23774, 3 units
Professor Tom Gage Office: Founders 218,
Hours: F 218, Wednesdays 1:30-3 and by appointment
Classes: MWF 10:00-10:50
The person who finds his country sweet is but a raw beginner. The person for whom each country is as his own is already strong. But only the person for whom the whole world is as a foreign country is perfect.
Hugh of St. Victor.
Spring, 2006
Engl 480 Special Topic course/cross listed with WLS 480: World Cultures and Alternative Representations grounds students in methodology that includes Edward Said's caveat to adopt critical stances in scholarly disputations about the Other. Students read and view literature and art embodying diverse human experiences in diverse and complex world contexts. The course satisfies the core Methodology requirement of International Studies Major, an alternative of Anthropology 318: Special Topics: Ethnography and Commuication 322: Intercultural Communication.
"If we no longer think of the relationship between cultures and heir adherents as perfectly contiguous, totally synchronous, wholly correspondent, and if we think of cultures as permeable and, on the whole, defensive boundaries between polities, a more promising situation appears. Thus to see Others not as ontologically given but as historically constituted would be to erode the exclusivist biases we so often ascribe to cultures, our own not least. Cultures may then be represented as zones of control or of abandonment, of recollection and of forgetting, of force or of dependence, of exclusiveness or of sharing, all taking place in the global history that is our element. Exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can therefore provide us with new narrative forms or, in John Berger's phrase, with other ways of telling." Edward Said "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors."
REQUIRED
1. E. T. Hall's The Silent Language
2. Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism
3. T. Todorov's The Conquest of America
4. J. O'Neill's The Blood-Dark Track
5. S. Davis "Road to Damascus"
6. F. Mernissi's Scheherazade Goes West
7. O. Pamuk's Snow
8. E. Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism
Essays: Fatima Mernissi's The Veil and the Male Elite
Edward Said's "The Public Role of Inellectuals and Writers" (Oncores)
'The Mullah and the Movies,"
"Close-Up" by Abbas Kiarostami (113 Min.)
India: Ray's Devi
China, viewing Zhang Yimou's Raise High the Red Lantern(98 Min)
Check this syllabus regularly and periodically reload the URL for Web Sites of considerable interest. Some readings, identified by astericsk, are available on Oncores Reserves System, which you can call up at home or in Mac labs on campus.
The International Studies Club of HSU (approval pending) can be reached at http:www.humboldt.edu/~teg1/International_Education.
Grade:
40% 2 midterms
30 % term paper
20 % final
5 % A field task
5% Attendance and participation in discussion (since the term is short and the pace is swift, don't miss class. Once may be forgivable; twice isn't.)
Edward Said defined Orientalism as academic utterances that foster among students, as readers of texts and recipients of art, a network
or structure of aesthetics and reference. Said enumerates that such discourse appropriates history, historicizes the past, and
narrativizes societies to forge epistemologies congruent with the epistemology of one's culture.
The course entails literature and cinema directed and/or financed by indigenous artists. It features works by the Other about how they understand the zeitgeist. Guest lectures provide perspectives in such disciplines of economics, politics, art, and globalism.
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January 18: Course Outline & Codes of Expression: Iconic, Enactive, Symbolic
From Oncores, please read Menocal's "al-Andalus and 1492: Ways of Remembering"*
Here are two scripts of the same message
, one in Chinese and one in Arabic. Notice how the instruments of each culture determine the shapes of the graphs. A brush forces the Chinese author to compose abbreviated pictures of reality, with only a combinaiton of eight strokes, each linear since the brush impedes curvature. A stylus composing arbitrary symbols for sounds of a particular language, not the thing itself, allows for a greater variety of shapes, both linear and curvilinear.
This illustrated manuscript registers the early entry of Arab numbers into Europe (why are the numbers backwards?):
Arabic Numbers
In this video you will see an Islamic calligrapher, concentrating on composing an Arabic word for "philosophy." Note how focussed and engaged he is drafting on paper the sacred black ink.
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January 20: Memory: Habitual, Conceptual, Personal
Assignment: Making Sense of the Map of Culture, Appendix II, pages 190-1.
Notice in this portrait how the
artist represents himself.
In this brief lecture on spices
, dietary codes function vertically and horizontally.
Change of European aristocratic dress over just 150 years indicates how much al-Andalus influenced court life:
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January 23: "Contrapuntal Viewing,"
Reading: Chapter 1 & 2 in Hall.
E. T. Hall's .
diagram.
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January 25: "Chain of Being,"
Read: Chapter 3 & 4 in Hall
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January 27: Historicizing the Past
Read: Todorov's Conquest of America, pages 1-50
The reading asignment for the first day of class was Menocal's From Oncores, please read Menocal's "al-Andalus and 1492: Ways of Remembering".* As we discuss Todorov for the next week, we will be alluding to the Menocal article, so peruse what you have read.
