geology Jeff Noblett, GY 140 / GY 150 "The Earth System: Patterns and Perspectives" (2 units of Natural Science Lab credit) Click here for full description This course will examine the scientific perspective on the Earth System from order (atomic structure) through chaotic behavior (weather, El Nino, earthquake prediction). Interwoven through this scientific theme will be the question raised from the perspective of ecofeminists of what our connection to place (Earth) consists of. This journey begins with personal feeling (chaos!) and continues towards patterns of human perspectives on the Earth (order?). We will examine the Earth System with the tools of a geologist, from the atomic-scale order of crystal structures through the larger subsystems of lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, with some acknowledgment of the biosphere. Emphasis will be on learning to recognize minerals, rocks and fossils in outcrops; to observe and interpret combinations of these to reveal ancient environments; to record this data on maps; to unravel folds and faults which change these patterns. After understanding the lithosphere in some detail, the course will review patterns found in the other three subsystems of the Earth, aspects of which behave in chaotic manners. This course will also include discussion of issues in environmental geology such as earth catastrophes, mineral and energy resources, and human-induced problems. Throughout this examination, the course will pursue questions raised by ecofeminists and other critics of traditional science concerning the place of humans in this system. What perspectives do we bring to science, what alternative solutions to environmental issues could non-scientists discover through the chaos of their personal feelings about their connection to the Earth, how could this chaos find order in the examination of the place of humans in the Earth System? A set of linked one-block courses that must be taken together, with a single instructor. |
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History Susan Ashley, Tim Cheek, Peter Blasenheim: HY 104 Culture, Society and History (AP:C–meets either the AP:A or the AP:B requirement; 2 units of Social Science credit) Click here for course homepage This course explores how people in different periods and in different cultures imagined and dealt with disorder. It looks at what people feared in nature, in other people and in themselves and at how they expressed these fears in images, thoughts, and actions. The course also examines how people sought and how they found a measure of security. It follows their efforts to give order to cosmic chaos through religion and political ideologies. It also examines the ways people in ancient and modern, western and non-western societies organized their communities to minimize conflict and to give themselves a sense of identity and place. The first block focuses on classical and feudal culture in Asia and the Mediterranean; the second deals with developments from the Age of Discovery to the present in Europe, Latin America. Both blocks emphasize close reading and discussion of literary and philosophical texts as well as key historical studies. Works range from classical thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato to moderns such as Marx and Sartre. A team-taught, two-block course. Bob McJimsey and Bryan Rommel-Ruiz: HY 105 "The Atlantic World - History and Myth: Ordering the Past" (AP:A; 2 units of Social Science credit) Our course has two goals. The first is to examine the relationship between myth and history. In this context myth is defined as a narrative structure providing profound meaning to a people. Examples from biblical and classical writings are prevalent. By contrast the historian’s task has been to use evidence of human thought and action to discover the causes of the fates of human societies. Often this has led historians to draw conclusions of moral meaning for readers. More recently, methods of critical scholarship have turned historians away from moral concerns toward more abstract pursuits such as economic determinism, various forms of social authority and the constructions of explanations based upon a matrix of social, ideological and mythological components. A variety of local community studies give examples of these methods. The course will offer a survey of these goals and methods to provide a context within which to evaluate particular case studies. The second goal is to introduce the students to examples of national myths. These will be drawn from the culture of the north Atlantic triangle: Canada, Britain and the USA. Topics will include ‘the Whig Interpretation of History,’ ‘ the Frontier,’ ‘Anglo-Saxon Liberty,’ ‘The Norman Yoke," ‘the idea of The People,’ ‘The Common Man,’ ‘Braveheart,’ and ‘Robin Hood.’ A team-taught, two-block course. |
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History and Political Science Bob Lee, HY 200 / PS 203 "The Search for Islamic Order: Yesterday and Today" (AP:B; 2 units of Social Science credit) Click here for full description In this two-block sequence students will receive an intense, rigorous introduction to Islam and its implications for the individual and for politics. Students will look at Islam through the lens of two disciplines, History and Political Science, with the organizing theme of order and chaos to guide the investigation. From the chaos of the 7th century emerged a new order based in Qur’anic revelation. Soon the new order extended from Iran to Spain. What were the personal, intellectual, cultural and political dimensions of this new order in the first centuries of the Islamic era?? How did the new order respond to its encounters with Judaism and Christianity, Greek rationalism and Iranian mysticism? To what extent could the elaboration of orthodoxy offset sectarian diversity and political ferment? The second half of the course confronts the question of order and chaos in the contemporary Muslim Middle East, examining questions such as the place of the nation-state in Islamic theory, the nature of the ‘Islamic state,’ the position of women in the Islamic world, Islam and democracy, Islam and human rights, Islam and violence. Students will be asked to pick a country for close study on one of these issues. A set of linked one-block courses that must be taken together, with a single instructor. |
