At the completion of this lesson: based on verbal instructions you will be able to find an address in the city. Conversely, you will be able to ask for direction to a certain shop or place of interest in the city.
" This class explores the creation (and creativity) of the modern scientific and cultural world through study of western Europe in the 17th century, the age of Descartes and Newton, Shakespeare, Milton and Ford. It compares period thinking to present-day debates about the scientific method, art, religion, and society. This team-taught, interdisciplinary subject draws on a wide range of literary, dramatic, historical, and scientific texts and images, and involves theatrical experimentation as well as reading, writing, researching and conversing. The primary theme of the class is to explore how England in the mid-seventeenth century became "a world turned upside down" by the new ideas and upheavals in religion, politics, and philosophy, ideas that would shape our modern world. Paying special attention to the "theatricality" of the new models and perspectives afforded by scientific experimentation, the class will read plays by Shakespeare, Tate, Brecht, Ford, Churchill, and Kushner, as well as primary and secondary texts from a wide range of disciplines. Students will also compose and perform in scenes based on that material."
In this course, the student will examine the writings of a diverse group of medieval women and analyze the perceptions of reality that they present, taking into account critics' views on their works as well. The student will begin by acquainting ourselves with the major socio-historical developments that shaped women's role in the period. The student will then take a look at some major feminist and gender/sex-related approaches to literature, followed by readings of women-authored texts, examining their styles, techniques, and representations of the world around them. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to: explain Medievalism as both a historical period and a movement in literature and the arts; provide an account of the role of women in the Middle Ages; explain the general intellectual climate of the Middle Ages; explain the significance of the Fall of the Roman Empire; explain the importance of Medieval oral traditions, the rise of literacy, cultures of chivalry, courtly love, Scholasticism, and the Church; describe the lives of Medieval women, wives, virgins, lovers, and mothers; explain the relationship between Medieval women and the Church in terms of theology, emerging religious communities, persecution, nunnery, scripture, hagiography, martyrdom, and sainthood; discuss Medieval concepts of gender and sexuality; explain the notion of secular female authorship; describe Medieval class structure and especially the nature of aristocratic and working-class women in the Middle Ages; identify and describe the formal and structural conventions of the Medieval lay; detail the themes of love, desire, romance, marriage, widowhood, and literary self-expression in the Medieval text; describe the major tenets, ideals, and ideas investigated in ChaucerŐs Canterbury Tales, especially from the perspective of the women in this complex text. (English Literature 407)
