This course surveys art of America from the colonial era through the post-war 20th century. The student will consider broad stylistic tendencies in various regions and periods and examine specific artists and works of art in historical and social contexts, with emphasis on the congruent evolution of contemporary American multi-cultural identity. Overarching issues that have interested major scholars of American art and its purview include the landscape (wilderness, Manifest Destiny, rural settlement, and urban development); the family and gender roles; the founding rhetoric of freedom and antebellum slavery; and notions of artistic modernism through the 20th century. Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to: Understand the historical (geographic, political) formation of the present United States of America; Be familiar with renowned influential American artists from the 18th through the 20th century; Be conversant in common stylistic designations used in Western art of the 17th through 20th centuries; Recognize subjects and forms in American art through history that mark its distinction; Be able to engage specific images, objects, and structures from different critical perspectives to consider their functions and meanings. (Art History 210)

For middle school and up, an introduction to the early Romantic German composer.

In this course, the student will examine the revolutionary energy, fascination with nature, desire to create art for the masses, and inward-facing focus of the Romantic period. First, the student will look at the broader socio-historical and literary context in which English Romantic poetry thrived, then examine the Romantic poet and the outer world, the Romantic poet and the inner world, and the poetry that bridges the gap between the two, attempting to understand what makes each poem 'Romantic.' Upon completion of this course, students will be able to: provide an account of Romanticism as both an historical period as well as a movement in art and literature; identify and explain Romanticism in terms of its relation to the French Revolution; describe the new views of society and social relations that arose during this era; explain the significance of industrialization, the rise of the working class, the expansion of British Empire, the heightening of British nationalism, and the rise of the press; explain Romanticism's relationship to Neo-Classicism; list and describe the major tenets of Romanticism, including the movement's interests in the natural world, supernaturalism, revolution, morality, ethics, exoticism, urbanization, mindscapes, moods, imagination, and interiority; provide an account of the nature and function of the Romantic craft of authorship. (English Literature 404)

Subject studies important examples of the literary form that, between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century, became an indispensable instrument for representing modern life, in the hands of such writers as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Austen, Scott, Dickens, the Brontes, Eliot, Hardy, and Conrad. The class alternates between eighteenth and nineteenth century topics, and may be repeated for credit with instructor's permission.

This subject traces the history of the European novel by studying texts that have been influential in connection with two interrelated ideas. 1) When serious fiction deals with matters of great consequence, it should not deal with the actions of persons of consequence--kings, princes, high elected officials and the like--but rather with the lives of apparently ordinary people and the everyday details of their social ambitions and desires. To use a phrase of Balzac's, serious fiction deals with "what happens everywhere". 2) This idea sometimes goes with another: that the most significant representations of the human condition are those dealing with persons who try to compel society to accept them as its destined agent, despite their absence of high birth or inheritance.

For middle school and up, an introduction to the post-Romantic composer Richard Strauss