ihum_coursecatalogue_0506

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Class of 2009

Introduction tothe Humanities

2005–06 COURSE CATALOGUE

IHUM

THE OFFICE OF THE VICE PROVOST FOR UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Giving you a firm grounding inthe ways humanists think and thekinds of issues they think about.

How to Use This Course Guide

• Read the descriptions of the various IHUM courses.

• Rank your preferences for autumn IHUM courses by filling

out Form 4, online, at http://approaching.stanford.edu.

• Make sure you’ve submitted this form, as well as the remainder

of your reply forms, online, by 8 a.m., Monday, June 14.

ANY QUESTIONS?

website: http://

approaching.stanford.edu

email: approaching

@stanford.edu

phone: (650) 724-2625

IHUM program website:

http://ihum.stanford.edu

Message from the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education 2

Message from the Director of Introduction to the Humanities 2

Overview of Introduction to the Humanities 3

Choosing your IHUM Courses 3

IHUM Courses at a Glance 4

Autumn-Quarter Courses 5–15

Conflict, Cooperation, and Human Nature 6

Freedom, Equality, Difference 7

The Human and the Machine 8

Journeys 9

The Literature of Crisis 10

Old-World Encounters 11

Race, Gender, and the Arts of Survival 12

Representing Nature: The Boundaries of the Human 13

Transformations: The Intersection of High Art and Contemporary Culture 14

Visions of Mortality 15

Autumn, Winter, Spring Residential Course 16–17

Structured Liberal Education (SLE) 17

Winter-Spring Course Sequences 18

Classics—Ancient Empires 19

Cultural and Social Anthropology—Encounters and Identities 20

Drama—Art and Ideas: Performance and Practice 21

English—Literature into Life: Alternative Worlds 22

French and Italian—Epic Journeys, Modern Quests 23

German Studies—Myth and Modernity: Culture in Germany 24

History—Worlds of Islam: Global History and Muslim Societies 25

Philosophy—The Fate of Reason 26

Religious Studies—Approaching Religion: Tradition, Transformation, and the

Challenge of the Present 27

Slavic Languages and Literatures—Poetic Justice: Order and Imagination in Russia 28

Spanish and Portuguese—American Genesis: Indigenous Texts and Their Resonance 29

Frequently Asked Questions 30–31

Contents

As the vice provost

for undergraduate

education, I am very

pleased to offer you

this catalogue of the

required courses

that will provide the

foundation for your liberal arts education

at Stanford. Introduction to Humanities is

a vital part of the integrated program of

study designed for your first and second

years at Stanford. In conjunction with

Introductory Seminars and courses in

Writing and Rhetoric, these courses will

challenge you to think for yourself and to

develop analytical and communication

skills that will serve you throughout your

undergraduate years and thereafter. The

faculty teams assembled to teach these

courses in the humanities represent the

very best that Stanford has to offer. They

are dedicated to inviting you to become

members of the intellectual community in

the humanities, through your active

inquiry into the important topics and

themes they present.

John C. Bravman

Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for

Undergraduate Education

I am very happy, indeed proud,

to welcome you to the Introduc-

tion to the Humanities program

at Stanford (known, in typically

irreverent Stanford terms, as

IHUM). The humanities are

surely in many ways at the heart

of the university, and we hope our courses can show

you why. Encompassing the written word, architecture,

music, image, and gesture (for starters!), humanities

courses at Stanford include classes in topics stretching

from medieval music to the philosophy of mind; from

African American fiction to Zen Buddhism; from

Roman history to American art in the ’60s. If your

IHUM courses are your first encounter with the

humanities at Stanford, you’ll find they will provide

you with a firm grounding in the ways humanists think

and in the kinds of issues they think about. If your

IHUM courses turn out to be your most extended

encounter with the humanities at Stanford, you may be

pleasantly surprised at what these courses will offer

you, no matter what future Stanford courses and life

path you take, and, perhaps more importantly, alterna-

tive ways of looking at the world that can enrich your

life in your undergraduate years and beyond. Welcome

to Stanford, and, please, explore the full richness of the

human experience while you are here. It gets tougher

afterward.

