Fall (September 3–December 18, 2014)
UNIVERSITY CLOSED: 11/26-11/27
LS 649.401: Philosophical Anthropology in Slave Narratives
The most frequently used argument against slavery is that slaves are human beings. This is a problem of philosophical anthropology. Students will read American slave narratives with the purpose of uncovering the picture of humanity which emerges from those sources. The course will lead students to investigate the philosophical foundations of the phenomenon of slavery that brought into the United States a very specific kind of diversity of human perspectives. Its purpose is to utilize the literary productions of African-Americans for philosophical anthropology.
Dr. Paul Richard Blum
Thursday, 9/11/2014–12/18/2014] (Thematic)
LS741.501: The Stories of the South
Southern writers and film-makers during the past century exhibited a profound stylistic, philosophical, social, and regional individuality; and some of them are just plain quirky. In either case their world-view was defiantly southern. Their writings look at the future from the perspective of a past ideal and they often present themselves as the last spokespersons for an order that is needed in the modern experience. At the same time, many saw that order as decadent and based on ideals that were hardly ever realized in actual experience. Finally, many of these writers felt a need to impose a theological perspective they found lacking in mainstream American literature.
We’ll study of the modern myth of the south as revealed by its foremost writers: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Toni Morrison, John Crowe Ransom, Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee Williams, Bobbie Ann Mason, and others. Poems by Ransom, Warren, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate. Analysis of film treatments of that myth in such features as Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, In the Heat of the Night, To Kill a Mockingbird, Mississippi Burning, and Driving Miss Daisy.
Dr. David Dougherty
Tuesday, 9/9/2014–12/16/2014 [no class 10/14, 12/16] (Thematic)
LS760.601: Women on the Verge
Who dares do all that may become a woman…and then some? What happens when the lives, loves, and accomplishments of women exceed the horizon of expectations placed upon them? From shrews to witches, from sirens to saints, from madcap heiresses to femme fatales, this course will explore the transgressive feminine in literature, film, and theory.
Mr. Louis Hinkel
Wednesday, 9/3/2014–12/17/2014 [no class 10/15, 11/26, 12/17] (Thematic)
Required of all students in their first semester.