117 Arthurian Literature
Other years: Offered in Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2020,
Spring 2022121 Readings in the European Tradition I
Topics in the past have included readings and discussion of a series of related texts from Homer and Genesis to Dante: Homer’s Iliad, selected Greek tragedies, Virgil’s Aeneid, selections from the Bible, and from medieval texts. Three class hours per week.
Required of European Studies majors. Open to European Studies majors and to any student interested in the intellectual and literary development of the West, from antiquity through the Middle Ages. Fall semester. Professor Doran.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018,
Fall 2023,
Fall 2024122 Readings in the European Tradition II
In this course, we will discuss writings and art that have contributed in important ways to the sense of what “European” means. The course covers the intellectual and artistic development of Europe from the Renaissance to the 21st century. The course will use a chronological and/or thematic template that focuses on dominant and persistent preoccupations of the European imagination. We will study poetry, drama, the novel, the essay, painting, photography, and film. In the past, we have studied works by Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Mann, Swift, Voltaire, Wordsworth, Austen, Marx, Flaubert and Tolstoy. We have looked at art ranging from Velásquez to Picasso, filmmakers from Chaplin to Godard. This course welcomes all students who enjoy studying literature and essays in depth, as well as those interested in the visual arts. Required of European Studies majors.
Spring semester. Professor Rosbottom.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021,
Spring 2025130 World War I
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2015, Spring 2017,
Fall 2022133 Europe in the Twentieth Century
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2008, Fall 2009, Spring 2012, Fall 2015
135 Art and Architecture of Europe from 1400 to 1800
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2018,
Spring 2023146 Art From the Realm of Dreams
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014,
Spring 2023201 Napoleon's Legends
Napoleon Bonaparte’s legacy in French domestic and international politics and military strategy profoundly influenced nineteenth-century Europe. But so did the legends surrounding him, created before his great defeat and exile, and nurtured after his death in 1821. In painting, caricature, and sculpture, literature, music, and film, the legends--positive and negative--of Napoleon have served many ends. The cultural complexity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe becomes clearer when one understands the motives behind and results of these representations of Napoleon.
In this course, we will study painting (e.g., David and Goya), narrative fiction (e.g., Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy), poetry (e.g., Wordsworth and Hugo), music (e.g., Beethoven), urban history and architecture (e.g., of Paris), and the silent and sound films of our century (e.g., Gance). We will examine how different generations and a variety of cultures appropriated the real and imagined images of Napoleon for social, political, and artistic ends, and thereby influenced the creation of modern Europe. Three class hours per week.
Limited to 25 Students. Spring semester. Professor Rosbottom.
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2009, Fall 2012, Spring 2015
203 Cityscapes: Imagining the European City
(Offered as EUST 203 and ARCH 203.) Cities, the largest human artifact, have been at the center of Europeans’ relationships with nature, gods, and their own kind since their first appearance. With the advent of capitalist energy, the European city went through radical change. The resultant invention, re-invention and growth of major metropolises will be the subject of this course.
We will discuss histories and theories of the city and of the urban imagination in Europe since the eighteenth century. We will consider Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, and St. Petersburg, among others, and the counter-example of New York City. We will study examples of city planning and mapping, urban architecture, film and photography, painting, poetry, fiction, and urban theory. And, we may study Atget, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Calvino, Dickens, Joyce, Rilke, Truffaut, Zola, and others.
Questions addressed will include: To what extent do those who would “improve” a city take into account the intangible qualities of that city? How do the economics of capital compromise with the economics of living? How does the body-healthy and unhealthy-interact with the built environment? How and why does the imagination create an “invisible city” that rivals the “real” geo-political site? Two classes per week.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Rosbottom.
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2008, Spring 2010, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2017
209 Fascism
2023-24: Not offered
215 Modernism and Revolution
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2014, Spring 2020
221 Music and Culture I
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013, Fall 2014, Spring 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2021,
Fall 2022,
Fall 2024222 Music and Culture II
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2019, Spring 2020,
Spring 2023223 Music and Culture III
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2013, Fall 2015, Spring 2018, Fall 2019,
Fall 2023225 The Age of Chivalry, 1000-1500
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2014, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Fall 2017
227 Early Modern England, 1558-1702: Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Fall 2021
228 Seventeenth-Century European Theater
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2017
230 The French Revolution
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Spring 2018
231 Race and Empire: The British Experience from 1760
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2016, Spring 2021
234 Nazi Germany
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2009, Fall 2010, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2021
235 Impostors
(Offered as EUST 235 and SPAN 380.) An interdisciplinary exploration of the causes behind the social, racial, artistic, and political act—and art—of posing, passing, or pretending to be someone else. Blacks passing for whites, Jews passing for gentiles, and women passing for men, and vice versa, are a central motif. Attention is given to biological and scientific patterns such as memory loss, mental illness, and plastic surgery, and to literary strategies like irony. As a supernatural occurrence, the discussion includes mystical experiences, ghost stories, and séance sessions. The course also covers instances pertaining to institutional religion, from prophesy from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles to the Koran and Mormonism. In technology and communications, analysis concentrates on the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, and the Internet. Entertainment, ventriloquism, puppet shows, voice-overs, children’s cartoon shows, subtitles, and dubbing in movies and TV are topics of analysis. Posers in Greek mythology, the Arabian Nights, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Roth, Oliver Sacks, and Nella Larsen are examined. Conducted in English.
Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Spring 2018, Fall 2021,
Spring 2025237 God
This course rotates around the shifting notion of the divine in Western Civilization, focusing on theology, philosophy, literature, and music. Students explore the development of the three major prophetic religions as well as some of the mystical movements they fostered. Discussions rotate around the King James Bible, Augustine’s Confessions, the Koran, Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed, the Zohar, and Spinoza’s work as a cornerstone to the Enlightenment. Secularism in modern culture is contemplated and the contemporary atheist movement of Dawkins and Hitchens is analyzed. Music explorations range from Johann Sebastian Bach to John Cage; in science, from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking; and in film, from Ingmar Bergman to Woody Allen. Readings include parts of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Kafka’s The Castle, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Borges’ “The Secret Miracle” and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2014-15. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2008, Spring 2013, Spring 2021
238 Soviet Union During the Cold War
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Fall 2015, Fall 2018,
Spring 2023,
Spring 2025242 European Intellectual History in the Twentieth Century
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2013, Spring 2015
243 Childhood and Child Welfare in Modern Europe
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2014
244 Images of liberation: Spanish Transition to Democracy
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2015
245 Stalin and Stalinism
Other years: Offered in Spring 2014, Fall 2016, Spring 2021,
Fall 2022,
Fall 2023250 The Monastic Challenge
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2010, Fall 2011
253 Dutch and Flemish Painting (The Art of Beholding)
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014
265 Forbidden
(Offered as EUST 265 and SPAN 382.) An exploration of forbidden behavior in diverse cultures from ancient times to the present. The course delves into the moral dilemma of the accepted and the rejected by analyzing concentric circles of power. Interdisciplinary in nature, the material will come from theology to government, from jurisprudence to medicine, from pedagogy to finances, from pornography to literature, from activism to computer hacking. It includes the Inquisitorial trails in fourteenth-century Spain, the orchestration of anti-Semitic propaganda under Nazism, the gulag in the Soviet Union, the public crimes during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, McCarthyism and the N.S.A. Contemporary books and movies discussed include Lawrence’s Women in Love, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and the Harry Potter saga, as well as Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat. Conducted in English.
Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2015
271 Modern Architecture, Design, and the Built Environment
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013
284 Women and Art in Early Modern Europe
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2008, Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Spring 2017, Spring 2021
294 Black Europe
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Spring 2018, Fall 2019, Spring 2021,
Spring 2023303 Poetic Translation
This is a workshop in translating poetry into English, preferably from a Germanic, Slavic, or Romance language (including Latin, of course), whose aim is to produce good poems in English. Students will present first and subsequent drafts to the entire class for regular analysis, which will be fed by reference to readings in translation theory and contemporary translations from European languages. Advanced knowledge of the source language is required and experience with creative writing is welcome.
Limited to 12 students. Spring semester. Professor Maraniss.
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2019, Fall 2021,
Spring 2023311 Birth of the Avant-Garde: Modern Poetry and Culture in France and Russia, 1870-1930
(Offered as EUST 311, FREN 364, and RUSS 311.) Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, poetry was revolutionized both in France and in Russia; nowhere else did the avant-garde proliferate more extravagantly. This class will focus on the key period in the emergence of literary modernity that began with Symbolism and culminated with Surrealism and Constructivism.
With the advent of modernism, the poem became a “global phenomenon” that circulated among different languages and different cultures, part of a process of cross-fertilization. An increasingly hybrid genre, avant-garde poetry went beyond its own boundaries by drawing into itself prose writing, philosophy, music, and the visual and performing arts. The relation between the artistic and the literary avant-garde will be an essential concern.
We will be reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud and the French Symbolists; the Russian Symbolists (Blok, Bely); Nietzsche; Apollinaire, Dada, and the Surrealists (Breton, Eluard, Desnos); and the Russian avant-garde poets (Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Tsvetaeva).
Our study of the arts will include Symbolism (Moreau, Redon); Fauvism (Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck); Cubism, Dada, and early Surrealism (Duchamp, Ernst, Dali, Artaud); the “World of Art” movement (Bakst, the Ballets Russes); Primitivism (Goncharova, Larionov); Suprematism (Malevich); and Constructivism (Tatlin, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky). The course will be taught in English. Students who read fluently in French and/or Russian will be encouraged to read the material in the original language.
Omitted 2014-15. Professors Ciepiela and L. Katsaros.