Orrin (Rob) Robinson

Professor, Department of German Studies

Christensen Professor and Director, Introduction to

the Humanities Program

2

This catalogue offers detailed information about all the courses

that satisfy the IHUM requirement. As the centerpiece of your

first year of studies, the decision should be one that you consider

very carefully. Reflect on your unique educational interests and

choose your courses accordingly. Selecting your IHUM prefer-

ences can be a preview of future academic decision making, if

you are thoughtful and active in the process. For example, look

closely at the departmental affiliations of the professors in the

courses that appeal to you to see if there is an underlying connec-

tion from autumn to winter-spring. Identify thematic associa-

tions among courses that you find especially attractive. Go to the

departmental or course websites listed in the descriptions for fur-

ther information. Be flexible and open to all the IHUM course

opportunities as spaces are limited in any one course.

Autumn course preferences are collected through the online

form at the Approaching Stanford website, and your assignment

will be finalized over the summer. You will learn your assignment

on the first day of orientation. Winter-spring preferences are col-

lected in November, after an IHUM Open House where profes-

sors are available to meet you and answer questions about their

courses. The winter-spring course assignments are finalized by

the opening of winter quarter. Course changes between winter

and spring are extremely rare, and only in response to compelling

academic conflicts.

If you are considering ranking SLE as your first choice, please

note two things. First, SLE is a housing preference as well as a

course choice. Second, SLE class meeting times are limited to

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 3:15–5:00 p.m. and

from 6:00–7:00 or 8:30 p.m. Students with special obligations

such as varsity athletics that conflict with these times should be

sure to avoid a scheduling conflict. All other IHUM lectures and

sections are offered throughout the day and into the evening.

After you have read carefully the descriptions of the different

course options, rank your preferences by filling out Form 4,

online, at http://approaching.stanford.edu. We make every

attempt to assign you to your top choices, and a vast majority of

students enroll in their first or second choice course, although, of

course, we cannot guarantee this outcome given the need to limit

course size. You will learn your assignment when you arrive on

campus for orientation.

Choosing Your IHUM Courses

Stanford University is committed to a broad liberal-

arts education for all undergraduates. The Intro-

duction to the Humanities (IHUM) requirement

builds an intellectual foundation in the study of

human thought, values, beliefs, creativity, and culture.

The courses that satisfy this requirement enhance

your skills in analysis, interpretation, reasoning, argu-

mentation, and expression, and thus also form a

foundation for advanced learning in all subjects

throughout your undergraduate career.

The IHUM requirement is structured in two

parts: 1) an autumn-quarter interdisciplinary

course, followed by 2) a two-quarter course

sequence in a humanities discipline. You will choose

from among 10 autumn-quarter courses and 11

winter-spring courses to satisfy the requirement. All

courses hold two hours of lecture and three hours of

discussion section, led by post-doctoral scholars in

the humanities. These complementary modes of

instruction focus on the interpretation of texts—

written, visual, musical, dramatic—that explore

what it means to be human.

Autumn IHUM courses are organized around

themes presented by faculty teams from different

departments and disciplines. Winter-spring

sequences represent a particular disciplinary

approach to one topic studied in depth over 20

weeks, an opportunity unique in the Stanford

humanities curriculum.

Structured Liberal Education (SLE) is the only

exception to the one quarter/two quarter structure

for the IHUM requirement. SLE is an intensive,

three-quarter sequence that satisfies the IHUM

requirement, the Writing and Rhetoric Requirement,

as well as one course in the Disciplinary Breadth

Requirement humanities sub-area. It is a residential

program, housing all students together. If you are

assigned to SLE, you will not enroll in another

IHUM autumn or winter-spring course.

Overview of Introduction to the Humanities

3

IHUM Courses at a Glance

4

Rank preferences for autumn courses online now; you will be asked to rank winter-spring preferences in November.

