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The Program
in the Study of Imagination sponsors the design and teaching of
a range of courses, such as: Philosophy of the Imagination; Music
and the Imagination; Comparative Studies in Imagination; Magic,
Witchcraft and the Imagination; The Mind in the Machine: Computer
Imaginations; The Threat of Imagination: a Social History of Mental
Process; Early Modern Fantasy in Music, Art and Science.
Spring
2003
Winter
2003
Fall 2002
Spring 2002
Winter 2002
Fall 2001
Winter
2003
Selected
Topics in Music Literature: Fantasy in Early Modern Era
Musicology Program 335-0-21
Monday 3:00-6:00 42 MAB
Prof. Linda P Austern
E-mail: l-austern@nwu.edu
Prof. Mary V Springfels
E-mail: spfls@aol.com
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course, which will emphasize both
performance practices and scholarship, will examine the fantasy
and related genres from about 1450 until the end of the eighteent
century. We will start from the perspective of what "fantasy"
and ideas of sensory-intellectual processes meant to late Renaissance
thinkers from music theorists to visual artists to medical writers,
and will look primarily at the rise of instrumental music neither
founded on pre-existing melodic or harmonic patterns nor bounded
by prescribed structural forms. We will also consider vocal forms,
and historical techniques of improvization as they relate to extant
written music; and we will look at changes in musical instruments
and their techniques from the Renaissance through the early Classical
era.
PROJECTS: Students will be able to complete written and performed
projects of many sorts.
PREREQUISITES: The completion of any course covering music before
1800 (Music 212
counts), OR experience performing Western music before 1800.
TEACHING METHOD: Lecture, discussion, and performance.
EVALUATION METHOD: lecture-demonstration.
Final term paper or project.
Selected Topics for Nonmajors : Music and Mind
General Music 175-0-23
Prof. Richard D Ashley
E-mail: r-ashley@nwu.edu
Prof. Scott D. Lipscomb
E-mail: lipscomb@northwestern.edu
MWF 2:00 125 MAB
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An introduction to the processes involved
in listening to and understanding music. Students will gain an
understanding of how music is perceived, remembered, and performed.
The course will focus on how music may be studied from a psychological
frame of reference, including issues related to culture, sociology,
physiology, psychoacoustics, and individual experience. No prior
experience is required either in music or in psychology; all necessary
concepts and required vocabulary will be introduced in course
readings and/or classroom discussions.
Music
and Emotion
Music
Theory 335
Annenberg (School of Education) 303
Tuesday 1-3:30
Prof. Richard Ashley (Music) and Prof. Andrew Ortony (Psychology)
E-Mail: r-ashley@northwestern.edu
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An introduction to the relationship between
music and emotion. Topics to be covered include theories of emotion,
the relationship of music to emotional experience, communication
of emotion in music, and emotional aspects of music in social
settings and in multimedia.
PROJECTS: An individual project, on some issue surrounding music
and emotion. The nature of each project will differ according
to students' backgrounds, interests, and abilities. Some will
be on the order of a literature review, whereas others might involve
some modest empirical work.
PREREQUISITES: None, although background in the cognitive sciences
and/or music is helpful.
TEACHING METHOD: Readings/lecture/discussion. Each class meeting
will have readings assigned beforehand, with questions for student
response as a preparation for discussion.
EVALUATION METHOD: Grades will be assigned on the basis of weekly
reading responses, class discussion, and final project.
READING: Primary readings from the psychological and musical literatures.
There should be 2 readings per week on average, such as 2 articles
or chapters from books.
NOTE: Crosslisted with Psychology 313.
Spring
2003
ART HISTORY 339
Special Topics in Renaissance Art: History of the Imagination
Instructor: Claudia Swan
T TH 12:30-2pm
Pick Laudati Auditorium
The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The subject of this course is the Renaissance
imagination. Between 1400 and 1700 and throughout Western Europe,
the imagination was understood as a faculty of mind essential
to cognition, artistic production, musical composition, religious
experience, medical theories, scientific experiment, and even
witchcraft. Esteemed products of the imagination include fine
works of art and successful hybrid creations whereas melancholics
and witches, for example, suffered the torments of malfunctioning
imagination. This course offers an encapsulated history of theories
and practices of the imagination in early modern European arts
and sciences alike, and will emphasize the central role of the
imagination in the arts, medico-philosophy, and religious thought.
