Humanities 5: Modern Culture (1848-Present)|spring 2021
This course will be taught in a hybrid format due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Course Description
In this course, we will examine the period between 1848 and the present as a time during which the core values, beliefs, and practices of Western culture have been called into question. Published in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche’s “God is dead” thesis and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory marked the death of Christianity as a unifying worldview in the West. The longstanding belief that the universe was guided by a benevolent God who would create a more just world gave way, in the twentieth century, to the realization that the universe guarantees us nothing and that justice isn’t inevitable, an idea captured by Albert Camus’s philosophy of the “absurd.” Finally, the horrific atrocities committed in two world wars suggested that Enlightenment thinkers got it wrong — human beings were not fundamentally rational and scientific advancement did not always improve the human condition.
Over the course of this quarter, we will consider the questions below to understand how writers, activists, and everyday people engaged with these ideas and attempted to build a better world. Along the way, we will draw special attention to bodies in the modern world — not only how human bodies were exploited, commodified, mutilated, and destroyed during this period, but also how human beings came together to heal and save bodies. In doing so, we will attempt to answer Albert Camus’s call in “Return to Tipasa” to “keep faithfully a double memory,” remembering “the humiliated” while cherishing what “beauty” there is in this world.
How do the conditions of the modern world challenge the Enlightenment worldview, which suggested that human reason and scientific advancement would necessarily improve the human condition?
What does Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead” in Western culture mean? What principles guide our actions if Christianity no longer dominates the Western worldview?
In Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus used the term “the absurd” to describe “our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.” How do we make our lives meaningful in an “absurd” universe?
How can we most effectively confront injustice and systems of oppression? How do we care for ourselves and others in the process? To use Camus’s words, in the “long fight for justice” how do we hold onto the beautiful things in this world? Can doing so help us more effectively fight for justice?
Course Schedule
3/29 | Course Intro. No Reading.
3/31 | “God is dead...and we have killed him.”
(*) Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Parable of the Madman”
4/2 | Finding Yourself in Ruins
(*) Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa” and selections from The Myth of Sisyphus
4/5-7 | The Body as Commodity
(*) Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
4/9-14 | “I am asking you to touch me.”
(*) Ada Limón, “The End of Poetry”
(*) Matthew Zapruder, selections from Why Poetry and Father’s Day
4/14: Zapruder Lecture via Zoom at 1pm; Poetry Reading via Zoom at 5pm
4/16-23 | Destroying Bodies
4/16-21: Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
4/23: The Holocaust. No Reading.
4/26-30 | Saving Bodies
Albert Camus, The Plague
4/26: Essay 1 due
5/3-7 | The Things We Carry
Ada Limón, selections from The Carrying
(*) Ada Limón, selections from Bright Dead Things
5/4: Limón Poetry Reading via Zoom at 5pm
5/10-21 | “In America, it is traditional to destroy black bodies.”
5/10-12: (*) Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”
5/14-17: (*) Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
5/19-21: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, Pt. 1
5/24-26 | Feminism & the Female Body
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
5/24 | Essay 2 due
5/28-6/4 | How to be Healers
5/28: Love Bodies
6/2: Love Yourself
6/4: Love Nature
Selected poems by Raymond Antrobus, Jericho Brown, Seamus Heaney, Ada Limón, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Mary Oliver, Tracy K. Smith, Ocean Vuong, Jenny Xie, and Kevin Young