The Modern Western Outlook/Impact

Instructor: Forrest Hartman
SF / SSHIS-200 / 15 sessions
Prerequisite: Intro to the Arts, ENG2
June 3–July 8 (no class July 4), Mon./Wed./Thurs., 6:30–9:30 p.m.

The course of modern world cultures (from 1500 to the present) in large part has been influenced profoundly by the rise and development of modern European ways of thinking which have led to an expansionism that has spread these ideas throughout the world in the encounters with other cultures. This course examines first of all what constitutes the modern Western outlook: the modern scientific revolution and the rise of capitalism. Then students investigate how these elements converged in an unprecedented expansionism that brought the West into direct contact with world cultures. The class then briefly considers the history of some of these cultures, including India, China, and the Muslim world, before their encounter with the West in order to understand the subsequent impact of the West and, in particular, colonization, on these cultures. The class also discusses current issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as they become relevant.

This course fulfills a Cultural History requirement or H&S elective.

Culture & Counter Culture: Resistance, Rebelliousness, & Bohemia in World Civilizations

Instructor: Josef Chytry
OAK / SSHIS-200 / 15 sessions
Prerequisite: Intro to the Arts, ENG2
July 15-August 15, Mon./Wed./Thurs., 9 a.m.–12 p.m.
Mainstream cultures often give rise to their “counter:” Counter-culture. This course considers the flowering of such countercultures in a variety of civilizations from Abraham and Prometheus to the present day, and reflects both on what the share in common and how they remain distinctive, in particular with regard to the proliferation of “Bohemias” within modern material civilization. The first part looks at Socrates and his counterculture in classical Athens, Chinese Taoism, Buddhism in its radical forms as Zen and Tantra, Sufism within Islamic tradition, and the Troubadours in medieval Europe. The second part then considers early modern dissident movements within the European enlightenment and revolution, the American Transcendentalists, and the emergence within modern capitalist society of “Bohemia” in nineteenth-century Paris and its proliferation in other Bohemias. The third part concludes with analysis of contemporary movements, starting with the Beats in the postwar period, the explosion of the Youth counterculture in the sixties, the permutations of sixties counterculture into the hedonistic seventies, and the course closes with a consideration of the possibilities of a digital counterculture for the early twenty-first century.

This course fulfills a Cultural History or a Social Science/Philosophy requirement or H&S elective.

The following study abroad course also satisfies a Cultural History requirement

• Berlin Past & Present with Karen Fiss