STUDENTS: If you run into ANY problems enrolling for classes please contact Humanities@Colorado.edu stating 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.
If you get a message that a class is full even though there appears to be spaces in the recitation you want, this is a known systems issue. Please go ahead, waitlist yourself for the class and email Humanities@Colorado.edu. We are actively monitoring this and will move you into the lecture/recitation if there is space.
*Courses that are asterisked are restricted for enrollment to Humanities majors until November 16.
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HUMN 1020 Introduction to Humanities II
Giulia Bernardini/Alexandra Eddy/
This course provides an analytical, chronological, comparative and integrated study of works in literature, music and visual arts from the Baroque to contemporary eras. While students are reading Racine and Moliere, for example, the art and music lectures examine the architecture of Versailles and compositions of Lully and other court composers. In the appropriate context with the literature, such composers as Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Stravinsky are studied, along with such artists as Fragonard, Goya, Monet, and Picasso.Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum.
HUMN 3093 Dramatic Deceptions
Shirley Carnahan
This course is an interdisciplinary one, intended to explore and compare various types of dramatic deception as they manifest themselves in play texts and films. We will begin by defining dramatic irony in its more official form and comparing it with the looser usage of irony as paradox. The course will continue with close readings of plays by such authors as Shakespeare, Pirandello, Wilde, Shaffer, and Stoppard. Topics of discussion will include how characters deceive others, how they deceive themselves, how the audience is deceived by the characters, how it is deceived by the author, and many more. Usually the class is required to attend one live dramatic performance. This course is reading and writing intensive.
HUMN 3104 Film Criticism
Jennifer Peterson
Surveys the range and function of film criticism, introduces major positions and concepts of film theory, and focuses on students’ abilities to write about film. Prerequisite FILM 1502. Same as FILM 3104.
HUMN 3850 Mediterranean: Religion Before Modernity
Brian Catlos
This course offers an innovative approach to the multi-faceted history of Christian-Muslim-Jewish interaction over the long duree, in the context of the Mediterranean. Therefore it eschews established paradigms (e.g. Europe, Islamic world) that have distorted our understanding of these and pushes students to reconsider the paradigms of Western history that have become canonical and are consequently accepted uncritically. Students will be led to reappraise assumptions regarding the nature of ethnic, religious, national and cultural identity, and the role of these in human history. Mediterranean Studies is a cutting edge, emerging field, with an interdisciplinary orientation. Students will use an array of material and methodologies not only to understand the region, but to interrogate our notions of what constitutes culture. Finally, the course compliments, but does not duplicate courses offered in History and Religious Studies, and dovetails with the Mediterranean Studies initiative currently being launched on campus.
HUMN 4000 Question of Romanticism
Stephanie Rowe
Romanticism in Ruins explores the Romantic era’s preoccupations with the ruined vestiges of the medieval and classical pasts, in Europe and beyond. In poetry, novels, essays, letters, paintings, and prints, late 18th and early 19th century writers, artists, and travelers found aesthetic inspiration and moral meaning in the decay of grand architecture gradually overcome by the forces of nature and human destruction. Looking at Romantic artists and writers in and among these haunted and haunting vestiges of the past, Romanticism in Ruins examines the role of ruins in the construction of Romantic sensibility, and in that sensibility’s cultural and political afterlife. Prerequisite HUMN 2000 or Jr/Sr standing. Same as ENGL 4574-002. Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: critical thinking.
HUMN 4004 Topics in Film Theory: National and Transnational Cinema
Reece Auguiste
This course will explore through lectures, film screenings, and seminars the diverse film making practices grouped under the category of national and transnational cinema. Because notions of national cinema and transnational cinema are inextricably linked the course will examine the multiple contexts of film production, distribution, exhibition, film festival circuits, Art cinema and film reception practices. In doing so, students will be introduced to a broad range of debates pertaining to national cinema in Russia, China, Africa, Iran, Europe and their symbiotic relationships to the global circulation of cinematic images and film cultures.
HONR 4055 Deconstructing Our Culture, Reconstructing Our Lives
(Official Course Title: Discourse Analysis and Cultural Criticism)
Cathy Comstock
How do we “read” the world and the discourses around us, and how does that reading shape our considerations and our actions? Deconstruction explores the vested interests or hidden contradictions in an ideological system by looking at that which has been marginalized in the service of its preservation. In Western culture, for example, we have placed so much emphasis on high achievement and physical perfection that perhaps the great majority of us walk around feeling “disabled” in some way: not buff enough, not smart enough, not good-looking enough, not thin or rich enough . . . When our hierarchies are applied to other races and other species, to the very environment we rely on for life, the effects can be even more damaging. Hence, we may want to question our traditional power hierarchies and consider new kinds of relationship to the world, to other species and to the environment. This class also gives you the opportunity to earn from one-to-three hours of credit for doing outreach to communities in need, where we often can intimately experience what life is like on the margins.
READINGS INCLUDE: On Deconstruction; “Freaks As-At the Limit”; Discipline And Punish; Gandhi; Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It; Compassionate Communication; PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization; and others.
Fulfills: Honors Senior Seminar *and* Social Sciences or Humanities Honors credit, in addition to Peace and Conflict Studies certificate hours, Humanities Upper Division. Also offers up to 3 *extra* hours of upper division credit for service, through the optional co-practicum, HONR 4056.
HUMN 4100 Writing the World
Paul Kroll
HUMN 4135 Art and Psychoanalysis
Paul Gordon
Explores psychoanalytic theory as it relates to our understanding of literature, film, and other arts. After becoming familiar with some essential Freudian notions (repression, narcissism, ego/libido, dream work, etc.), students apply these ideas to works by several artists (e.g., Flaubert, James, Kafka, Hoffmann, and Hitchcock). Same as FILM 4010. Prerequisite, HUMN 2000 or junior/senior standing. Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: literature and the arts.
HUMN 4170 Fiction and Reality
Annjeanette Wiese
Reality television, fiction, meta-fiction, virtual reality, magical realism, documentary, propaganda, autobiography, testimonial, digital manipulation of images, robotics–all are popular today for their ability to explore and question the line between fiction and reality. This issue is not a new phenomenon; throughout history humans have tried to understand the distinction between fiction and reality. But our contemporary culture seems particularly interested in both the differences and similarities between the two concepts. In this course we will explore the ramifications of the assumption that a recognizable distinction between reality and fiction exists or that there is no objective way to distinguish the two. With the aid of diverse theoretical sources, we will analyze a selection of literary, scientific, and cultural works in order to see how they define reality and fiction. At the same time, we will think deeply about the nuances involved in and the consequences of these definitions. The goal of this approach is twofold: 1) to arrive at an idea of what these often ambiguous concepts mean in our culture and 2) to be able to critically apply this idea to the problems posed by the questionable status of the separation between reality and fiction.
HUMN 4502 Nietzsche:Literature and Values
Henry Pickford
A study of Nietzsche’s major philosophical writings, with attention to his views on metaphysics, aesthetics and his critique of morality. Restricted to sophomores/juniors/seniors. Same as GRMN 4502. Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: ideals and values.