AUTUMN WINTER SPRING TOTALUNITS UNITS UNITS UNITS

Conflict, Cooperation, and Human Nature 5

Freedom, Equality, Difference 5

The Human and the Machine 5

Journeys 5

The Literature of Crisis 5

Old-World Encounters 5

Race, Gender, and the Arts of Survival 5

Representing Nature: The Boundaries of the Human 5

Transformations: The Intersection of High Art and Contemporary Culture 5

Visions of Mortality 5

Classics—Ancient Empires 5 5

Cultural and Social Anthropology—Encounters and Identities 5 5

Drama—Art and Ideas: Performance and Practice 5 5

English—Literature into Life: Alternative Worlds 5 5

French and Italian—Epic Journeys, Modern Quests 5 5

German Studies—Myth and Modernity: Culture in Germany 5 5

History—Worlds of Islam: Global History and Muslim Societies 5 5

Philosophy—The Fate of Reason 5 5

Religious Studies—Approaching Religion: Tradition,Transformation, and the Challenge of the Present 5 5

Slavic Languages and Literatures—Poetic Justice: Order and Imagination in Russia 5 5

Spanish and Portuguese—American Genesis: Indigenous Texts and Their Resonance 5 5

15

Structured Liberal Education (Residential) 9 9 10 28Satisfies requirements: IHUM, WRR, Disciplinary Breadth (partial)

IHUM course assign-

ments are finalized

during the summer.

You will receive your

assignment when

you arrive on campus

for Orientation.

5

Autumn-Quarter CoursesStudents in Introduction to the Humanities pair an autumn-quarter intro-

ductory course with a winter-spring course sequence. All autumn-quarter

IHUM courses will hone your skills in the humanistic disciplines through

close study and critical investigation of a limited and carefully selected

number of works. These courses are interdisciplinary, so that you learn

how different disciplines in the humanities approach the works you study.

All autumn-quarter courses are designed and taught by a team of faculty

members. Their lectures, ranging from 90 to 225 students in each course,

provide lively interaction between differing points of view. Lectures form

the basis for discussion sections of approximately 15 students led by post-

doctoral Teaching Fellows.

What does your mother’s brother’s daughter call

you? Chances are pretty good that she calls

you “cousin,” and because of this, you assume a host

of duties, expectations, and social responsibilities.

The classification of other people is a human univer-

sal, intimately related to the tension between conflict

and cooperation that pervades human social systems

and helps define who we are.

In this course, you will explore some striking

forms of human social interaction and their relation-

ship with what makes us human. In addition to the

construction of family systems, warfare and slavery are uniquely human activities:

upon these we will focus our discussion of human nature. How people manipulate

such social classifications as “nonhuman” or “kin” in an effort to define a potential

spouse, an opponent in war,

or a slave, and how people

resist attempts at denying

them their humanity, will

provide insight into what

makes a person human.

Using tools from

anthropology and history, we

will approach the question

What is human? from a broad

historical and comparative

perspective. Throughout our

investigations, we will strive

to understand how variation on social structures and cultural norms can provide

more general insights into human nature and the resolution of social problems.

This autumn-quarter course may be followed by any one of the Introduction to the

Humanities winter-spring sequences. You will be asked to rank your preferences for these

sequences during autumn quarter.

Conflict, Cooperation, and Human Nature

2 50-minute lectures

3 hours of small-group discussion

5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Libra Hilde, ComparativeStudies in Race andEthnicity

James Holland Jones,Department ofAnthropological Sciences

TEXTS

Shelley, Frankenstein

Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia

The Popol Vuh

Jacobs, Incidents in the Lifeof a Slave Girl

Mailer, The Naked and theDead

The so-called savage has always been a play-

thing to civilized man—in practice a convenient

instrument of exploitation, in theory a provider

of sensational thrills. Savagery has been, for the

reading public of the last three centuries, a

reservoir of unexpected possibilities in human

nature; and the savage has had to adorn this or

that a priori hypothesis by becoming cruel or

noble, licentious or chaste, cannibalistic or

human according to what suited the observer or

the theory

—Malinowski, Sexual Life of Savages

Autumn-Quarter Courses

6


Freedom” and “equality” are commonly appealed to as the fun-

damental principles of Western liberal societies. Individuals

are supposed to be treated as equals and to have a right to free-

dom. In particular, they are supposed to have the freedom to

carry on their everyday lives and pursue their ambitions without

respect to such differences as race, ethnicity, religion, or gender.

