FALL 2024 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
9:00 – 10:30 AM
COURSE 101
Jane Eyre: Strange, Epochal, and Eerie
Helen Heineman, PhD
A mystery enveloped the publication of Jane Eyre when it first appeared. “It was a live coal dropped by some unknown hand,” wrote one early reviewer. The book was for its time so bold and daring, that most were sure that the author was a man. Another guessed otherwise, citing a scene in the text: “a woman sitting on a chair… sewing rings to new curtains, and…taking up another rung and more tape, went on sewing.” “This passage”, said Harriet Martineau, “could have been written only by a woman or an upholsterer.” The book was full of strange sounds: a demonic laugh, distinct and low, shrill, and appalling shrieks, though not supernatural, but fearfully actual. It was also a revolutionary book, as another reviewer clearly saw: “There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor…a murmuring against God’s appointment.” Rather, it is the story of an indomitable life, enduring long trials and working itself, battered but safe into quiet waters, casting her anchor beside the unforgettable Rochester, as he finally “stretched out his hand to be led.”
We will read this old favorite as newcomers to the tale, in four installments, using the 2006 Penguin Classics edition. Class 1: Chapters 1 – 12
Class 2: Chapters 13 – 21
Class 3: Chapters 22 – 31
Class 4: Chapter 32 – to End
OR
COURSE 102
Rise Up!: An Introduction to Indigenous Music in North America
Craig Harris
Indigenous sounds provide building blocks that make America’s music truly unique. They’re inherent in indigenous rock, blues, jazz, hip-hop, reggae, opera, and symphonic music. The cultural exchange has flowed in two directions. Spanning more than 500 years, this multimedia class, based on Craig Harris’s in-depth study, Rise Up! Indigenous Music in North America (Bison Books, November 2023) introduces the many dimensions of the indigenous soundscape. This eye-and-ear-capturing course will integrate history, spirituality, and day-to-day Indigenous life through well-researched conversations, recorded interviews with prominent artists, video montages, and audio samples.
10:45 – 12:15 PM
COURSE 103
Voting in America: How “Democratic” is our Republic?
David Smailes, PhD
Join us for a timely exploration of the state of American democracy as we head toward Election Day. Our discussion will center on the history of voting and voting rights, as well as the obstacles to voting access in recent years. In this presidential election year, we will also examine the history and nature of the Electoral College, and the question of alternatives to the Electoral College such as the popular election of the president.
1:15 – 2:45 PM
COURSE 104
Women, Art, and Society
Jessica Roscio, PhD
H.W. Janson’s History of Art, a standard textbook used in art history courses, did not include any women until 1987. In 1989, the Guerilla Girls told us that less than 5% of the artists in the modern art section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art were women, but 85% of the nudes were female. Every March, museums ask if you can “name five women artists” in honor of Women’s History Month. This course will show you that we can do way better than all of this! Over the course of four weeks, we will survey a range of works by women artists working from the sixteenth century to the present day. We will start each class learning about one artwork considered iconic for the way it positions women artists in a particular time or place. Then we will expand each discussion to spend more time with topics such as self-portraiture, the modern city, photography, and the feminist art movement.
OR
Course 105
What’s in an Age? Stories from the Edge of Anthropocene
Lawrence McKenna, PhD
Watchmakers rely on it, physicists define it, and poets wax lyrical about it, but only geologists truly own time. Geologists have, informally at first but now with increasing bureaucratic zeal, divided Earth’s history into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages with scientific precision and (generally) objectivity. Until now, that is, because the epoch we thought we were living in, the Holocene, has been tailgated right out of existence by our fossil-fuel burning automobiles.
Back in February 2000, Nobel Laureate and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, clearly exasperated, interrupted a meeting to declare that we were “no longer in the Holocene but in the Anthropocene,” ushering in a new epoch dominated by Homo sapiens. The evidence for this pretty-obvious transition is everywhere, yet this past February, the organization that oversees time (the International Union of Geological Sciences) decided that the time wasn’t right to define a new period in Earth’s history. The Anthropocene is an idea whose time has undeniably arrived…even if we can’t decide exactly when that was.
Week 1: How geologists stared into the abyss of time and created a soulless bureaucracy to measure it.
Week 2: The Holocene, the Great Acceleration, and the Anthropocene: An epochal story in three acts.
Week 3: Art, literature, and the Anthropocene: How an obscure scientific concept sparked an artistic movement.
Week 4: Staring into the Abyss of the Anthropocene: Why it was denied, why it shouldn’t have been, and why it matters.