ATM Curriculum

Study theoretical and methodological texts as they interact with the literary, visual, and performing arts. Emphasis falls on current theoretical approaches from the 20th and 21st century, while artistic materials may come from any period. Approaches seminars develop an understanding of multiple theoretical discourses in the world of the arts, with an emphasis on the difference, and divergence, of approaches between them. ATM Approaches seminars assess the particular historical and cultural contexts from which the theories arose, and examine the implications of applying these approaches to other cultures and regions.

Sample Courses:

• Technology, Self, and Other: Modern Literary Theory and Science Fiction
• Sex and Gender: The Third Wave
• Introduction to Theory: Methods of Research in the Global Humanities
• Confronting Culture: Postcolonial and Feminist Approaches to Art and Literature

Study artistic and literary primary sources from diverse regions around the globe. Global Topics seminars operate within a frame of reference that is cosmopolitan yet keenly aware of the linguistic and cultural particularity of the studied materials. Global Topics sophomore seminars achieve global ambitions in studying the metamorphosis of imported forms under the pressure of local contexts.

Sample Courses:

• Responding to ‘The West’ – Colonial Encounters and Their Legacies
• Rescued, Kidnapped, Gifted, Sold: Transnational Adoption in Film, Literature, and the Media
• Unacceptable: Iconoclasm, Censorship, Burning – When Art Gets Destroyed
• The Global Flâneur: The Modern Art of Thought and Movement
• Ecology and the Arts: Toward a Poetics of Sustainability

Learn to develop the analytic tools, critical methodologies and research skills to engage in original scholarship in the global humanities. We will begin by examining how literature and art respond to local as well as global pressures in an increasingly interdependent world. How do aesthetic objects perpetuate or resist ideologies of race, gender and nation, among others? What makes aesthetic experience at once distinct from and yet related to other forms of intellectual cognition or apprehension? How does the relationship between culture and politics express itself in different contexts? At the same time, we will rethink what it means to do research in a global context so as to include not only trips to libraries and archives, but moreover, to museum exhibits, monuments, memorial sites and other cultural spaces that bear upon students’ interests. Finally, students will learn to develop their own research skills and articulate an original claim or argument in the form of a term paper, a senior thesis prospectus and an annotated bibliography. Among the critical questions that will inform the course: What does it mean to do research in the global humanities? How has your research interests evolved over the course of the semester? What is original and compelling about your claim or research methodology? Common readings will include texts by Sigmund Freud, Benedict Anderson, Louis Althusser, Gayle Rubin, Raymond Williams and George Yúdice.

Research Thesis

The research thesis consists of an inquiry into a theme relevant to the global arts following one of these analytical models: Multiple objects of study are engaged in a cross-cultural compare/contrast analysis; examine migrations of object(s) of study, culture(s), or people(s) in a trans-national or trans-regional range of inquiry; The object of study is examined as a point of contact between multiple cultures; study an object’s influence across cultures.

Creative Thesis with Scholarly Introduction

Students may produce an original, finished, creative work, accompanied by a piece of writing that will delineate some of the following issues: the methodology applied in the creation of the work, the historical context of the artistic medium, the critical debates within the tradition, and the relevant theoretical approaches relevant to the creative work.

Translation Thesis with Scholarly Introduction

Students may produce a polished English-language translation of a foreign-language text, accompanied by an introduction that will examine the cultural, and possibly historical, significance of the original work according to the latest scholarship, and translation theories relevant to the project.

Sample syllabus:
Reale syllabus, 2012-13