HUMANITIES 5: MODERN CULTURE (1848-PRESENT)|Summer 2019 

COURSE SCHEDULE 

8/5 | Introduction: The “Republic of Conscience”

  • (*) Seamus Heaney, “From the Republic of Conscience,” in Selected Poems 1966-1986 

8/6-7 | Capitalism: The Body as Commodity

  • (*) Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, Sections 1, 2, & 4

8/8 | "God is dead…and we have killed him.”

  • (*) Friedrich Nietzsche, selections from The Gay Science (Section 125) & Thus Spoke Zarathustra (“Retired from Service” & “The Ugliest Man”)

8/12 | Modernity: “where the dead men lost their bones”

  • (*) T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

8/13-14 | Destroying Bodies

  • Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

8/15-19 | Saving Bodies

  • Albert Camus, The Plague                                                                

8/20-22 | “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body.”

  • 8/20: (*) Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”

  • 8/21: (*) Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

  • 8/22: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, Part One (pp. 5-71)

8/26-29 | Feminism & The Female Body

  • 8/26: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

  • 8/27-29: Toni Morrison, Beloved

9/2 (Labor Day)—No class.

9/3-4 | New Poets: "Exit Wounds”

  • (*) selected poems by Seamus Heaney, Ocean Vuong, Tracy Smith, Kevin Young, and Jenny Xie

9/5 | Conclusion