Exchanges take many forms. Technologies are exchanged across societies. Cultures are exchanged across national borders. Ideas are exchanged across texts. These exchanges can be profoundly beneficial through providing opportunities for philosophical expansion or increased diversity. They can also do harm when exchanges become unilateral or acts of colonialism. While typically think of exchanges as simple acts of transmission, they are never neutral. What is exchanged between cultures and persons is profoundly shaped by the material, linguistic, and conceptual context of the exchange. The exchanges, themselves, also transform societies and cultures in complex ways. The courses in this cluster examine the nature of exchange with particular attention to the ways in which exchanges on a global scale have motivated innovation, conflict, and revolutionary change.

Associated Course Pairings:

Course Descriptions

CC100: The Renaissance Thinkers

Instructors: Dario Sponchiado & Mike Siddoway
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Historical Perspectives
CRN# 12574
Block: 1

Renaissance scholars were in search of knowledge, beauty, and truth. Our main task in the course will be to see the parallels between the viewpoints, the inspirations, and the works produced by both artists and scientists (and even artist-scientists!) and why the city-states in Italy in the 14th century were the fertile ground for this cultural revolution. Along the way, we will consider renaissance arts and letters, the impact of politics, the relationships between individuals, society, and culture, and how the “liberal arts” still shape and influence our current world.

CC120: Conduct of American Foreign Policy

Instructor: Schuyler Foerster
CRN# 12526
Block: 2

As a foundation course in Political Science, this course offers an analytical and historical framework for understanding contemporary American foreign policy. The course will place particular emphasis on national security policy, broadly defined. This course also serves as a First-Year Writing Seminar, designed to facilitate students’ ability to understand writing as a “way of thinking” about the discipline of political science and as a vehicle for communicating within that discipline.

CC100: Global Exchange in Art: Antiquity to 20th Century (I)

Instructors: Tamara Bentley & Gale Murray
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Historical Perspectives
CRN# 12506
Block: 1

This art history course has a two-fold purpose. We will examine in depth particular case studies of art from diverse traditions from antiquity to the 20th century. In addition, we will consider exchanges between these traditions in still life, landscape, and figurative art. A number of the case studies will pertain to Europe, but we will also cover selected artists and art movements from China, Japan, and the Islamic world. To provide a point of reference for later material, we begin with a week comparing the Greco-Roman tradition in sculpture, religion, and philosophy with early Chinese pictorial art in tombs, considering the very different visual and intellectual emphases. Following weeks turn to Renaissance art in relation to humanism, Jesuit art in the Far East, women artists in the Netherlands, the global circulation of Chinese bird and flower motifs and visions of the East in the Enlightenment, and Dutch trade in blue and white ceramics.

CC120: Global Exchange in Art: Antiquity to 20th Century (II)

Instructor: Tamara Bentley & Gale Murray
CRN# 12551
Block: 2

This block will center upon a tiered writing project, including tutorial meetings with the professors aimed at finessing each student’s writing and fine-tuning their analysis. Building on scholarly approaches introduced in the first block, additional methodologies will be considered, as well as scholars who combine multiple approaches. Thematically we will consider exchanges in garden design between China and the West in the 18th century, Romanticism and Orientalism, Impressionism and the Japanese print, and artistic responses to war in 20th century China and the West. Approaches will include close visual reading; literary tools as used in art; critical insights based on race, class, and gender; institutional forms of power in relation to normative imagery; colonialism and race; and art used in political contexts—at times supporting, at times critiquing, the nation-state.

CC100: Travel Narratives Across Time

Instructor: Najnin Islam
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
CRN# 12490
Block: 1

Travel writing is arguably one of the most persistent forms of narrative found across different cultures and time periods. In this class we will take a transhistorical approach to the study of travel narratives. Our conversations about texts of early European exploration in different parts of the world, narratives by South Asian, African and Caribbean authors and recent popular television shows and documentaries will be guided by the following fundamental questions. What defines a travel narrative? What real or imaginative geographies do these narratives chart and what kinds of knowledge do they produce about cultural “others”? What might these texts teach us about the relationship between knowledge and power? Further, in what ways have these so called cultural “others” in turn, engaged creatively with the form and expectations of the European, colonial travel narrative? We will also collectively think about the rapidly evolving relationship between contemporary travel writing and the tourism industry, especially around questions of conservation.