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2007, Spring 2010, Spring 2014
313 Serving the Tsars and the Party
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012
332 Gender, Class, and Crime: the Victorian Underworld
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2015, Spring 2019
335 European Migrations
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Fall 2016
339 Defining the Modern: Russia Between Tsars and Communists
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013, Spring 2016
342 Kafka, Brecht, and Thomas Mann
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2009, Spring 2012, Spring 2015
352 Proseminar: Images of Sickness and Healing
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012
356 Baroque Art in Italy, France, Spain, and the Spanish Netherlands
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2013, Fall 2016,
Spring 2022360 Performance
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2014, Fall 2017, Fall 2020,
Spring 2023363 Traumatic Events
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2008, Fall 2010, Fall 2014, Fall 2018
364 Architectures of Disappearance
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2013, Spring 2016, Spring 2019,
Fall 2022,
Spring 2025365 Making Memorials
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Fall 2016, Fall 2021
368 SPACE
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2018,
Spring 2022,
Fall 2024371 Music and Revolution: The Symphonies of Mahler and Shostakovich
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2007, Fall 2010, Spring 2014
372 Culture and Politics in 20th-Century Europe
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2008, Spring 2010, Spring 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014
373 Topics in European History: The Politics of Memory in Twentieth-Century Europe
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2010, Spring 2012, Spring 2014
374 Medieval and Renaissance Lyric
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Spring 2020,
Spring 2022385 Witches, Vampires and Other Monsters
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2020, Fall 2021,
Fall 2022,
Fall 2023390, 490 Special Topics
Fall and spring semesters.
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022,
Spring 2023,
Fall 2024498, 498D, 499, 499D Senior Departmental Honors
A double course.
Spring semester.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022,
Spring 2023,
Spring 2025Panoramic Introductions
232 Representation and Reality in Spanish Cinema
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013, Spring 2021,
Fall 2022249 Buñuel, Saura, Almodóvar: Spanish Auteurs
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2015
Nation-Specific Studies
340 Violence, Art, and Memory of the Spanish Civil War
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2014, Fall 2016, Spring 2021
Course Specialized by Auther & Text
264 Don Quixote [RC]
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2014, Spring 2017,
Fall 2022Thematic Analysis
233 Love
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2014, Spring 2017,
Spring 2022,
Fall 2024270 Hispanic Humor [RC]
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2013
312 Spanish Detectives and the género negro
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2008, Fall 2012
Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature and Culture
354 War and Memory
2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2010, Fall 2014
Related Courses
- (Course not offered this year.)CLAS-123 Greek Civilization (Course not offered this year.)CLAS-124 Roman Civilization (Course not offered this year.)CLAS-134 Archaeology of Greece (Course not offered this year.)ENGL-332 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Course not offered this year.)ENGL-338 Shakespeare (Course not offered this year.)ENGL-348 Modern British Literature, 1900-1950 (Course not offered this year.)FREN-321 Amor and Metaphor in the Early French Middle Ages (Course not offered this year.)FREN-339 Worldliness and Otherworldliness (Course not offered this year.)FREN-365 Toward the New Wave (Course not offered this year.)GERM-315 German Cultural History to 1800 (Course not offered this year.)GERM-316 German Cultural History from 1800 to the Present (Course not offered this year.)GERM-333 Comedy and Humor (Course not offered this year.)GERM-347 Weimar Cinema: The "Golden Age" of German Film (Course not offered this year.)GERM-352 Kafka, Brecht, and Thomas Mann (Course not offered this year.)GREE-212 Greek Prose: Plato's Apology (Course not offered this year.)GREE-215 An Introduction to Greek Tragedy (Course not offered this year.)GREE-217 Reading the New Testament (Course not offered this year.)GREE-318 An Introduction to Greek Epic (Course not offered this year.)GREE-441 Advanced Readings in Greek Literature I (Course not offered this year.)GREE-442 Advanced Readings in Greek Literature II (Course not offered this year.)HIST-208 Spain and the Pacific World, 1571-1898 (Course not offered this year.)HIST-213 Turning Points in the History of Science (Course not offered this year.)LATI-215 Latin Literature: Catullus and the Lyric Spirit (Course not offered this year.)LATI-316 Latin Literature in the Augustan Age (Course not offered this year.)LATI-441 Advanced Readings in Latin Literature I (Course not offered this year.)LJST-341 Interpretation in Law and Literature (Course not offered this year.)MUSI-444 Twentieth-Century Analysis (Course not offered this year.)PHIL-111 Philosophical Questions (Course not offered this year.)PHIL-217 Ancient Greek Philosophy (Course not offered this year.)PHIL-227 Aesthetics (Course not offered this year.)PHIL-310 Ethics (Course not offered this year.)PHIL-463 The Later Wittgenstein (Course not offered this year.)POSC-475 Personality and International Politics: Gorbachev, the End of the Cold War and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Course not offered this year.)PSYC-338 Personality and Political Leadership (Course not offered this year.)RELI-111 Introduction to Religion (Course not offered this year.)RUSS-212 Survey of Russian Literature From Dostoevsky to Nabokov (Course not offered this year.)RUSS-227 Fyodor Dostoevsky (Course not offered this year.)RUSS-228 Tolstoy (Course not offered this year.)RUSS-401 Advanced Studies in Russian Literature and Culture I (Course not offered this year.)SOCI-315 Foundations of Sociological Theory (Course not offered this year.)SPAN-320 Generations of 1898 and 1927 (Course not offered this year.)THDA-112 Materials of Theater (Course not offered this year.)