This class proposes to look at journeys of self-discovery that are also a discovery of diversity in the  American racial and cultural makeup as depicted in films and poems predominantly from the 1970s.

If Los Angeles, at the center of the culture industry, is charged with representing America to the world, it is also obsessed with representing itself. According to its own mythology, there is no better place than L.A. to realize the quintessentially American dream of leaving the past behind and making one’s own destiny. And if L.A. considers itself the ideal setting for American self-fashioning, it also bills itself as the product of such a process: a city of big dreams and endless possibilities, built against the blank canvas of the desert.

America has a special romance with what’s underground: from the Gold Rush to the oil fields to fracking, we’ve long imagined a secret store of wealth and resources beneath the soil, even as we also fear enough won’t ever be found there. In California especially, a legacy of worrying and warring over the groundwater stretches from the “water wars” of the early 20th century to our most recent ballot Proposition 1, which sought to manage the care and movement of water to various parts of the state.

Even as we prepare to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War (on May 9th, 2015), secessionist movements — from Texas’s ongoing struggles to regain its status as a separate nation to the anti-corporate Second Vermont Republic independence effort — are still going strong.While it seems unlikely that the United States will actually lose any of its fifty members in the near future, communities within the larger United States maintain a notable tradition of rejecting claims of American sovereignty and striking out to establish their own independent or semi-independent co

In Georg Lukács’s seminal 1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?” he identified narration and description as distinctive modes of the novel, each appropriate to a different form of society under a different period of capitalism. Although Lukács was not the first to distinguish between narration and description, his essay was decisive in entrenching this opposition and, moreover, in denigrating the latter: whereas narration is the dramatic mode of writers and characters who are active participants, description is the tedious mode of passive observers.

This senior seminar will offer students an introductory overview, as well as in-depth engagement with, the work in aesthetics, literary theory, and criticism developed by the Frankfurt School.  “The Frankfurt School” was the term eventually coined to identify a core group of intellectuals working in and around the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), founded in 1923 and affiliated to this day (except for its exile during and in the immediate aftermath of the National Socialist/Nazi regime) with the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt. The Institute’s foun

This course will examine the work of Greek intellectuals (philosophers and literary writers) who, as adults, in moments of Greek historical and political crises, left Greece and emigrated to other European countries. The primary corpus of the work of these authors was written in the languages of their adopted countries, thus, allowing them to make major contributions to the specific intellectual life of those countries and to European letters in general.

Violence, understood as both verbal, psychological and physical acts, has always been a central part of theatre, and forms a strong current in European theatre also in the last hundred years. Reaching from verbal insults to systematic terror and torture, theatrical violence can also be directed towards the audience. The course will discuss different aspects of violence, how it can be understood and what its effects as well as its dramaturgical potential can be. An important dimension will be the ethical problems that violence confronts us with.

In 1914, the outbreak of the “Great War” marked the beginning of a bloody conflict that transformed the Western World. At the end of the war, empires had disappeared, brand new countries had been created, while after-war political and economic instability allowed for the development of future extremist ideologies. In Italy, the end of WWI resulted in expanded territorial borders, an impoverished economy and an unstable society.

A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures. The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works.  The role of oral tradition in the preservation of early myth will also be explored.