Concepts and practices we will survey include the grotesque, monstrosity,
wonder, creativity, the musical fantasia, melancholy, and witchcraft.
Artists and writers featured include Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht
Durer, Hans Baldung Grien, Michelangelo, Jacques de Gheyn II,
and David Teniers; Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Robert
Burton, among others. This course is open to students interested
in art history, literature, musicology, history, religion, philosophy,
and critical theory.
PREREQUISITES: None. Students will benefit, however, from familiarity
with the history, art history, or literature of early modern Europe.
Contact instructor with questions.
TEACHING METHOD: Two one-and-a-half hour lectures per week, with
active discussion.
EVALUATION METHOD: The student's grade in this course will be
based on participation (30%), a mid-term take-home essay (30%),
and one five-page analytical paper (40%)
READING: TENTATIVE READING LIST:
Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical
and Medieval Thought. Urbana 1927.
Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons. The Idea of Witchcraft
in Early Modern Europe. Oxford 1997.
Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. transl.
Margaret Cook, Chicago/London 1987
David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art. Princeton
1981.
David Summers, The Judgment of Sense. Renaissance Naturalism
and the Rise of Aesthetics. Cambridge 1990.
Course packet
ITALIAN 490-0
Topics in Italian Literature and Culture. The Fate of Fortune:
Aby Warburg and the Italian Renaissance
Instructor: Davide Stimilli
Office Address: 129 Kresge Hall
Phone: 847-491-8268
E-mail: d-stimilli@northwestern.edu
Office Hours: By appointment
Time: Tuesday 3:30-5:20
Room: Kresge 122
Expected Enrollment: 10
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The revival of the pagan goddess Fortuna and
the meaning of 'fortune' in the Italian Renaissance is going to
be the focus of our discussion. This topic was central to Aby
Warburg's intellectual endeavors since his 1907 study on the Florentine
merchant Francesco Sassetti. While editing the manuscript of Sassetti's
last injunctions to his sons, Warburg had been struck by the unorthodox
invocation of a Roman goddess in the will of a Christian merchant.
The question Warburg asked in 1907: "Why this particular
pagan deity, Fortuna, was revived by the Renaissance", led
him to the investigation of the revival of ancient paganism in
the Renaissance that was to be the main focus of his ensuing scholarship.
By tracing this leitmotif of Warburg's thinking, we will try to
shed light on a question that remains central to any interpretation
of the Renaissance: how to reconcile the emerging consciousness
of human freedom and individuality with the still pervasive acceptance
of the agency of fate in human life? The most striking instance
of such a contradiction is, perhaps, the ubiquitous belief in
astrology, another topic, not by chance, dear to Warburg, that
we will also address in our discussion. In the process we will
read the bulk of Aby Warburg's published writings and some as
yet unpublished materials, along with some of the most influential
texts on the interpretation of the Italian Renaissance: Jacob
Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,
Ernst Cassirer's The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance
Philosophy, and Edgar Wind's Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance.
And, of course, we will also read excerpts from works by the most
prominent Italian humanists, such as Petrarch, Alberti, Ficino,
Pico, Machiavelli, and Valla.
PREREQUISITES: No prerequisite; taught in English.
TEACHING METHOD: Conducted as a seminar.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: Attendance and participation; two papers
of, respectively, 8-10 and 14-15 pages.
TEXTS:
A. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to
the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities
1999)
J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
(New York: Modern Library 2002)
E. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy
(New York: Dover 2000)
E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (photocopy)
Packet of readings available at Quartet.