Yet the principles of freedom and equality are often contest-

ed as soon as they move from the realm of abstract ideals to con-

crete social practices. People who agree in principle find them-

selves differing (sometimes violently) about what kinds of freedom and equality are

important and indeed essential to a just society. Which freedoms will a just society

promote and which must be curtailed for the sake of justice? What particular equali-

ties properly concern government—equality of opportunity or equality of well-being,

for example—and how can the achievement of equality be reconciled with respect for

freedom? What roles should social and political institutions take in guaranteeing free-

dom and equality?

This course will explore these and related questions—some of our most pressing

issues today, both nationally and globally—through interdisciplinary inquiry that

includes political philosophy, education, literature, history, and

law. We will repeatedly move between the realm of abstract ideas

and actual case histories, using one to shed light on the other.

This autumn-quarter course may be followed by any one of the

Introduction to the Humanities winter-spring sequences. You will be

asked to rank your preferences for these sequences during autumn

quarter.

Freedom, Equality, Difference



5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Eamonn Callan, School ofEducation

David Palumbo-Liu,Department of ComparativeLiterature

Debra Satz, Department of Philosophy

TEXTS

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Ellison, The Invisible Man

Locke, Second Treatise ofGovernment and Letter onToleration

Mill, On Liberty

Selected Supreme Courtcases

7

Society … practices a social tyran-

ny more formidable than many

kinds of political oppression, since,

though not usually upheld by such

extreme penalties, it leaves fewer

means of escape, penetrating

much more deeply into the details

of life, and enslaving the soul

itself.

—Mill, On Liberty

Most anyone ought to know that a

man is better off free than as a

slave, even if he did not have any-

thing. I would rather be free and

have my liberty. I fared just as well

as any white child could have fared

when I was a slave, and yet I would

not give up my freedom.

—from the congressional testimony

of Reverend E.P. Holmes, clergy-

man from Georgia and former

house servant

“

This course explores the shifting boundary lines between

the mechanical and the human by considering how

human individuals connect and interact with machines, how

they may even be conceived, designed, and manipulated as

machines. We will ask a number of questions together about

what it means to think of the human body as a machine:

What is a machine? How would one design a body or personality as a machine or

device? Does the future promise more intimacy between machines and humans? And

what would that mean for human values and sensibilities? These questions will take us

to the heart of ideas of what it is to be human. We will explore these ideas from a vari-

ety of directions ranging from paradigms of bio- and social engineering to ethical

issues concerning biotechnology and creationist arguments for “intelligent design”

that reveal the work of God.

We will trace the history of thinking about people, society and machines from

Plato and his antecedents through to our contemporary dilemmas over biotechnolo-

gy. Our argument is that the ethical issues associated with designing people as some

kind of device or artifact are not at all new. Our message is that we have been cyborgs

for as long as we have been human, intimately associated with artifacts and machines,

constantly exchanging properties with them, designed by and designing our social and

cultural realities.




The Human and the Machine



5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Henry Lowood, History ofScience and TechnologyCollections, UniversityLibraries

Jeffrey Schnapp,Departments of French andItalian, and ComparativeLiterature

Michael Shanks,Departments of Classics,and Cultural and SocialAnthropology.

TEXTS

Plato, The Republic

Marinetti, Selected Poemsand Related Prose

Ballard, Crash: A Novel

A Japanese film

Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Peter Molyneux, Black &White

Science and technology multiply

around us. To an increasing extent

they dictate the languages in which

we speak and think. Either we use

those languages, or we remain mute.

—J. G. Ballard, Introduction to Crash

8


The journey is our most fundamental narrative, and no won-

der; we are all, from the day of our births, embarked on a

constant passage through space and time toward an end we can

only think we know. Death itself is in dispute: Is it final, or only

the beginning of another journey? The mysteries of destination

infuse our lives, giving rise to our most basic questions of purpose

and meaning and faith, our proper relation to others and the

physical world.

