Page 105 of Scripps College Academic Catalog 2004-2006 by Scripps College - The Women's College - Claremont

103 THE HUMANITIES SCRIPPS COLLEGE The Nature of Evil. How does an individual come to commit evil acts from the everyday cruelty of racism, sexism, and homophobia to the almost unimaginable evil of genocide? This course will examine the nature of evil from the perspective of psychology, literature, and film. Students will read works by various authors including Sade, Hoffman, Shelley, Capote, Jung, Foucault, Milgram, and Lifton. R. Burwick, J. LeMaster. What is Postmodernism? This course picks up where Core I leaves off by examining in more depth the postmodern challenge to the Enlightenment project. Postmodern theorists, writers, and artists have argued that traditional modernist categories, concepts, and principles are no longer adequate to make sense of the changing structure of our contemporary world.We will examine how postmodern thinkers have deconstructed key modernist concepts (such as the self, truth, knowledge, history, or art) and how, rejecting the Enlightenments claims to universalism, they have revisited notions of cultural, national, race, and gender identities. Readings may include works by Venturi, Jencks, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Habermas, Rorty, Baudrillard, Jameson,Appiah, Butler, Borges, Calvino, and Winterson. Some films may also be included in the syllabus. Offered in 2004-2005.N. Rachlin, C.Walker. Culture Clash: Encounters of the Traveler with the Other. Beginning with the notion that no voyage is completely innocent and that no voyager is merely an impartial observer, this course will examine the variety of experience of travelers including exiles as enforced travelers and their contacts with peoples and cultures other than their own.We will include such texts as the Odyssey, Herodotus Histories,Apuleus Metamorphoses, Ovids Exile poetry, The Travels of Marco Polo,Wolstonecrafts Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Conrads Heart of Darkness, Calvinos Invisible Cities, and Naipauls India. Offered in 2004-2005. R. Burwick, E. Finkelpearl. Enlightenment and the Arts. Enlightenment ideas significantly influenced the visual and performing arts of Europe. By examining changes in aesthetic values, artistic production, and cultural patronage during the late 17th to early 19th centuries, this course will explore how Enlightenment ideals affected music, theatre, dance, painting, sculpture, architecture, and garden design.To provide a fuller context for these developments, issues of colonialism, orientalism, and nascent nationalism will be investigated. Offered in 2004-2005.B. Coats, P. de Silva. Communities of Hate. The Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda as well as the politics of hate in the United State will be used as case studies in this exploration of the causes of mass hate. Questions raised in the course will include: How are collective identities formed? How can aberrations of collective identity formulation lead to mass hate? How are communities of hate constructed (role of ideology, religion, propaganda, the media, etc.)? What are the social, economic, and political factors that contribute to the emergence of mass hate? What are the underlying psychological principles of mass hate? By which processes do groups and societies create the Other ? Are race, ethnicity, and gender purely ideological notions? Finally, how do we combat the politics of hate when we know that appeals to our common humanity have not worked? A. Marcus-Newhall, N. Rachlin. The Culture of Capitalism: Race, Class, and American Liberalism. As the economic ideology of liberalism, capitalism suggests that success depends on manifesting into practice a set of hegemonic ideas concerning the prerequisites for capitalist success.This course interrogates the universalizing assumptions of capitalism, presenting it not as a free-floating set of abstract ideas, but rather, concretizing it into different cultural milieus. In particular, we are interested in whether and how capitalism impacts cultures differentiated by race and class, how capitalism shifts the understanding of the concepts of race and class, and how cultural practices stratified along race and class lines change societys understanding of capitalism. Students will conduct both field and library research culminating in a class project. T. Kim, N. Neiman-Auerbach. Women in Greek Myth: Psychological and Historical Perspectives. This course examines several Greek myths about women both in their historical and social contexts and from the point of view of modern psychoanalytic theories. Readings include the Odyssey,Antigone, Electra and other Greek texts, as well as Freud, Kashack, Chodorow, and Gallop.Topics of discussion include a consideration of the ways that different disciplines examine the same material, the formation of psychoanalysis in part around Greek myths, and a historical examination of Western views of women. E.Finkelpearl, J. LeMaster.

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