CC120: Intertexts: Who Tells The Story?

Instructor: Corinne Scheiner
CRN# 12546
Block: 2

In the 1960s, Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality, observing that “any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” In this class, we will read three novels, each of which explicitly announces its intertextuality, alongside the novels they have absorbed and transformed. Specifically, we will examine how each (re)tells the story of the earlier text by having previously marginalized and/or silenced characters narrate their own stories. We will begin by looking at “otherness” in John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), in which the monster Grendel, the villain from the 8th-century epic Beowulf, retells the events of the epic from his perspective. We will then explore otherness and marginalization in terms of language and power in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), in which Susan Barton, a castaway, finds herself on the same island as “Cruso” and Friday from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and subsequently narrates her version of events. We will conclude by exploring marginalized and silenced voices in terms of both gender and race in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986), in which the historical figure, Tituba, a West Indian slave accused of witchcraft, tells her story, one that includes the stories of others, as Condé’s Tituba shares a prison cell with Hester Prynne, the heroine in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). As we engage with these intertexts, we will focus on developing and strengthening the skills of close reading and critical analysis, both as readers and as writers.

CC100: Philosophy as a Way of Living

Instructor: Jonathan Lee
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
CRN# 12494
Block: 1

What is it to lead a meaningful and good life? How can we embrace a way of living that is respectful of others and authentic to ourselves? This course explores a diverse array of thinkers and texts that seek to answer such questions and to help people understand how to live well. The course draws upon and puts into creative and critical conversation the diversity of ways in which philosophers across time and around the globe have grappled with the challenges of living a human life.

CC120: Topics in Philosophy & Literature

Instructor: Rick A. Furtak
CRN# 12528
Block: 2
THIS COURSE WILL BE TAUGHT REMOTELY

By examining the literary style of philosophical texts, as well as the philosophical aspects of literary works of art, this course will focus on how different modes of writing are well-suited to address traditional questions of philosophy and to illuminate significant features of human existence.

Could philosophy itself be understood as a literary enterprise? And what is the philosophical significance of poetry and other forms of literature which explore the same aspects of human experience that are also studied by philosophers who tend to use more prosaic and abstract modes of writing?

CC100: Russia: Language, Literature, and Film (I)

Instructor: Natalia Khan
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
CRN# 12492
Block: 1

What’s to be done? Who is to blame? What is the Russian soul? These are the “cursed” questions the Russian writers, film directors, artists, and intelligentsia (интеллигенция) have been debating since the beginning of the 19th century. Why and how do these questions relate to us today?
Russian culture has been perceived by the West as the Other and--often simultaneously--as the repository of the West’s most cherished values. From Christianity to Marxism to postmodernism, Russia--its history and art--has embodied the crucial conflicts that characterize contemporary consciousness. In spite of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Cold War, much of the European and American intellectual landscape has been shaped
by Russian writers, film directors, artists, and composers. Some of the most defining trends in European cultural history of the 20th century--Realism, Modernism, Existentialism, Symbolism, and Formalism--are inconceivable without Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Nabokov, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, and other Russian writers and film directors.

In this course, we will integrate the study of Russian language with the great tradition of Russian literature and film. We begin with the premise that each of these disciplines, i.e., the study of a language and the concomitant study of literature, film, and culture, infuses and cross-fertilizes the other.

CC120: Russia: Language, Literature, and Film (II)

Instructor: Natalia Khan
CRN# 12536
Block: 2

Sequel to CC100 Russia: Language, Literature, Film, this course will continue the investigation of Russia through the study of its language and culture but now with an added focus on cultivating the writing skills for self-expression, research, and analysis. In their research projects, students will address some of the defining questions of the discipline: What is the role of the dissident in the evolution of the Russian literary canon?
What are the extra literary--political, philosophical, religious--dimensions of the pursuit of social justice in the Russian fiction?

(Upon successful completion of Russia: Language, Literature, Film CC100 and CC120,
students will qualify for enrollment into the second part of Elementary Russian, RU102.)