The works we will examine in this course were written

across a span of some 2,300 years, from very different cultural and historical situations and

in very different forms and genres. But each of them presents some essential aspect of that

journey we all share, and of the multiplicity of passages we make within that one great

journey—moral, spiritual, and emotional passages that relentlessly challenge and trans-

form us even as we advance toward what the poet Thomas Gray called our “inevitable

hour.” The writers of these works are not in agreement as to where we are going or how we

should get there, but all compel us, by the penetration of their vision and the power of

their art, to make part of our own journey in their company.

This autumn-quarter course may be followed by any

one of the Introduction to the Humanities winter-

spring sequences. You will be asked to rank your prefer-

ences for these sequences during autumn quarter.

Journeys



5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Tobias Wolff, Department ofEnglish

Lee Yearley, Department ofReligious Studies

TEXTS

Selected stories of Tolstoyand Flannery O’Connor

Writings of Chuang Tzu,with selected poems fromthe T’ang Dynasty

Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Joyce, Dubliners

It had begun to snow again. He

watched sleepily the flakes, silver

and dark, falling obliquely against

the lamplight.

The time had come for him to set out

on his journey westward. Yes, the

newspapers were right: snow was

general all over Ireland.

—Joyce, “The Dead”

9


Most human lives contain major turning points:

crises that transform an individual’s future

development. On a much larger scale, cultures under-

go crises too: political, intellectual, and religious

changes that alter forever the course of human histo-

ry. This course will focus on both kinds of crisis.

We will consider the personal upheavals brought

about by the political, social, religious, and erotic ties

of our authors and their characters. These crises were

pivotal moments that dramatically altered the trajec-

tory of their lives. Moreover, each of our texts reflects not only a personal crisis but

also the turbulence of its cultural environment; each develops a unique strategy for

coping with it.

In addition to offering a unique

introduction to these great texts, this

course aims to provide a conceptual and

historical framework enabling you to

address crises in your own life and in the

modern world with a greater degree of

understanding and, perhaps, a clearer

sense of how to survive them.

This autumn-quarter course may be fol-

lowed by any one of the Introduction to the

Humanities winter-spring sequences. You

will be asked to rank your preferences for

these sequences during autumn quarter.

The Literature of Crisis



5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Martin Evans, Departmentof English

Marsh McCall, Departmentof Classics

TEXTS

Plato, Apology

Boethius, The Consolationof Philosophy

Sophocles, Oedipus theKing

Shakespeare, Hamlet

Vergil, Aeneid

Voltaire, Candide

10

Friends and companions,

Have we not known hard hours before this?

God will grant us an end to these as well.

You sailed by Scylla’s rage, her booming crags,

You saw the Cyclops’ boulders. Now call back

Your courage, and have done with fear and sorrow.

Some day, perhaps, remembering even this

Will be a pleasure.

—Vergil, Aeneid


11

In this course we will examine five moments of intellectual

encounter among the far-flung civilizations of the Eastern

Hemisphere in the premodern and early modern eras. The

texts we will investigate are landmark works of cultural trans-

lation and ethnographic analysis, penned by scholar-travelers

from across the Old World. In addition to reading works by

two Western analysts of the “East,” you will be introduced to

early Chinese and Persian appraisals of India, as well as a

North African encounter with sub-Saharan Africa. Each of

our chosen works shows a self-critical mind at work; each rep-

resents a lifetime of empirical research, drawing on firsthand

experience of foreign lands as well as careful interrogation of

prior accounts; and each went on to become an influential

classic in a distinctive intellectual tradition.

Using methods from intellectual history and cultural geography, we will focus on

reconstructing the worldviews and geographical imaginations that inform each text.

Historical maps and images will assist us in eliciting the authors’ spatial and ethno-

graphic categories, which will be analyzed in their geopolitical context. All of the

works we will consider are associated with large-scale cultural movements that signif-

icantly refashioned the human landscapes of the

Eastern Hemisphere. Our goal in juxtaposing

these works is twofold: to explore how the con-

cept of civilization itself has been produced

through cross-cultural contact and to probe how

such contact was perceived from within the dis-

tinctive humanistic traditions of premodern

Afro-Eurasia.

