ENROLL

Jessica Keating

Jessica Keating

Pierre Hecker

This interdisciplinary course will explore one of Shakespeare’s most controversial and complex plays, The Merchant of Venice. We will investigate the play’s historical, political, religious, and theatrical contexts as we try to understand not only the world that produced the play, but the world that came out of it. How should what we learn of the past inform a modern production? How can performance offer interpretive arguments about the play’s meanings? Individual and group projects may involve research, writing, dramaturgy, program design, and exhibition curation. Students will be actively involved in a full-scale Carleton Players production of the play.

Jeremy P DeAngelo

Jeremy P DeAngelo

The Crusades, beginning in 1099, brought the kingdoms of Western Europe into contact with many new cultures. This course studies the literature of the period to understand the attitudes and motivations that initiated it, and takes a postcolonialist approach to characterize texts from the Crusades as an attempt to define the Self against the Other—not just on the part of the Crusaders, but from the perspective of Muslims, Jews, Orthodox Greeks, and others. By examining this material, we can gain insight into the motivations behind prejudice and violence, issues which are of crucial importance today.

Cathy Yandell

The French Renaissance continues to intrigue students and critics by its propensity for paradox, ambiguity, and contradiction. Just as literature and the arts reached new levels of aesthetic achievement, the bloodiest civil war in French history was taking shape. Lyric poetry, bawdy tales, essays and chronicles depict beautiful bodies and monsters, war and peace, hatred and love. Through such authors as Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Louise Labé and Montaigne, as well as artistic and musical works, we will investigate the multiple worlds of French Renaissance culture.

Prerequisite: One French course beyond French 204 or instructor permission

William North

In Late Antiquity, Christians and pagans asked with particular intensity: How should I live? What should be my relationship to wealth, family, power, and the world? How are mind and body related in the good life and how can this relationship be controlled and directed? What place had education in the pursuit of the good life? Was the best life to be achieved through material renunciation, psychological transformation, or both? We will ask these and many other questions of a wide array of primary sources written originally in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian while employing the insights of modern scholarship.

Extra Time Required

Victoria Morse

What were women’s lives and experiences like in Europe before the modern era? What work did they do, how did they manage their private lives, their family commitments, their faith, and their intellectual lives? We will examine these questions through women’s own writings, writings about women, and secondary literature on family, gender, medicine, law, and culture. In 2016-17, we will have a special opportunity to think about Jewish women’s lives. Projects will include helping to create an exhibition related to William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice or working with Middle School students in the after school program.

Kathryn L Steed

Prerequisite: Latin 204 or the equivalent

Laurence Cooper

Cross-listed with POSC 354. What does it mean to be morally excellent? To be politically excellent? To be intellectually and spiritually excellent? Are these things mutually compatible? Do they lie within the reach of everyone? And what is the relation between excellence and pleasure? Between excellence and happiness? Aristotle addresses these questions in intricate and illuminating detail in the Nicomachean Ethics, which we will study in this course. The Ethics is more accessible than some of Aristotle's other works. But it is also a multifaceted and multi-layered book, and one that reveals more to those who study it with care.

Crosslisted with POSC 354

Cross-listed with POSC 354.00

Laurence Cooper

Cross-listed with POSC 254. What does it mean to be morally excellent? To be politically excellent? To be intellectually and spiritually excellent? Are these things mutually compatible? Do they lie within the reach of everyone? And what is the relation between excellence and pleasure? Between excellence and happiness? Aristotle addresses these questions in intricate and illuminating detail in the Nicomachean Ethics, which we will study in this course. The Ethics is more accessible than some of Aristotle's other works. But it is also a multifaceted and multi-layered book, and one that reveals more to those who study it with care. Seminar paper required.

Crosslisted with POSC 254

Noah Salomon

Sonja Anderson

This course introduces students to the structure, history, and theology of the Catholic Church through the lens of gender and power. Through a combination of readings and conversations with living figures, students will develop the ability to critically and empathetically interpret Catholicism in its various manifestations. Topics include: God, rituals, salvation, the body, women, materiality, sex; the authority of persons, texts, and tradition; conflicts and anxieties involving masculinity, feminist theologies, the ordination of women as priests, the censuring of heretical theologians, and the clerical sex abuse crisis. Conditions permitting, this course will include trips to local Catholic sites.