COL 199: “Pandemics and the Humanities” 
Donald Cross
Mon/Wed/Fri
2:00-2:50pm
Class #20886
This will be the only class in which you are already an expert. You’re an expert by virtue of merely being alive at this moment in history. For several years now, each day has given you a crash course in how to survive a pandemic, how to mourn mass death, how to stay social in isolation, and how to expand your emotional literacy during a crisis. By studying representations of plagues and pandemics in the humanities throughout the ages, this seminar aims to turn your lived experience of the coronavirus into theoretical lessons about death, disease, and the humanity of the human.Our approach will be chronological. More specifically, our semester breaks down into six

COL 199: “Pandemics and the Humanities” 
Donald Cross
Mon/Wed/Fri
3:00-3:50pm
Clemens 123
Class #20887
This will be the only class in which you are already an expert. You’re an expert by virtue of merely being alive at this moment in history. For several years now, each day has given you a crash course in how to survive a pandemic, how to mourn mass death, how to stay social in isolation, and how to expand your emotional literacy during a crisis. By studying representations of plagues and pandemics in the humanities throughout the ages, this seminar aims to turn your lived experience of the coronavirus into theoretical lessons about death, disease, and the humanity of the human.Our approach will be chronological. More specifically, our semester breaks down into six

COL 199: "Ethics of Refusal" 
Devonya Havis
Tues/Thurs
11:00-12:20pm
Clemens 123
Class #21696
How we move through the world is shaped by our contexts – the technologies we use, social media platforms we follow, learned community perspectives, what we navigate based on where we live, and the ways others perceive us. While our varied contexts contribute to our uniqueness, they often encourage us to follow a particular status quo or to lean into social trends without questioning or examining whether conforming is the best way to live. At what point does living a certain kind of life make us responsible for challenging the given status quo? When is it an ethical responsibility to question authority? What role do critical thinking and knowledge play in helping us determine how best to live? Is there an ethics associated with resisting or refusing? This seminar will use philosophical texts and contemporary readings as a starting point for exploring these questions.

COL 199: "Literature of/and Human Rights"
Shaun Irlam 
Mon/Wed/Fri
10:00-10:50am
Baldty 119
Class #23178
This course will explore the intersections between literature and human rights through a number of contemporary post-modern, diasporic and post-colonial works.Summary: a). Narratives of witness; b). poetics of sentiment, creating an audience; c) politics of representation / aestheticization d.) suffering of others, e.) articulation of rights. How does literature bear witness to human suffering and crimes against humanity? A prominent dimension of the novel since its inception has been the drama of human suffering and championship of the persecuted. In the 18th century, an iconic instance of this was Richardsons heroine, Clarissa; in the 19th century, the social protest novels of Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell and others charted the horrors of industrialization in Victorian Britain while Zola¿s Rougon-Macquart cycle did the same for the French underclasses. Across the Atlantic, a large corpus of slave narratives and novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave momentum to the abolitionist movement which became to precursor to the contemporary discourse around human rights. 

COL 199: "Literature of/and Human Rights"
Shaun Irlam 
Mon/Wed/Fri
12:00-12:50pm
Baldty 120
Class #16287 
This course will explore the intersections between literature and human rights through a number of contemporary post-modern, diasporic and post-colonial works.Summary: a). Narratives of witness; b). poetics of sentiment, creating an audience; c) politics of representation / aestheticization d.) suffering of others, e.) articulation of rights. How does literature bear witness to human suffering and crimes against humanity? A prominent dimension of the novel since its inception has been the drama of human suffering and championship of the persecuted. In the 18th century, an iconic instance of this was Richardsons heroine, Clarissa; in the 19th century, the social protest novels of Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell and others charted the horrors of industrialization in Victorian Britain while Zola¿s Rougon-Macquart cycle did the same for the French underclasses. Across the Atlantic, a large corpus of slave narratives and novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave momentum to the abolitionist movement which became to precursor to the contemporary discourse around human rights. 

COL 199: "Quarrel between Philosophy and Literature"
Krzysztof Ziarek
Mon/Wed
4:15-5:35pm
Clemens 123
Class #18357
Why do philosophers read poets, and why do poets read philosophy? The course will trace the history of this question, beginning with the ¿quarrel¿ between philosophy and poetry in antiquity and leading up to the contemporary conversations and polemics between the two disciplines. This quarrel between philosophy and poetry is mentioned in Plato, and already at that time it was perceived as ¿ancient.¿  The course will begin by exploring the provenance and the stakes of this quarrel as seen by Plato and proceed on this basis to inquire into its formulations in later texts, from ancient Greece to 20th literature, philosophy, and film. 

This seminar is open to all students interested in exploring the fascinating and challenging intersections between the two main areas of the humanities: literature and philosophy. Reading literary and philosophical texts, we will discuss such questions as the nature of human existence, the problem of time, death, and finitude, the role of gender, as well as the differences and similarities between imagination and reason, passion and logic, literary language and philosophical argumentation. What is the difference between how poetry and philosophy address and express those issues?  How is poetic/literary saying different from philosophical ways of telling?  How do we think between poetic images and philosophical reasoning/argumentation?  

In the first part of the course, we will examine convergences and differences between literary and philosophical texts in antiquity (Plato, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Sophocles' tragedies), the Middle Ages (Boethius), and the Enlightenment (Voltaire). Rethinking the heritage of Greek culture and tragedy for the moderns, Nietzsche's influential study The Birth of Tragedy will serve as the transition to the questions that characterize contemporary debates between philosophy and literature. After The Birth of Tragedy, we will read essays by Heidegger and Irigaray, and a number of literary texts: short stories by Dinesen, Borges, and Faulkner, poetry by Wislawa Szymborska, Reggio¿s film, Koyaanisqatsi.