This autumn-quarter course may be followed by

any one of the Introduction to the Humanities win-

ter-spring sequences. You will be asked to rank your

preferences for these sequences during autumn

quarter.

Old-World Encounters



5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Martin Lewis, Program inInternational Relations

Kären Wigen, Departmentof History

AUTHORS

Herodotus, Hsüan Tsang, al-Biruni, Ibn Battuta,Matteo Ricci

In all manners and usages they

differ from us to such a degree

as to frighten their children

with us, with our dress, and

our ways and customs, and as

to declare us to be the devil’s

breed.... By the by, we must

confess, in order to be just,

that a similar depreciation of

foreigners not only prevails

among us and the Hindus, but

is common to all nations

towards each other.

—from al-Biruni’s account of

his travels in India


How do men and women survive—not just physically, but

intellectually, creatively, spiritually—in the world? Our

course examines texts that imaginatively model strategies to

overcome physical deprivation (everything from enslavement

to castration) and social oppression (from religious persecu-

tion to gender discrimination). The often brilliant and innova-

tive strategies of survival represented in these works, which

range from the twelfth century to the present, appear in diverse

forms—sometimes as physical resistance, racial “passing,” or

political ultimatum, and other times as artistic challenge, edu-

cational reform, or rhetorical suasion. The strategies take shape

in similarly diverse genres: We will be reading and discussing

drama, fiction, epistolaries, and a slave narrative.

These texts ask us to consider how to creatively survive the constraints of gender,

of race, of nation, of history itself; they ask us as well to consider at what cost and for

what greater purpose does one survive. Our readings thus explore not only the many

arts of survival but also the possibilities for effecting social and personal change.

This autumn-quarter course may be followed by any one of the

Introduction to the Humanities winter-spring sequences. You will

be asked to rank your preferences for these sequences during

autumn quarter.

Race, Gender, and the Arts of Survival



5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Michele B. Elam,Department of English

Harry J. Elam, Jr.,Department of Drama

TEXTS

Abelard, The Letters ofAbelard and HeloiseShakespeare, Othello Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave GirlHughes, MulattoWhitehead, The Intuitionist

I spoke of most disastrous

chances,

Of moving accidents by

flood and field;

Of hairbreadth scapes i’ th’

imminent deadly breach;

Of being taken by the inso-

lent foe

And sold to slavery; of my

redemption hence…

—Shakespeare, Othello

In a minute ma boy’ll be run-

nin’ from de white folks with

their hounds and their ropes

and their guns and every-

thing they uses to kill po’

colored folks with. My boy’ll

be out there runnin’. Colonel

Tom, you hear me? Our boy

out there runnin’. You said

he was ma bastard boy. I

heard you—but he’s yours

too—out yonder in de dark

runnin’ from yo’ people.

—Hughes, Mulatto

12


13

Our thinking about the place of human beings in the

natural world is profoundly influenced by our val-

ues, beliefs, and cultures. This course will examine the

ways that five writers in the modern period represent and

conceptualize the natural world. We will explore their dif-

ferent conceptions of human and nonhuman nature, and

the ways that these ideas reflect specific historical and

cultural contexts. Although all these writers share basic

assumptions about the natural world, each constructs

and conceptualizes nature in a different way. Each offers a distinct account of human

relations to nature, and in doing so often offers an account of human social, racial, and

gender relations. In general, the course focuses on an exploration of the problem of

representing nature in language (literary, philosophical, etc.).

This course focuses on the construction of a set

of conceptual relations between humans as

social beings and a natural world that may, or

may not, include human beings. The evolving

conception of nature allows certain human

actions and practices to be read as either natu-

ral or unnatural, as correct or deviant. When

human beings argue about their relation to the

natural world, they are also arguing about their

relation to each other. In this course, we will explore

the ways that human beings include themselves as part of

the natural world or define themselves against it. What are the boundaries of the

human? What defines us as humans? Are humans animals or some other form of being?