MUSIC 335-0 sec 20
Special Topics in Composition: Dance and Music Studies in Collaboration
DANCE 333-0 sec 20 Dance & Music Studies in Collaboration
Instructors: Amy Williams and Joseph Mills
M W 11-12:30 Ballroom Studio, Dance Center
This class is organized around the collaborative creation of new
work by students. A series of exercises and assignments will be
designed to engage the students in the study and experimentation
of collaborative processes. Historical models will be used as
the basis of research projects and presentations (i.e. Cage/Cunningham,
Balanchine/Stravinsky). We will work to develop a common vocabulary
for participating in informed dialogue about each other's work.
Students will be expected to spend considerable time outside of
class working with each other on assignments and the final project.
The class will culminate in an informal public performance.
The class is open to graduate and undergraduate students, by permission
of the instructors. All musicians must be able to play an instrument
(acoustic or electronic) and be actively involved in the rehearsal
and performance of the works of their peers. Although the class
is designed primarily for musicians and dancers, we do encourage
students in the visual arts and theater to join as well.
Permission of instructor is required.
RELIGION 350-0-28
Topics in Religion : Religion and Magic
INSTRUCTOR: Richard Kieckhefer
Office address: 1940 Sheridan Rd., Rm 20, Evanston Campus
Phone: 847-491-2614
E-mail: kieckhefer@nwu.edu
Office Hours: Winter MW 3:30-4:30 & by appt.
Time: TTH 9:30-11:00
Room: 222 PKS
Expected Enrollment: 35
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will examine the ways magic is
viewed and practiced in various cultures, its relationship to
mainstream religious practice in each of those cultures, and a
range of theories that have been proposed regarding the relationship
between magic and religion.
TEACHING METHOD: Lectures with some class discussion.
EVALUATION METHOD: Grades will be based mainly on term papers,
but class discussion will also be taken into account.
READING:
1. Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual
of the Fifteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1998).
2. Siegel, Lee, Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
3. T.M.
Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: ritual Magic in
Contemporary England (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1989).
Plus a packet of photocopies.
Fall
2002
Listening
to Poets
Classics 390-0 (meets with Greek 301-0-20)
TTH Kresge 7 (time TBA)
Prof. Sean Gurd
Email: s-gurd@northwestern.edu
For the ancients, listening to poetry was just as important, if
not more important, than reading poetry. In this course we will
investigate the different cultural claims of reading and listening
in antiquity, and, through a study of selected modern philosophical
texts, we will ask whether listening is more important to thinking
than reading is. Readings will include: Homer, Anaximander, Heraclitus,
Plato, Plutarch, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Heidegger.
PARIS SPACE: The Shaping and Perception of the Parisian Cityscape
During the Second Empire (1852-1870)
Art History 470: Studies in Modern Architecture
Seminar Th 2:00, Kresge 276
Professor David Van Zanten
Observers have always been troubled by how effective the spaces
and facades of Second Empire Paris were but how mysterious was
the urbanistic practice that produced them. This seminar will
explore the social construction and reconstruction of the "Capital
of the Nineteenth Century" on at least three planes:
1). That of direct experience (reflected in literature and scientific
examination -- no city was written about as much in that time,
nor analyzed so intensely in our own);
2). That of graphic depiction, both in terms of the painted conventions
of place and space, and in terms of the mass of new media evolved
at that moment and focused on the city itself;
3). That of architectural generation -- the celebrated "Beaux-Arts"
system of spatial composition.
I would like to explore the hypothesis that it was the exterior
urban spaces and their decoration that were Second Empire Paris's
real accomplishment, that architecture played a subservient role
in the organization and multiplication of these at city scale,
and that parallel media help us understand how this all worked.
Architecture is not the only spatial medium.
Reference will be made to the broader context of the transformation
of London, Vienna, Berlin and Hamburg. The course will make use
of Northwestern's unusually rich holdings of newspapers and popular
and professional journals: Journal des debats, Journal des chemins
de fer, (Moniteur universel is at the U of C), L'illustration,
Illustrated London News, Magasin pittoresque, Revue generale de
l'architecture et des travaux publics, Moniteur des architectes,
Encyclopedie d'architecture, Gazette des architectes et du batiment,
L'artiste, Builder, Allgemeine Bauzeitung, Zeitschrift fur Bauwesen,
Deutsche Bauzeitung.
