Wisdom, Culture, and Justice Through the Ages II

Catalog description

This course explores the social, political, cultural and literary developments of human history from 1600 CE to the present. Through key historical sources and literary texts students will examine how various societies through the centuries cultivated particular visions of wisdom, culture, and justice as well as how these visions nurtured key historical developments. Combining elements and methodologies of both Old and New Historicism along with various literary methodologies-new criticism, structuralism, reader response, deconstruction, Marxism, cultural poetics, etc.-this course investigates the shifting paradigms of Western Civilization in order to help students to situate contemporary society in this historical trajectory. Special emphasis in this course will be placed on explicating "who is our neighbor" as we explore the cultural exchanges that occurred across the global community beginning with the seventeenth century age of exploration and ending with the anticolonial movements of the twentieth century. Co-requisite: HNR-385.