via University of Chicago
HUMA 11000. Readings in World Literature
"we study epic texts that are central to the literary and cultural traditions of various regions and peoples of the world [with an emphasis on] how literature might matter for our lives here and now [and] ways in which texts from different cultural backgrounds articulate the cultural values, existential anxieties, and power structures of the societies that produced them"
sample readings: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Mahabharata, The Odyssey ("texts that imagine and even create a people's sense of a shared past and a shared culture")
HUMA 11100. Readings in World Literature II.
"This course examines the nature of autobiographical writing from a wide range of cultural and historical contexts, including texts such as Augustine's Confessions, Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, Wole Soyinka's Aké and Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home."
Questions: "how the self is constructed through reading and writing, the relationship between memory and identity, the claims of authenticity or truth, the oscillation between interior and exterior life, and the peculiarities of individual voice"
HUMA 17000-17100-17200. Language and the Human I-II-III.
Language is at the center of what it means to be human and is instrumental in all humanistic pursuits. With it, we understand others, persuade, argue, reason, and think. This course aims to provoke critical examination of common assumptions that determine our understanding of language, texts, and the ways language is used and understood via three interconnected processes: power, identity, and thought.