Seminar, meeting one afternoon weekly, with a preliminary bibliographical
paper (due the fourth week) and a longer research paper to be
presented during examination week, both to be written and graded.
Bibliography:
Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories, 1999
Karen Bowie (ed.), La modernite avant Haussmann, 2001
Andrew Barry et al., Foucault and Political Reason, 1996
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 1984
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (edition Eiland and McLaughlin,
1999)
Marcel Roncayolo, Les grammaires d'une ville, 1996
Bernard Lepetit, Les villes dans la France moderne, 1988
Pierre Pinon and Jean des Cars, Paris . Haussmann, 1991
Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna,
1986
David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, 1958
Imagining
the Internet: Fiction, Film and Theory
Comparative Literary Studies 390: Topics Comp Lit
TTh 2:00
Jillana Enteen
E-mail: j-enteen@northwestner.edu
Much
recent fiction, film and theory are concerned with representing
the Internet and the World Wide Web. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted
as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema
or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This
course will examine the ways in which virtual media appears in
cultural discourses. Our guiding questions will include the following:
In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions
of the Internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences
of language, gender, community and identity? While you will be
expected to conduct research on the World Wide Web and participate
in Internet discussions, no previous Internet experience is necessary.
Spring
2002
Special Topics in Philosophy: "Philosophy of the Imagination"
Philosophy 390
Professor David M. Levin
Office address: 1818 Hinman Avenue
Phone: 491-3656
E-mail: d-levin@northwestern.edu
Reading philosophical and literary texts spanning the last three
centuries, this course will examine a number of questions concerned
with the imagination, the faculty that produces images. The imagination
is of course crucial not only in the creation of works of art,
but also in aesthetic experience and judgement. For this reason,
questions about the nature and role of the imagination, as well
as its limitations, have always been of great importance for philosophical
thought concerned with the production, experience and critical
reception of art. But the imagination, mediating between sensory
experience and conceptual categories, has also played a crucial,
if ambiguous role in philosophical accounts explaining both the
acquisition of knowledge and the causes of deception and error,
often being chastised for its freedom from conventions and rules.
Precisely this freedom, however, has made the imagination a necessary
resource for social and political philosophies, visions that it
serves not only as a constructive force, but also as a powerfully
critical and destructive force. In this course, therefore, we
will study all these different functions of the imagination. And
we will draw on our discussion of the texts to imagine imagining
otherwise.
Prerequisites: None
Format: Lecture and discussion.
Readings: Plato's Republic; essays on Aristotle, Hegel and Vico;
essays by Wilhelm von Humboldt; the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin,
and philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Nancy, Walter Benjamin,
and Jacques Derrida, as well as poems by Wallace Stevens.
New Media as Literature
RTVF 341
Ann Weinstone
E-mail: weinstone@northwestern.edu
Wednesdays 12-3 in 52 Kresge
"New Media as Literature" is part two of a two-quarter
sequence that investigates relationships between innovative post-World
War II fiction, hypertext, hypermedia, and ethics. The spring
quarter course focuses on Web-based writing and hypermedia, and
on the lively conversation about these new modes of production
and dissemination. Part one is NOT a prerequisite for part two.
During the past fifty years, questions of how we "read"
each other and of how we "write" or represent ourselves
and others have become central to the arts, to humanistic scholarship,
and to the conduct of human relations in general. Does the advent
of the Internet and hypermedia present opportunities for more
ethical modes of reading and writing? Students will read hypermedia
fiction, critical works, web logs, cybertext journals, and a variety
of other on-line work. We will test the claims of programmers,
artists, and cultural and literary theorists and develop our own
analyses. Some of the authors we will encounter are Michael Joyce,
Talan Memmott, Shelly Jackson, Geoff Ryman, Mark Amerika, Roland
Barthes, Stephanie Strickland, George Landow, N. Katherine Hayles,
and others. Students will have the option to produce a hypermedia
piece for their final project.
