Great Books Course
HUM 1500 - Great Books in the Humanities
Humanities scholarship, through the study of language, literature, history, philosophy, and communication, aims to offer insight into the foundational questions and challenges that motivate and vex the human condition and our efforts to forge community. For this reason, since its formation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries until today, humanistic study has been vital to the formation of practical wisdom, the humane functioning of society, and the expansion of cultural understanding. Across this history, “Great Books,” both enduring and contemporary, have recorded the Humanities’ effort to bring to bear critical thinking to meet challenges and imagine new futures for the human experience. With lectures from leading faculty across the Humanities disciplines, intensive small group discussions, and a focus on impactful texts representing a cross-section of cultures and contexts, “Great Books in the Humanities” engages students in that same tradition of interpretive, analytical, and critical thinking as equipment for meeting challenges from industry to education and politics to pop culture.
- Philosophy
- English
- Linguistics
- Communication
- History
- World Languges and Cultures
- Writing and Rhetoric Studies
The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations
Author
José Medina
Department
Philosophy
Faculty
Erin Beeghly
About the Book
This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways - from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism.
Mrs. Dalloway
Author
Virginia Woolf
Department
English
Faculty
Scott Black
About the Book
In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman’s life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past—the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.
Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard
Author
Nora Ellen Groce
Department
Linguistics
Faculty
Aaron Kaplan
About the Book
From the seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, the population of Martha’s Vineyard manifested an extremely high rate of profound hereditary deafness. In stark contrast to the experience of most Deaf people in our own society, the Vineyarders who were born Deaf were so thoroughly integrated into the daily life of the community that they were not seen―and did not see themselves―as handicapped or as a group apart. Deaf people were included in all aspects of life, such as town politics, jobs, church affairs, and social life. How was this possible?
Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
Author
John Durham Peters
Department
Communication
Faculty
Sean Lawson
About the Book
Communication plays a vital and unique role in society-often blamed for problems when it breaks down and at the same time heralded as a panacea for human relations. A sweeping history of communication, Speaking Into the Air illuminates our expectations of communication as both historically specific and a fundamental knot in Western thought.
On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition
Author
Charles Darwin
Department
History
Faculty
Rachel Dentinger
About the Book
It is now generally recognized that the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 not only decisively altered the basic concepts of biological theory but had a profound and lasting influence on social, philosophic, and religious thought. This work is rightly regarded as one of the most important books ever printed.
The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library)
Author
Franz Kafka
Department
World Languages & Cultures
Faculty
Joe Metz
About the Book
Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.
The Fire Next Time
Author
James Baldwin
Department
Writing & Rhetoric Studies
Faculty
Jay Jordan
About the Book
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized
the nation, gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement—and still
lights the way to understanding race in America today.
"Basically the finest essay I’ve ever read... Baldwin refused to hold anyone’s hand.
He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince
you. He wrote beyond you." —Ta-Nehisi Coates
