A world of literature
Faculty Publication: Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern France
The current cultural climate in France is often described as one of “déclinisme” or “sinistrose,” a mixture of pessimism about the national future, nostalgia for the past, and a sinister sense of irreversible decline concerning the present. The notion of “democratic melancholia” has become widely popular, cropping up time and again in academic papers and newspaper articles. In Melancholy Politics, Jean-Philippe Mathy examines the development of this disenchanted mood in the works of prominent French philosophers, historians, and sociologists since the beginning of the 1980s....
Indian Cinema in Context
Introduction to Indian mainstream (mainly Bollywood) cinema and its evolution through the last seven decades. Topics to be explored include, but not limited to, the relation between Indian society/culture and its cinematic representations, cinema's resistance to dominant nationalist and patriarchal ideologies
Global Consciousness and Literature
Exploration of the cultural and historical roots of globalization and the development of global consciousness from ancient Greece to the present, as reflected primarily in literature, but also with reference to historiography, cartography, religion, art, politics, economics, and popular culture.
Early Masterpieces of Western Culture
Comparative study of major works of literature, philosophy and culture in the Western tradition from the ancient world to the Renaissance, from Homer and the Bible to Shakespeare and Cervantes.
Modern Masterpieces of Western Culture
A comparative study of major works of literature, philosophy and culture in the Western tradition from the Enlightenment to today, from Descartes and Voltaire to Dickinson and Calvino. Emphasis on the works as representative of their historical and cultural period, as well as how these works create the cultural world we live in today.