Music
and the Visual Arts
Musicology 335
Linda Austern
Time: 9:00-10:30 Tuesday and Thursday
Place: MAB 125
This course investigates the multi-faceted interplay between the
image and musical sound in the West from the Middle Ages to the
present, and across all media, including paintings, symphonic
tone-poems, chamber music, buildings, compact discs, stage-works,
and multi-media installations. The approach is primarily theoretical,
raising questions of perception, imagination, and apprehension
of art-works.
Prerequisite: ability to read musical notation OR previous coursework
in art theory or art history.
Mapping Italian Literature: The Theatre of Memory
Instructor: Davide Stimilli
Office Address: 129 Kresge Hall
Phone: 847-491-8268
E-mail; d-stimilli@northwestern.edu
Italian Renaissance savants and magicians, such as Giulio Camillo
and Giordano Bruno, taught throughout Europe a variety of mnemotechniques,
or arts of memory, which were enthusiastically received by their
contemporaries, and whose power of fascination is still unabated.
Starting from a discussion of these experiments in artificial
memory, the course will first explore the ways in which the metaphor
of memory as theatre has shaped and still shapes our thinking
about memory, even beyond literature. Texts will include short
stories by Borges and essays by neurologists Luria and Sacks.
Secondly, we will look at the ways in which the stage of memory
is itself used as a theatrical device in the story of The Fat
Woodworker, a masterpiece of Renaissance storytelling, and in
Pirandello’s As You Desire Me, a play inspired by the infamous
Bruneri-Canella affair, a case of mistaken identity and loss of
memory that took hold of the Italian public in the 1920s. We will
read it along with another cause célèbre: the case
of Martin Guerre in 16th-century France. Finally, we will look
at the most recent, cinematic versions of the "theatre of
memory": Raoul Ruiz' Three Lives and Only One Death, based
upon Pirandello's novel The Late Mattia Pascal, and Christopher
Nolan's Memento.
Prerequisites: none.
Teaching Method: Conducted as a seminar. Taught and readings in
English.
Method of evaluation: Attendance and participation; two papers
of, respectively, 4-6, and 8-10 pages.
Texts: Selections from: Montaigne, Essays; Zemon Davis,
The Return of Martin Guerre; Yates, The Art of Memory;
Sciascia, The Mystery of Majorana; Pirandello, As You
Desire Me and The Late Mattia Pascal; Sacks, An
Anthropologist from Mars and The Man who Mistook his Wife
for a Hat; Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist and The
Man with a Shattered World; Manetti, The Fat Woodworker;
and Borges, Fictions.
Films: The Return of Martin Guerre, with Gerard Depardieu,
As You Desire Me, with Greta Garbo, Three Lives and
Only One Death, with Marcello Mastroianni, and Memento,
with Guy Pearce.
Winter
2002
Imagination and Idealism in Art
Art Theory and Practice 101-6-20
Professor: William Conger
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10:30-12:00
Office: Room 212, Kresge Hall
Phone: 1-3558 or 1-7346
Email: w-conger@nwu.edu
A seminar-type investigation of imagination and how it is used
to create art and imagery in visual culture. Very diverse examples
taken from historical and contemporary visual culture are probed
to discover how ideas about art and life are idealized in images.
Sources include images in art history, natural science, quantitative
diagrams, popular and commercial culture and technology. Related
brief readings, both historical and contemporary, provide background
and context for discussion. The overall aim is to foster active
understanding of how images function in structuring meaning and
how imaginative process is related to visual form. A guiding question
is, To what extent and why do visual images (as products of imagination)
contradict or match reality and common-sense experience?
In an informal conversational setting, each seminar session will
focus on one issue or question pertaining to the relationship
between imagination and idealism in visual art and culture.
Teaching Method: Discussion and use of visual materials.
Method of Evaluation: Grading will be determined on a series of
short (1000-1500 words) papers examining specific issues (Can
a photograph be a truthful representation of reality?) and visual
projects, (Alter a symbol to question its meaning) class participation,
attendance. Critiques of visual projects (materials for the creative
projects will be provided).
