CSLC 204 Being-With, from City-State to Nation-State: Culture, Politics, and Community from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
Politics, in its essence, boils down to being for or against. However, before we can be for or against, we must be WITH. This course examines our cultural ways of being with one another. Culture as a form of being-with—with its continuously evolving symbolic modes of human interaction, its common structures of feeling, and its shared sense of space and time—is what makes all forms of human togetherness, politics included, possible for us in the first place. In this class, therefore, we shall examine how certain key cultural achievements in literature and the arts, from the time of Alexander the Great and the Romans, through the rise of Islam and the European Middle Ages, all the way up to the Renaissance and the European Wars of Religion, both resulted from and in turn shaped the communal interactions of the people living in those places and times, and how they continue to shape the social, political and economic dimensions of our own world, even to the present day. Topics to be covered might include (but will not be limited to): theories of culture and society as they evolved over this historical time period; the contest of rhetoric and philosophy over education; the role of the arts (literature, painting, architecture, music, fashion and design) in the making, unmaking, and remaking of the relation between self and society; the persistence of nomadic cultural practices in agriculture-based societies, and vice versa; the linguistic and poetic foundations of important religious doctrines (and the conflicts among them); and perhaps most pertinent to today, the way the means of social communication shapes the structure of human community itself.
Core Requirements Met
- Pre-1800
- Global Connections