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Mathematics Marlow Anderson, Kathy Merrill, Fred Tinsley: NS 150 "From Order to Chaos to Order" (2 units of Natural Science credit) In this course we will examine two complementary scientific approaches to the theme Order and Chaos. During the first block we will emphasize exciting recent mathematical and scientific developments in the study of chaotic systems, and how chaotic behavior arises in contexts that seemingly ought to be predictable. Often this chaotic behavior leads to the beautiful pictures known as fractals. During the second block we will emphasize how statistical regularities arise out of seemingly chaotic and random behavior. The course as a whole will thus provide a good conceptual understanding of the scientific and mathematical approach to both Order and Chaos. The course will be supplemented by guest appearances by faculty from other disciplines, examining how these ideas are applied in physics, art, music and literature. A team-taught, two-block course. |
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Philosophy Judy Genova, Jonathan Lee, John Rosenthal, Mara Harrell: PH 110 "Introduction to Philosophy": From Chaos to Order? From Order to Chaos? (2 units of Humanities credit) Click here for full description This course provides an introduction to the primary subject-areas of the discipline of philosophy, by looking at the ways in which ideas of order and chaos have shaped the kinds of questions and the kinds of answers that have come to define philosophy. The two-block course will be divided into four modules, each of which will be taught by a different member of the department’s faculty. The course begins with a treatment of metaphysics, the philosophical approach to questions of reality, and this is followed by an introduction to questions of ethics and political theory. The second block of the course begins with an introduction to the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science, and this is followed by an exploration of the fundamental questions of aesthetics, the philosophical approach to the arts. Although the course will include readings from major figures in the history of philosophy, it will also include many contemporary readings. A team-taught, two-block course. |
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Political Science Lief Carter: PS 201 and 296 "Political Analysis and Politics of the Legal Process" (2 units of Social Science credit) Click here for full description And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.PS 201 officially serves as an introduction to the Political Science major. It explores political power (e.g., force and coercion) and influence (e.g., rhetoric and other forms of persuasion), and contrasts both of these to economic processes of social organization. PS 296 introduces the nature of legality and legal reasoning. Power is the rawest and most primitive form of imposing social order. Influence and then law serve as successive ‘civilizing’ steps toward more effective and peaceful forms of social ordering. These linked courses provide a good introduction to the perennial problem of social chaos (these days we see it in East Timor, Kosovo, Northern Ireland) and the solutions that liberal thought in Western Civilization has thus far offered for that problem. Obviously the gods have not yet managed to "create a race that can understand." A set of linked one-block courses that must be taken together, with a single instructor.> Eve Grace: PS 103 "Western Political Traditions: Rule and Right" (AP:A; 2 units of Social Science credit) This course attempts to bring students into a dialectical engagement with the claims of political and moral orders which guide our communities and inform our private lives. Among the primary questions raised: What is the nature and foundation of political rule? What is the basis, character, and extent of our public and private concern for such principles as justice, equality, and freedom? How are these principles defined? Are they informed and supported by an account of "human nature?" Is there such a nature and can we determine what it is? How do we go about accounting for and defending our political and moral values? What is the relation between politics and principle? Stress is placed on situating students in the midst of controversy, where a variety of basic but competing perspectives are analyzed. Students will consider whether and how these questions affect not only our politics but their own lives. A two-block single-instructor course. |
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Russian-Eurasian Studies David Finley and Alexei Pavlenko: RS 200 "Russians and Americans: Visions of Order" (1 unit of AP:B; 1 unit of Humanities credit and 1 unit of Social Science credit) Our course will explore how Russian perceptions of 20th-century America and comparable American views of Russia have changed before, during and after the Cold War. We’ll put these visions in perspective by looking at Russia’s history of contacts and collisions with the West. The Cold War was the predominant ordering structure for international relations from about 1946 through 1988. Anchored in the polar engagement of the US and USSR, it expanded to affect not only East-West political, military, cultural and economic relations, but to engulf most of the rest of the world. Ideologically, it reflected competing visions of social order. While fundamentally contentious, it also brought relative stability to much of the world for nearly half a century. Then in the late 1980s the Soviet domestic order began to disintegrate under an accumulation of pressures, and with that the Cold War order of international relations vanished too. Neither has been effectively replaced yet. Why? Chaotic forces challenge fragile new structures, domestically and globally. Our course will explore these images of social order and their challenges in recent turbulent history–as they have appeared to Russian and American observers. A two-block course with one instructor in each block; separate grades given for each block. |