We will discuss literary and philosophical representations of nature in various places and

at various times. By examining these issues over a sweep of several centuries, students

can see how ideas of what is natural and what is social shift over time. The representa-

tions of nature we are examining are part of a long and complicated debate about

human and nonhuman nature—a debate that has profound implications for our own

understanding of the natural world and our relation to it.

In this course, we will try to find the roots of the current environmental crisis by

examining the porous boundary between nature and culture and by exploring how our

thoughts and ideas about nature affect the way that we treat the earth and its inhabitants.




Representing Nature: The Boundaries of the Human



5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Andrea Nightingale,Departments of Classicsand Comparative Literature

Richard White, Departmentof History

TEXTS

Descartes, Discourse onMethod

Shelley, Frankenstein

Darwin, Voyage of theBeagle

Thoreau, Walden

Walcott, Omeros

As I came home through the woods with

my string of fish, trailing my pole, it

being now quite dark, I caught a

glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across

my path, and felt a strange thrill of sav-

age delight, and was strongly tempted

to seize and devour him raw; not that I

was hungry then, except for that wild-

ness which he represented.

—Thoreau, Walden


Humanities courses usually concentrate on written texts. In

this course, taking a different approach, we will encounter

characters and themes not simply in a written form, but as

each appears in and is transformed by a variety of different

media (film, opera, symphonic music). The emphasis of the

course will be not only on reading, but on viewing and hearing as well, and on con-

sideration of how the artistic medium itself affects experience. We will introduce you

to a variety of aesthetic experiences and to the differing interpretive challenges that

each presents.

The course is organized around three characters or ideas that have figured promi-

nently in the Western imagination in the 20th century. In each case we trace this char-

acter/idea from its initial occurrence through its various media transformations in

order to see how each contributes, in multiple ways, to the modern construction of the

self and our understanding of the human condition. Each unit is constructed to move

from texts that today fall into the category of high culture or art (Mozart, Shakespeare,

Nietzsche) to works of today’s culture (in each case, a modern film), in order to allow

you to see the ways in which this material is transformed in the process.




Transformations: The Intersection of High Art and Contemporary Culture



5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Stephen Hinton,Department of Music

Susan Stephens,Department of Classics

WORKS

Mozart, The Magic Flute

Shakespeare, Othello

Verdi, Otello

Nietzsche, Also SprachZarathustra

Kubrick, 2001: A SpaceOdyssey

One must have chaos in

oneself to give birth to a

dancing star.

—Nietzsche, Thus Spake

Zarathustra

14


15

If you are reading this sentence, you are now alive. If so,

someday you will die. In this course we will examine

some of the basic issues arising from these facts. We begin

with several of the most fundamental questions arising

from the first-person confrontation with thoughts of our

own mortality. Is death bad for me, and if so, why? What

can the badness or the indifference of death tell us about

what makes my life good? If death is the permanent end

of my existence, is it necessary that my choices are arbi-

trary and my life meaningless?

Taking an anthropological perspective we will examine the biocultural process of

dying and its relationship to the human experience of loss. We will compare funerary

traditions from around the world and consider their role in the

social transitions that follow the death of a family member. We

confront issues of theodicy (why bad things happen to good

people) and compare the ways that different religions

approach this problem. Throughout these issues, we will

consider the boundaries of human life and death, and

wrestle with the ethical dilemmas that they engender.

This autumn-quarter course may be followed by any one

of the Introduction to the Humanities winter-spring

sequences. You will be asked to rank your preferences for

these sequences during autumn quarter.

Visions of Mortality



5 units

FACULTY TEAM

Christopher Bobonich,Department of Philosophy

Ron Barrett, Department ofAnthropological Sciences

TEXTS

Bhagavad Gita

Lucretius, On the Nature ofThings

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Schopenhauer, Essays andAphorisms

Tolstoy, The Death of IvanIlyich

Our terrors and our darknesses of mind

Must be dispelled, then, not by sun-

shine’s rays,

Not by those shining arrows of the light,

But by insight into nature, and a scheme

Of systematic contemplation.

