MEMO
TO:
FROM:
DATE:
RE:
General Education Committee
Randall VanderMey, Professor of English
January 20, 2015
Gloss on IS-126-1 “Global Narratives in the Arts of Europe”: satisfying
requirements for GE standards on “Thinking Globally” and “Performing
and Interpreting the Arts”
I plan to co-lead the 2015 Europe Semester with Ken Kihlstrom and toward that
end would request approval of my planned IS-126 course, “Global Narratives in the
Arts of Europe” for both “Thinking Globally” and “Performing and Interpreting the
Arts” credit in the GE program.
The course is an expansion and adaptation of a course I taught on the 2008 Europe
Semester, which was already approved for “Performing and Interpreting the Arts”
credit. All the requirements and activities leading students to create, perform, and
interpret the arts remain in place in this new adaptation. Through an expansion
and refocusing of the course, however, I have also worked in several ways to make
it satisfy the requirements for “Thinking Globally.”
For “Performing and Interpreting the Arts” I ask every student to create an original
art project in a medium of their choice (encouraging them to work in media that
they have not already mastered) and to present it publicly to the rest of the group
in a fitting setting. In 2008, I had students who wrote original songs and
accompanied themselves on a piano; I had students who wrote and orally delivered
short stories, who created an interactive art installation, who presented a video
version of a photographic slide show of photographs they had taken en route, who
teamed with a half dozen others to create and present a multi-media satirical epic
stage musical, etc. All the projects were required either to be in the mode of
narrative or to reflect on narrative—or both. And following the presentations,
students were required to write a self-critique and reflection on their discoveries
about narrative in the making of their art. As preparation for the projects, we
studied artistic narratives all through Europe—in theaters, concert halls and public
squares, in Edinburgh, in Stratford, in the London Tate Museum, in the Louvre, in
the Caen Peace Museum, in the Rijksmuseum, in Bayeux, in Berlin, Prague, Rome,
Israel, etc. We looked at narrative theory, at the practices and products of artists,
and at writings about narrative and in narrative mode. All of this exposure
throughout their travels fed into “narrative journals”; the journals played into class
discussions and small-group interactions, and they fed into an end-of-the-semester
synthesis paper on a narrative-related topic of the student’s own choosing and an
oral exam done in pairs.
VanderMey—Memo to GE Committee
2
I plan to repeat this pattern of arts pedagogy but this time with a more specific
focus on “global narratives.” I explain in the accompanying syllabus what I mean
by global narratives:
1) stories that have come to have universal popularity and influence, such
as the Italian poet Dante’s Divine Comedy or the ancient poet Ovid’s
tellings of Roman myths in Metamorphoses, as well as stories in the
Bible;
2) stories that emerge from globally significant conflicts, such as Simon
McBurney’s play Copenhagen, that emerges from the German and Danish
scientific research that led to the development of the atom bomb in
WWII;
3) stories that represent one cultural perspective on events that would be
interpreted quite differently from an opposing cultural perspective, such
as the Norman (French) depiction of the Norman Conquest in 1066, on
the Bayeux Tapestry, or Primo Levi’s memoir of Jewish life in Europe
during a century of war.
To qualify for “Thinking Globally” credit, I will be asking students
1) to encounter narrative in art throughout the 11 countries we will be
visiting, looking specifically for art that reflects global influences or
migrations or cultural strains. E.g., I’ll point students to art displayed in
galleries that reflects colonial expansion or the exoticizing of the other.
2) I will assign a hefty load of reading, play-going, and movie-watching
focused on a carefully chosen list of works that match places in our
travels and reflect global events and cultural flows. E.g., I will ask them to
watch and respond to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a German-directed
film about a maniacal, Sisyphusian visionary who strives to build an
Italian opera house deep in the Brazilian jungle. I’ll have them read and
enact scenes from the play A Disappearing Number, which deals with a
precocious young Indian mathematician who is championed by a
Cambridge don, and the play Way to Heaven, a Spanish playwright’s
(Juan Mayorga’s) handling of the WWII atrocities at Teresienstadt, the
Nazi-run concentration camp in the now-Czech Republic. And I’ll have
them read the Elif Shafak novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, which shows an
Arizona woman’s entrance by marriage, divorce, and family networking
into the historical realities of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the
Turks.
3) Besides asking students to read, view, interact with, and write about a
rich smorgasbord of “global narratives,” I plan to work throughout the
semester to stretch students’ consciousness of what they are absorbing to
include a more global awareness. For example, I will ask them to respond
to settings and characters—possibly minor ones in the narratives—that
hint at global contexts for the actions described: intercontinental trading
practices, colonialization, patterns of subjugation and exclusion,
VanderMey—Memo to GE Committee
3
hybridization, cultural cross-fertilization, etc. I will ask students to
reflect in their writing and conversations and performances on historical
contexts relative to the art works they encounter, so that they will
incorporate such effects as blind spots, objectifications, hegemonies,
patriarchal patterns, and power differentials into their interpretations of
works of art.
The third practice I’ve just listed is potentially the most important way of teaching
students to think globally, because it will provide them ways to respond with
global awareness not only to works displaying patently cross-cultural and
international influences but also to works that otherwise would comfortably
represent to them the values and codes of meaning in their Western “home”
culture.
I’m genuinely excited to teach this course. I’m learning a great deal myself as I put
it together and, I think and I trust, capturing in it the spirit of the college’s GE
standards for both “Thinking Globally” and “Performing and Interpreting the Arts.”
I see it as a course that could be taught successfully on campus as well, without all
the excitement of travel.
I submit the plan for IS-126-1, Global Narratives in the Arts of Europe, to the GE
Committee for their approval of the course as meeting the two standards.