HUMN STUDENTS:If you run into ANY problems enrolling for classes please contact napodano@colorado.edustating your full name, the class in which you are trying to enroll and the error message you are receiving. If you are enrolling in a lecture class that also has a recitation, please include the applicable recitation section number.
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HUMN 1110 Introduction to Humanities 1 Literature
Humanities 1110 is a 3 credit hour course that meets three times a wee . The course provides an analytical and comparative study of works in literature from Antiquity to the 17th century. Approved for A&S Gen. Ed. distribution: Arts and Humanities.
Literature: This section includes works such as Homer’s Odyssey, Greek tragedy, Plato’s Symposium, Dante’s Inferno, Boccaccio’s Decameron, selections from Montaigne’s Essays, and Shakespeare’s King Lear.
HUMN 1120 Introduction to Humanities 2 Literature
Introduces students to works from the major Western literary periods (Baroque, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, Post-Modernism) from the 17th- through the 21st-centuries outside their national literary boundaries. Approved for A&S Gen. Ed. distribution: Arts and Humanities.
HUMN 1210 Introduction to Humanities 1 Art and Music
Giulia Bernardini/David Ferris
Humanities 1210 is a 3 credit hour course that meets three times a week . The course provides an analytical and comparative study of works in music, and visual arts from Antiquity to the 17th century. Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum.
Music: A chronological study of Western classical music from Classical Antiquity through the Renaissance, with primary focus upon developments in the art of Western musical composition in its natural context: the intellectual tradition of Western civilization. We will study significant individual Western classical compositions both as artistic structures and as expressions of human thought and experience, and will note similarities between early Western music and the music of other cultures, times, and places. No prior knowledge of music is necessary.
Art: The art lectures will begin by investigating examples of the art and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome and will then move onto Early Medieval, Romanesque, and Gothic architecture and architectural sculpture. The semester ends with a survey of major Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Reformation works in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Throughout all periods of study, we will consider the question – and problem – of context; attempting to better understand the political, religious, social, and philosophical trends underpinning each era we encounter. No prior experience with art or art history is necessary. Approved for A&S Gen. Ed. distribution: Arts and Humanities.
HUMN 2000 Methods and Approaches to Humanities
Annje Wiese
Provides a transition from the introductory courses to the upper-division courses. The goal of this course is to introduce Humanities majors and minors to a rich range of interdisciplinary interpretive strategies and theories and to apply those strategies to a broad selection of cultural products. The “methods and approaches” in the course title points toward this process: we will look at different methods of interpretation and different ways that particular lenses or theories might inform our acts of interpretation. By taking this course, you will gain an understanding of some of the key developments and perspectives that inform studies in the Humanities and you will put those methods and theories into practice. Approved for A&S Gen. Ed. distribution: Arts and Humanities.
HUMN 3092 Studies: Modern Poetry
David Ferris
Explores the literary and critical significance of lyric poetry in the modern age. Begins with the modern turn of poetry in Romanticism, in particular, Wordsworth and Shelley, then works through the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Dickinson, Yeats, Hughes, Celan, Bachmann, Bishop, Sexton, Attridge, Adonis, and Hill. Will also include critical material on the concept of “modern” poetry.
HUMN 3093 Game Studies
Andrew Gilbert
Game Studies introduces basic media literacy by exploring the aesthetic and cultural principles behind the use and creation of one of (if not the) largest cultural forms of modern media. As 60% of all Americans play video games daily, and the industry itself surpasses cinema as the global games market reached 148.8 billion, it is wise for us to be able to read and critique such a massive part of our culture. This class will explore the specific theories associated with the media of gaming as well as dive deeply into several aspects unique to gaming (the avatar, the Dungeons and Dragons live stream, etc.).
HUMN 3210 Narrative
Annje Wiese
This course will examine narrative as a central form of representation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by analyzing the effects of form on how we understand and represent our world. Two questions will guide this examination: “what kind of relation (if any) is there between narratives and reality (or ‘life’)?” (posed by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan); and, “what kind of notion of reality authorizes construction of a narrative account of reality?” (posed by Hayden White). With the aid of different theories of narrative, we will attempt to answer these questions by closely analyzing how narrative form represents and informs perception and experience as well as how this has changed throughout the past century. Approved for A&S Gen. Ed. distribution: Arts and Humanities.
HUMN/ENGL 3310 Bible as Literature
Sue Zemka
No single book has been as influential to the English-speaking world as the Bible. We’ll read the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament for stories, poetry, and wisdom traditions. We’ll approach the Bible as literature by analyzing its plots, characters, and meanings. Students study its textual history, how there came to be a “Bible,” and the many writers, conflicts, and cultures from which it emerged. We’ll consider the Bible’s powerful influence on ethics and philosophy.
HUMN 4030 Art of Travel
Giulia Bernardini
Examines the art of travel: not where to go and what to do, but rather philosophical concepts about why people travel. Areas of discussion will include exploration, discovery, escape, pilgrimage, the grand tour, expatriotism, exile, nomadism, armchair travel, and the sense of home. Materials will include books by travel writers, novels, films, essays, short stories, art, music, and historical documents.Approved for A&S Gen. Ed. distribution: Arts and Humanities.
HUMN 4835 Literature and Social Violence
Cathy Comstock
This honors seminar focuses on both literary and non-fictional texts about social violence, so that we can compare the understanding and effects made possible through different media, including film in some cases. We’ll study gang culture, homophobia and AIDS, the effects of racism and poverty on gutted-out neighborhoods and school systems, and the politics of hunger. We’ll also look at sources of great hope and positive action, such as Mountains Beyond Mountains, The Freedom Writers’ Diary, Angels in America and other ways in which both art and social action can make a transformative difference. All this is combined with the option to get extra credit by doing volunteer work in community agencies, since the personal experience with the effects of social violence helps us to understand the class materials—and our culture overall—more deeply.
As a means of approaching works from across the disciplines and beyond, we will be learning how to do discourse analysis of the language of both the texts and our society. In this way the class will focus especially on our methods of making meaning and how those meanings act to maintain or transform our cultural structures. Approved for A&S Gen. Ed. distribution: Arts and Humanities.
The class texts include Do or Die, Angels in America, The Bluest Eye, Freedom Writers’ Diary, Savage Inequalities, Gandhi the Man andTortilla Curtain. Restricted to sophomores/juniors/seniors. This course is approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: contemporary societies.