Humanities Courses with Kate Zambreno


Humanities 122: Contemporary Culture and the Arts

This course will look at America in the age of globalization, from the inside and out, through contemporary culture and the arts. We will be dissecting the concept of the “American dream,” as well as its ideal of free speech, and the artworks that have both addressed and challenged this ideal, paying attention to the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s. The two plays that we will read, Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Top dog/Underdog” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” depict the “American dream” as seen from the margins. As this course will be interdisciplinary in nature, we will not only be reading plays, fiction and essays, but also viewing artwork and watching films that complement the readings, such as Spike Lee’s” Bamboozled,” Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s fictional documentary” Ten,” and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.” We will also be looking at contemporary cultural mediums, from the graphic novel to MP3s to podcasts to digital video to stop-action animation to even music videos. For this course students will also read the literature of current world conflicts, from “Nowhere Man,” Aleksandar Hemon’s novel of a Bosnian refugee in Chicago in the nineties to “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel about growing up in Iran. We will also be discussing these works in the light of the post-9/11 world, and will be reading an essay by author Don DeLillo on the subject.

Some of the texts include:

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi ISBN 037571457X Pantheon
Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon ISBN 0375727027 Vintage
Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks ISBN 1559362014 TCG
Angels in America by Tony Kushner ISBN 1559360984 TCG

  Humanities 142: Women and Creativity

For this summer course we will explore issues and obstacles facing women artists both historically and in the modern day. Asking questions like-What is a woman artist? What does it mean to explore the feminine in your work? Why have there been so few “great” woman artists? Why are some women artists so little known? Who gets to decide who is “great” or not, anyway? We will be in dialogue with thinkers and writers like Virginia Woolf, who in A Room of One's Own dared to inquire after the fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister, as well as Alice Walker, who expanded Woolf's notion of sisterhood to include African-American women and her notion of art to include the domestic sphere. Plus we will be reading four works of fiction, starring Shakespeare's sisters from the Victorian period to 1950s America , including Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, as well as looking at some exciting examples of visual art and film by women that explore the feminine experience.

For more information contact Kate Zambreno

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