Reading List: Selected brief readings will be provided in advance
for each discussion topic. A diverse range of authors may include
classical and contemporary philosophers, artists, art critics,
cartoonists, scientists, social commentators, etc.
Music and Magic in the Early Modern Era
Musicology 335
Professor Linda Austern
Time: Mondays 3-6 PM, MAB 229
E-mail: l-austern@northwestern.edu
This course will begin by looking at forms of mental process (including
imagination and memory) and the varieties of occult thought in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and will progress through
unities of music and text that draw on references or inferences
from Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophies, astrology, numerology,
pre-modern medicine, and witchcraft. We will concentrate on ways
in which composers and dramatists brought imagined creations of
unseen (and unseeable) musical forces to the stage and to chamber
performance.
Prerequisites: EITHER reading knowledge of French, Italian, German,
or Latin; OR the ability to read musical notation.
"Philosophy of the Imagination"
Philosophy 390, Special Topics in Philosophy
Professor David M. Levin
Office address: 1818 Hinman Avenue
Phone: 491-3656
E-mail: d-levin@northwestern.edu
Course description: Reading philosophical and literary texts spanning
the last three centuries, this course will examine a number of
questions concerned with the imagination, the faculty that produces
images. The imagination is of course crucial not only in the creation
of works of art, but also in aesthetic experience and judgement.
For this reason, questions about the nature and role of the imagination,
as well as its limitations, have always been of great importance
for philosophical thought concerned with the production, experience
and critical reception of art. But the imagination, mediating
between sensory experience and conceptual categories, has also
played a crucial, if ambiguous role in philosophical accounts
explaining both the acquisition of knowledge and the causes of
deception and error, often being chastised for its freedom from
conventions and rules. Precisely this freedom, however, has made
the imagination a necessary resource for social and political
philosophies, visions that it serves not only as a constructive
force, but also as a powerfully critical and destructive force.
In this course, therefore, we will study all these different functions
of the imagination. And we will draw on our discussion of the
texts to imagine imagining otherwise.
Prerequisites: None.
Format: Lecture and discussion.
Readingss:
Plato's Republic; essays on Aristotle, Hegel and Vico; essays
by Wilhelm von Humboldt;
the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and philosophers Jean-Paul
Sartre, Jean-Luc Nancy, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida,
as well as poems by Wallace Stevens.
The Self and the Other (II)
Between Kant and Hegel: Imagination and/or Recollection, Fantasy,
Memory
GERMAN 414-0
Kerstin Behnke
Time: M 3:00-5:30
Office Address: Kresge 107
Phone: 491-8292
E-mail: kbehnke@northwestern.edu
The power of imagination and its various representational products
have long since held the attention of philosophers. Aside from
its capacity for production, reproduction, and association, its
synthetic power also has a mediating function, which has made
it indispensable for bringing about cognition. Both Kant and Hegel
acknowledge this role of the imagination, yet their exposition
of its tasks and place is different in fundamental ways. If, for
Kant, the imagination is an original capacity of the soul and
thus a faculty of its own, Hegel declares it a phase within a
larger development of spirit, and it is now flanked by recollection/internalization
and (thought-)memory. This double emphasis on a forward movement
that is also oriented toward the past makes room for two aspects
that are absent from Kant's transcendental philosophy, namely
history and language, thus (re-)opening the door to a "psychology"
of the imagination.
In the course, we will explore the alterations in the conception
of imagination and phantasy from Kant to Hegel and the evolving
recollective and memorial functions in view of the philosophical
seachange that becomes apparent in them: it is not only one of
method (from transcendentality to dialectics), but also one of
thinking about mind and soul. As we thus leave the depths of the
human soul for the nocturnal pit of intelligence and look back
on how Hegel has reconfigured Kantian thought, this double focus
will also allow us to situate other, related shifts in understanding
(e.g., concerning image and symbol, aesthetics and the fine arts).
Teaching Methodology: Lecture/discussion (in English).
Evaluation: Class participation, one presentation, term paper.