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Southwest Studies Doug Monroy, Vicki Levine and Susan Scarberry Garcia: SW 175 "The American Southwest" (2 units of AP:B; 2 units of General Studies credit) Click here for full description 
As a first year seminar, "The American Southwest" provided an introduction to the region’s histories, peoples, and cultures and an interdisciplinary and intercultural study of chaos and order in the American Southwest. The course had twin themes: inter-ethnic conflict and cooperation, and the use of aesthetic media to construct and express concepts of ethnicity. Block 1 explores the interconnections among ritual, epistemology, social structure, and aesthetic expression in the creation of meaning and order among peoples of the Southwest. We will explore creation narratives as the foundation for world view, kinship and social organization, and other cultural domains. Block 2 focuses on historical dynamics in the Southwest, including intercultural conflict and resolution as newcomers have been integrated into the larger regional system. We will explore the boundaries that separate individuals and communities through consideration of historical events such as the Spanish entrada, Indian wars, border conflict, and outlawry. We will also investigate the role of expressive culture (especially literature, poetry, and music) in conflict resolution and the renegotiation of ethnic boundaries. Local field trips and at least one week-long trip to southern Colorado and northern New Mexico will provide opportunities for students to acquire direct experience of the region. A team-taught, two-block course.Studies in the Humanities Marie Daniels, Michael Grace, Jane Hilberry, Edith Kirsch, Bob McJimsey, Mark Stavig: HS 120 Renaissance Culture (3 blocks) Click here for full description Block One:Vision and Self: The Renaissance Eye Edith Kirsch (Art History), Maria Daniels (Spanish) Block One of Renaissance Culture examines the re-ordering of European culture through the lens of classical art and literature in Italy from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. In literature, we study the works of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Castiglione and Machiavelli and the impact of their ideas on such fundamental issues as the authority of classical antiquity, the "chaos" of the Middle Ages, the imitation of nature, and the power and meaning of love (as grounded in the writing of Plato). We also examine the work of visual artists who, like their literary counterparts, expressed and at the same time gave shape to the principles of the Italian Renaissance. These artists include Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Block Two: "The Evolution of the Creative Artist" Michael Grace (Music), Jane Hilberry (English) In Block Two of Renaissance Culture, we will explore twin issues in the development and representation of the creative artist during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. First, we will look at the way that innovation in the arts, particularly music, was often perceived as threatening to disrupt the established (and God-given) order. We will consider such innovation in the musical compositions of Leonin, Guillaume de Machaut, Josquin des Pres and Claudio Monteverdi. Secondly, we will examine the way artist-figures within literary texts (characters such as Walter in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and the Duke in Measure for Measure) seek to order their "materials"–the people and events taking shape around them–and the way those materials resist shaping. In both cases, art is seen to arise from the fruitful tension between the forces of order and chaos (or tradition and innovation, control and resistance). Block Three: "Vice and Virtue: The Crisis of Renaissance Humanism" Robert McJimsey (History), Mark Stavig (English) Northern Renaissance Humanism was imbued with the cause of reform. The Church, government and society fell under sharp criticism and demands for renewal. The Reformation and the Wars of Religion intensified these appeals. This Block examines these struggles and in particular those writers who kept alive the traditions of Humanist thought and criticism. Michael Grace, Tom Lindblade, Dave Mason, Gale Murray: HS 180 Revolution in the Arts (2 units of Humanities credit) When major changes occur in the arts, often the new genres, styles and media at first seem chaotic to audiences, viewers, and readers; only the older arts are judged to be rational and ordered. Human sensibilities have, however, proven remarkably adaptable to new aesthetic ideas. And it is this adaptability, manifest in a desire to find order in apparent chaos, that has allowed the arts in the western world to progress. During periods of profound societal change and ruptures with tradition the artist has often been the first to express new values which define the individual=s place in a changing world. This course will examine periods of artistic revolution in four media - the visual arts and music in Block 1, drama and literature in Block 2. The periods of change that will be examined are: 1) the emergence of Romanticism in the 19th century from the18th-century Enlightenment; 2) the dawn of Modernism in the mid to later 19th century; 3) the growth of modern arts in the first half of the 20th century. A team-taught, two-block course. Block 1 Michael Grace (music) and Gale Murray (art) - Study of three revolutionary periods in art and music: the emergence of a new romantic aesthetic in reaction to the rational balance of form and feeling in the 18th century; the transformation of 19th-century Romanticism into the pre-modern movements of Realism, Impressionism and Symbolism; the growth of modern art and music under the banners of Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. Specifically, the course will cover the following:
Lindblade (Drama/Dance) and David Mason (English) -- Study of three revolutionary moments in literature: the Enlightenment revolution of satire and humor; the Romantic revolution of self and identity; and the Modernist revolution of perspective and form. Several genres will be considered in light of these great changes in culture and consciousness. Specifically, the course will cover the following:
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