Here are two scripts of the same message
, one in Chinese and one in Arabic. Notice how the instruments of each culture determine the shapes of the graphs. A brush forces the Chinese author to compose abbreviated pictures of reality, with only a combinaiton of eight strokes, each linear since the brush impedes curvature. A stylus composing arbitrary symbols for sounds of a particular language, not the thing itself, allows for a greater variety of shapes, both linear and curvilinear.
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January 30:
Read: Todorov's Conquest of America, pages 51-124
Travel Writing: New World and Reaction.
This painting is entitled "Two
musicians. Given that you are a professional illustrator for a publishing house, how would you title this composition for a manuscript dealing with early troubadours?
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February 1:
Read: Todorov's Conquest of America, pages 125-182
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February 3: Appropriating History
Read: Todorov's Conquest of America, pages 183-254
"The Pharmakon: the Continuity of Cult" - Streaming Media
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February 6: Genres
Read: Edward Said's Culture, Introduction, pages i-xxviii
Please read Todorov's Epilogue and uploaded letters from Flaubert's "Cairo" and Lady Montagu's
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February 8: Narrativizing Societies
Read: Edward Said's Culture, pages 3-14
Please Read Ahdaf Soueif's "Passing Through: William Golding, An Egyptian Journal".
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February 10: The Artist Structuring Aesthetics and Reference
Read: Edward Said's Culture, pages 15-30
"Letter XXX"
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February 13:
Read: Edward Said's Culture, pages 31-42
First Us-Search meetings
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February 15:
Read: Edward Said's Culture, pages 43-61
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February 17: Contrapuntal Scrutiny
Read: Edward Said's Culture, pages 62-80
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February 20:
From Oncores, please read Jorge Luis Borges' "Averroes' Search" and Irving's Night Journey of the Prophet"
View this brief lecture on Florentine Art's representation of Averroes and Averroes.
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A visual entitled Two Musicians.
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February 22:
From Oncores, please read Douglas et al "Mickey in Cairo" and Edward Said's "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals"
Local MosqueSimilar to Alhambra facade, Interior and
Founders.
Although we are not reading the Dante's Comedia, you should peruse Dante's schemata of Hell and compare it with that of Ibn Arabi, a contemporary of Averroes. Diagram of Muslim Inferno (Asin) Dante's heaven is based upon the same cosmography as that reported by Washington Irving in "The Night Journey" and also by Muslim architects , who built the Hall of the Camareswere familiar. If you were standing in center hall and look up at the ceiling, you would see this modified design of the Seven Heavens in Carmares Dome, anticipating Dante's Paradise. The following is a video in which the camera does this for you. The dome of the Comares Hall simulates the seven heavens common to Dante and Islam.
This revised ceiling in the Alhambra anticipates Dante's mythology of the afterlife in the Comedia(see movie Seven Heavens in Carmares Dome, anticipating Dante's Paradise).
Prior to Dante, Purgatory was unheard of in the Western tradition. Did he graft it from Islam? Reading the Vita Nuova, consider how influential was the Islamic culture on his story of Beatrice and Divine Love. Note too how close Dante's explanation for love/lust is to Ibn Arabi's from the passage I upload to you.
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February 24:
Read:
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February 27: Midterm
Genealogy: Time Travel
Read: O'Neill's Blood-Dark Track Prologue
Assign: Begin Search for music lyrics.
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March 1:
Read: O'Neill's Blood-Dark Track, Chapters 1 & 2
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March 3:
Read: O'Neill's Blood-Dark Track, Chapters 3
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March 6:
Read: O'Neill's Blood-Dark Track, Chapters 4 What modes of rhetoric are these passages on Time and potential?
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March 8:
Read: O'Neill's Blood-Dark Track, Chapters 5
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March 10:
Read: O'Neill's Blood-Dark Track, Chapters 6
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March 15-19: Spring Break
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March 20:
Due: Us-Search Progress Report, the plan
Read: O'Neill's Blood-Dark Track, Chapters 7
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March 22:
Read: O'Neill's Blood-Dark Track, Chapters 8
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March 24:
Read: Mernissi's Scheherazade, Chapters 1-3
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March 27:
Read: Mernissi's Scheherazade, Chapters 4-7
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March 29:
Read: Mernissi's Scheherazade, Chapters 8-10
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April 3:
Read: Mernissi's Scheherazade, Chapters 11-13
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April 5
Read: Midterm
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April 7: Travel in Space/The Levant in Fact and Fiction:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 1-4
and Yeazell's "The Pastness of the Orient", (Oncores).
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April 10:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 5-8 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 1
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April 12:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 9-13 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 2
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April 14:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 14-17 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 3
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April 17:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 18-21 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 4
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April 19:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 22-24 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 5
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April 21:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 25-27 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 6
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April 24:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 28-30 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 7
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April 26:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 31-34 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 7
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April 28:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 35-38 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 8
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May 1:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 39-41 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 9
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May 3:
Read: Pamuk's Snow, Chapters 42-44 and Davis' Demascus, Chapter 10
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May 5: Summary
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May 8: Finals on Monday from 10:20-12:10
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