Elective Courses

Men in the Dark: Five Comedies of Shakespeare

3 credit hours : Shimer Humanities credit; IIT Equivalent: HUM 300-Level

Monday, Wednesday 12:10-2:50

Harold Stone

Comedies, as we all know, have happy endings; in Shakespeare’s day that meant a wedding. Not every marriage is a happy one; and, especially in a comedy, the route to matrimony is full of deception and indirection. In many of Shakespeare’s comedies it is the fate of the men to be deceived by or to be blind about their feelings. Some characters can’t recognize their true loves at a distance, another can’t distinguish his wife from a statue, and worst of all we learn that some can’t tell one woman from another in bed. The female figures often have a moral depth and thoughtfulness which appears when they are compelled to act outside their stereotypical role. We will compare two groups of plays: in the The Winter’s Tale and Much Ado About Nothing the action seems controlled by an evil character whose goals are thwarted at the end; in contrast the action of Measure for Measure and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are directed by morally suspect but essentially benign beings. The controlling force in Twelfth Night may be the comic result of the unexpected arrival identical twins on a typical court society whose values are based on an unreflective and ambiguous notion of gender identity. We will be looking at the different pairs of lovers, the evils they face and the ways happiness steals on the stage by surprise in the final scene.

Reading List: Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night

World War One and the Origins of the Modern

3 credit hours: Shimer Humanities or Social Sciences credit; IIT Equivalent: HUM 300-level

Monday, Wednesday 6:25-9:05

Harold Stone

We will examine the ways scientific developments and new ways of representing reality in the fine arts and imaginative literature were used during this war. The massive noise of artillery fire traumatized thousands of soldiers; doctors of the new science of psychoanalysis diagnosed these men as suffering from hysteria, an illness that had previously been found primarily in female patients. A few years before the avant-garde of the art world was fascinated by a new movement painting called cubism--of course this was only known to a few. By the end of the conflict the principles of this new approach to representation had been seen by millions of men who had been protected by tarps and canvas with the blotchy patterns of camouflage. These are just a few examples of the complex relations between warfare, high culture and technology.

The immensity of the subject matter requires that we limit ourselves to some specific issues. We will focus on one major battle, known as the Somme which began in the middle of 1916. We will limit ourselves to the literary reactions of British writers to this conflict because of its profound effect on Britain’s social fabric, the basic principles of its political parties, and the presuppositions of its cultural values.

Reading list: (a selection of the following)

Primary Sources

• Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End
• C.S. Forester, The General
• Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Penguin Book of First World War Poetry ed. by John Silkin
• Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
• Rebecca West, Return of the Soldier
• Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room or Mrs. Dalloway

Secondary Sources

• Eksteins, Modris, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
• Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory
• Gilbert, Martin, The Somme
• Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918