Readings: TBA
Fall
2001
Music and Imagination
Musicology 435
M 3:00-6:00
Professors: Linda Austern and Inna Naroditskaya
This course aims to explore the many intersections between music
and the imagination while building bridges between historical
musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, aesthetics, and
performance. Music and the other arts involve the creative faculty
of the mind as well as the bodily senses. The study of musical
imagination involves the consideration of different historical,
geographical, political and biological contexts, which we will
investigate.
For more information, please contact: l-austern@northwestern.edu
or in-narod@northwestern.edu
Imagining
the Internet: Fiction, Film and Theory
CLS 383
T/Th 2:30-3:50
Professor: Jillana Enteen
Much recent fiction, film and theory are concerned with representing
the Internet and the World Wide Web. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted
as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema
or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This
course will examine the ways in which virtual media appears in
cultural discourses such as Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash and the
Wakowski Brothers' The Matrix. Our guiding questions will include
the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective
perceptions of the Internet? How have virtual technologies challenged
experiences of language, gender, community and identity? While
you will be expected to conduct research on the World Wide Web
and participate in Internet discussions, no previous Internet
experience is necessary.
For more information, please contact: j-enteen@northwestern.edu
Studies in American Literature: The Cultural Imagination of
Turn-of-the-Century America
English 378, Section 24
T/Th 9:00-10:30
Professor: Carl Smith
The course explores the relationship between social experience
and selected imaginative forms in the United States in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to reading
a range of written texts (including novels by William Dean Howells,
Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, and Charles W. Chesnutt, as well as
Jacob Riis's "How the Other Half Lives"), we shall examine
a wide variety of other kinds of materials, mainly painting and
photography, as well as the Columbian Exposition, the grand and
very influential world's fair held in Chicago in 1893. The discussion
of Riis will concentrate heavily on photography and social reform
(including the work of Lewis Hine), and we will devote a week
to the painting of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. The assignments
for other weeks include the work of numerous other photographers,
painters, sculptors, and illustrators (among them John Singer
Sargent, J.G. Brown, Mary Cassatt, Frederic Remington, Charles
Montgomery Flagg, and many others) in themselves and in relation
to such aesthetic and philosophical movements as realism and modernism,
and such issues as urbanization, gender, race, and modern psychology.
Part of the course's purpose will be to discuss how to examine
such imaginative forms in aesthetic and historical terms, and
how these two kinds of examination are interrelated.
The period covered is commonly viewed by scholars in several fields
as a critical time of transition and redefinition. By raising
and trying to answer--through a scrutiny of the assigned materials--a
group of large cultural questions, we shall try to see how Americans
in the period understood the world in which they were living,
how they chose to express that understanding, and how the ways
in which they expressed it mattered in relation to other developments.
For more information, please contact: cjsmith@northwestern.edu
Music and the Embodied Imagination
Music Theory 333-0
MWF 10:00-10:50
Professor: Candace Brower
Cognitive research has shown that much of our everyday thinking
is both metaphorical and deeply embodied. It appears that we imaginatively
project the patterns that make up our embodied experience-those
which we experience most directly-onto patterns in more abstract
domains, resulting in metaphors of goal-directed motion, balance,
stability, force, counterforce, containment, blockage, and the
overcoming of blockage. This class will explore the role played
by the embodied imagination in our understanding of music. The
course will include readings on the theory of embodied metaphor
as it has been put forward by linguist George Lakoff and philosopher
Mark Johnson. Students will learn techniques for musical analysis
derived from this theory that help to bridge the gap between structure
and expression. These techniques reveal how musical meaning arises
through the mapping of musical patterns onto patterns abstracted
from embodied experience known as image schemas, including schemas
for containment, cycle, source-path-goal, verticality, force,
balance, and center-periphery. Analysis assignments and a final
analysis project will allow students to build upon and refine
their own musical and embodied intuitions.
This course is open to all graduate and upper-level undergraduate
music majors. Nonmajors with the appropriate background may register
with permission of instructor.
For further information, please e-mail c-brower@northwestern.edu
n.b. PSI Curriculum Development
funds are available by application. If you are a faculty member
or a graduate student and can plan to teach an affiliated course,
please consider applying for funds.
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