Reflections Seminars: Fall 2024
First Semester Students
World as Stage and Screen
- Greg Polakoff (Humanities) and Jay Shea (English)
- Tuesday 11:30 – 2:30 & Thursday 10:00-2:00
- CREDITS: Humanities 345-101 and English 603-101
If “life imitates art far more than art imitates life”––as Oscar Wilde would have us believe––then what can we learn from the performative arts and media about life and the world in which we live? “World as Stage and Screen” explores what drama, film, dialogues, and immersive digital and theatrical media have to say about humans and our complicated relationships to these media.
The course will focus on the Renaissance (15th–early 17th centuries) and Late-Modern Era (19th–21st centuries), two periods marked by scientific, artistic, and social revolutions and geopolitical change. From the age of the printing press and the Globe theater to the hyperreal era of the internet, we will survey the relationship between art, life, and knowledge.
From the Renaissance, we’ll study William Shakespeare, particularly plays related to meta-theatricality and “world as stage”. Our study of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may include titles such as Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo, Karel Çapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and films such as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. Toward the end of the course, we’ll move into the spectorial world of digital technologies by studying video games and films, which may include Cronenberg’s Existenz and Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York. Readings will also include short theoretical and philosophical texts. Students will be encouraged to engage in the course actively and creatively, including participating in theatrical/performance activities.
The Story of Us: The Oral Tradition and Digital Culture
- Dr. Gray Miles (Humanities) and Rebecca Million (English)
- Tuesday 2:30-6:30 & Thursday 2:30-5:30
- CREDITS: Humanities 345-101 and English 603-101
Gather ‘round the fire: All fall quiet as the bard enters the circle. A story is about to be told. The listeners have heard it throughout their lives, but each time it’s told it changes, another small patch of colour added to the quilt. The story comforts and warns, elicits laughter and fear, delight and dread–and when the story is over and they walk away from the fire and go to their beds, the people feel part of something larger than themselves; they become that small patch of colour. And once stitched into the quilt, they can know their own culture.
Long before we had books we had stories, and through stories, legends, myths, plays, songs and nursery rhymes–even jokes and gossip–culture was passed from one generation to another and sometimes stories travelled over long distances and joined distant peoples in symbol and imagination–all by voice, memory, and performance. This is the Oral Tradition, ancient and powerful.
The Oral Tradition didn’t die out when writing, then the printing press, then mass media and the digital age came along. It transformed, yes, but it still lives and works on us and has power in our world today. Think of urban legends and conspiracy theories, memes, trends and slang. Now culture passes around in story form on digital platforms; online games, social media, chat groups and forums.
What are the connections between ancient Oral Traditions and contemporary Digital Culture? Can we trace a through-line back through the ages to today? And where are the disruptions along this journey? What happens, for example, when the stories that circulate the widest are selected based on digestibility, shock value, outrage-generation, and salaciousness? If stories are how we learn about ourselves, what are we to think of our own culture based on the stories we tell about “us” right now?
In this course we’ll dig into some of the oldest stories in the world and talk about how they were made and transmitted, and how and why they survived all the centuries of change since they were first uttered so long ago. We’ll read and listen to myths, plays, fairy tales, ballads, and poems, and learn what techniques and components gave them staying power. Students will be encouraged to draw connections between the orality of the ancient world and the platforms and artefacts of today’s digital gathering places. Our classroom discussions will be punctuated with invited guests and storytelling, and students will get chances to create and share their own stories, poems, songs, etc. in addition to engaging in literary and cultural analysis. Students will do research and write about current forms of cultural transmission and analyze whether the long line of the Oral Tradition continues today, or whether it has been broken, interrupted, or morphed into something unrecognizable.
Third Semester Students
Moby-Dick and the Buddhist Tradition
- Dr. Julian Nemeth (Humanities) and Dr. Kristopher Woofter (English)
- Wednesday and Friday 11:30-2:30
- CREDITS: Humanities Ethics 345-BXH and English Literary Themes 603-103
- Pre-requisites: Humanities 101 & 102 and English 101 & 102
The core of this paired course is an examination of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece of dark romanticism, Moby-Dick; or The Whale. It combines an English course centrally concerned with the novel and its creative and historical contexts, with a Humanities section devoted to putting the work into dialogue with Buddhist ethics.
Written during a period of intense industrialization in the United States, and centered on an industry that, like today’s fossil fuels, had global impact politically, culturally, and environmentally, Moby-Dick is an allegorical work of fiction, history, ecology, and philosophy that continues to compel our investigations. We will study Melville’s novel intensively, along with related works that will help to understand Melville’s novel in time and place, but also within the philosophical and aesthetic traditions that informed it, and that it helped to inform.
In the English course, we will explore critical concepts such as the environmental Gothic, the sublime, monster-theory, Weird theory, dark romanticism, Transcendentalism, pessimism, and related traditions. We will also read George Cotkin’s chapter-by-chapter reflection on Moby-Dick, entitled Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick (2012) and screen the experimental documentary film Leviathan (2012). Other readings may include work by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne (to whom Melville dedicated Moby-Dick), and Emily Dickinson. Additionally, we will examine the novel through different critical angles such as race, class, gender and sexuality; religion (not directly related to Buddhism); and topics such as animal liberation, (anti-) anthropocentrism, (anti-)capitalism, ambiguity, epistemology (systems of knowledge), ineffability, paradox and contradiction, queerness, and the concept of “America.”
For the Humanities course, we will put Moby Dick into dialogue with Buddhism. For millennia, Buddhist writers have investigated the nature of desire, suffering, and one’s place in the cosmos; concerns that are also central to Moby Dick. How might Buddhist concepts such as “impermanence,” “interconnectedness,” and “emptiness” enrich our understanding of the novel? How might Moby Dick shed light on the Buddha’s teaching (dharma)? To help answer these questions, we will contrast Buddhist philosophy with “Western” ethical traditions including Utilitarianism, Kantianism, and Virtue Ethics. Finally, grounding our learning in experience, we will engage in a weekly meditation practice and employ the novel to analyze our own moral dilemmas. As Melville writes, “Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”
Questions? Contact Gabrielle Bernardin, Reflections Administrative Assistant: at gbernardin@dawsoncollege.qc.ca or by MIO.
