HUM 102: CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS
Spring 2014-2015
Week
1
LECTURE
February 9
Introduction
READING
class policy
I. Reason and Its Discontents
2
3
4
5
February 11
Skepticism and Certainty: On the
Subject of Modern Science
René Descartes, Meditations on First
Philosophy: I and II
February 16
Freud and Descartes: Two Models of the
Self
Sigmund Freud, “On the Difficulties of PsychoAnalysis”
February 18
Montaigne: Europe and its Others
Michel de Montaigne, “On Cannibals”
February 23
Analysis of Power, Analysis of
Contingency
Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapters 1,6, 7,15,
25, 26
February 25
Reading Shakespeare, Reading the
Tempest
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
March 2
Staging theTempest
Shakespeare, The Tempest
March 4
Philosophy of the Tempest
Shakespeare, The Tempest
March 9
Ottoman Istanbul: Architecture and
Urban Patterns of the Early Modern Era
Evliya Çelebi, Book of Travels: 'Vienna'
FILMS
II. The Question of Politics
6
March 11
Subject and Sovereign
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (selection)
March 16
Enlightenment and Revolution:
Copernicus to Kant
Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus
(selection)
Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment”
March 18
Hegel and Haiti: The Limits of
Enlightenment
Peter Singer, "Intro. to Hegel";
G. F. Hegel, "Lordship and Bondage"
III. History and Revolution
7
8
9
March 23
Nature and Technology:
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Preface, Letter
IV, and Vol. II: Chapters III-IX
March 25
Godlike Science? Frankenstein's
Critique of Reason
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Preface, Letter
IV, and Vol. II: Chapters III-IX
March 30
Romanticism and the Invention of Nature Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Preface, Letter
IV, and Vol. II: Chapters III-IX
April 1
History and the Proletariat
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto,
Parts I and II
April 6
The Age of Commodities
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto,
Parts I and II
April 7
Tuesday
April 8
MIDTERM EXAM
The Ruins and Rise of Progress
Charles Baudelaire (poems and prose-poems)
Victor Erice, Spirit of
the Beehive (1973)
IV. Versions of Modernity
10
April 13
"Cold and Sinister Beauty": Baudelaire's
City
Charles Baudelaire (selected poems and
prose-poems)
April 15
Policing the City
Arthur Conan Doyle,
“A Scandal in Bohemia”
(Mon. 20Fri. 24
Spring
Break)
11
12
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April 27
Human Nature contextualized: Darwin
and Urban Ecology
Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions
in Man and Animals (selection)
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental
Life” (selection)
April 29
Human Rights
Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”
May 4
Science 1: Cosmology
Galileo Galilei, Starry Messenger (selection);
Johannes Kepler, A Part of the Preface to
Kepler's Dioptrics;
The Deen Institute, 'Ottoman Contributions to
Science and Technology'
May 6
Science 2: Evolution
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
(selection);
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
(selection)
13
May 11
Futurism
Futurist texts
May 13
Montage: Modernism and the Arts
Kurt Schwitters, “The Onion”
Dziga Vertov, Man
with a Movie
Camera (1929)