—Lucretius, On the Nature of Things


Autumn,Winter, and SpringResidential Course

The Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE) offers students an

intensive, residence-based learning experience that simultaneously sat-

isfies the IHUM requirement, the Writing and Rhetoric I and the Writing

and Rhetoric II requirements, and one General Education Disciplinary

Breadth Requirement in the humanities. Assignment to Structured

Liberal Education will override any preferences you have expressed for

housing or for Writing and Rhetoric courses.

Structured Liberal Education is a three-quarter course sequence.

If you are assigned to SLE, you will be enrolled in the sequence for

autumn, winter, and spring.

16

17

Structured Liberal Education (SLE) is a special program

that encourages students to live a life of ideas in an atmos-

phere that stresses critical thinking and a tolerance for ambigu-

ity. SLE asks students to confront central questions that have

perplexed and confounded humankind throughout the ages:

What is knowledge? What is the relationship between reason

and passion? How does the concept of justice change over time? Is coherent meaning

possible in the modern era? Can one live a spiritual life in the contemporary world?

These questions and many more provide the foundation for a chronologically struc-

tured course beginning in the ancient world and ending with the modern period.

SLE is academically rigorous, but it also fosters close student-instructor relation-

ships and provides an environment that encourages students to develop lasting friend-

ships. Together with other students, SLE freshmen live and learn together in three

houses (one freshman and two four-class) in Florence Moore Hall, the informal set-

ting for lectures, small-group discussions, films, and plays. This SLE community pro-

motes the active and often fierce exchange of ideas, not only in the classroom setting

but also in the dining room at mealtime and in the dorm late at night. SLE instructors

participate actively in the intellectual life of the dorm, regularly dining with students

and holding individual writing tutorials. Each week culminates with a film, a visual

text serving as a commentary on the written texts studied in lectures and discussion

sections. In addition, each quarter students organize and produce a play, which is not

only always great fun for everyone but also offers another lens for viewing the period

under study.

Students receive individualized writing instruction from SLE instructors and

upper-class writing tutors. Because of its intensive concentration on both the analysis

of texts and the written and oral communication of ideas, SLE is a nine-unit course in

autumn and winter quarters and a ten-unit course in spring quarter. SLE satisfies

simultaneously the IHUM requirement, the Writing and Rhetoric I and the Writing

and Rhetoric II requirements, and one Gen-

eral Education Breadth Requirement in the

humanities.

Students enrolled in this track will remain in

the sequence for three quarters.

Structured Liberal Education (SLE)

INTERDISCIPLINARY

3 hours of lecture

4 hours of small-group discussion, plus sessionswith writing tutors

Weekly film series

9 units autumn and winterquarters

10 units spring quarter

FACULTY DIRECTOR

Mark Mancall, Department of History

SELECTED TEXTS

The Bible, The Koran,Buddhist Sutras; works by Plato, Aristotle,Euripides, Sappho, Homer,Confucius, Chuang Tzu,Mencius, Augustine, Dante, Descartes,Machiavelli, Saikaku, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud,Woolf, Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Arendt, Salih

The philosophers have

only interpreted the world

in various ways; the point,

however, is to change it.

—Marx, “Theses on

Feuerbach”

Autumn,Winter, and Spring Residential Course

18

Winter-Spring SequencesOn the following pages you will find information about the various winter-

spring course sequences in Introduction to the Humanities, along with brief

descriptions of the disciplines they represent. These departmentally based

courses offer you the opportunity to use the skills you will gain and explore

the disciplines you will learn about in your autumn-quarter IHUM course, in a

new, challenging, and faster-paced course sequence.

Any one of these course sequences, combined with an autumn-quarter

IHUM course described in the preceding section, will complete the first-year

requirement. There is no need to rank your preferences for winter-spring

sequences now; you will be asked to do so during autumn quarter after the

IHUM Open House in November. Winter-spring course sequences are described

here so that you know what to expect during the coming year.

19

Why are wealth and power so unevenly distributed

around the world today, with so much in the hands of

Europeans and their descendants in other countries? In this

course sequence you will investigate one of the decisive

places and periods in the world’s history: the Mediterranean

basin between about 800 BCE and 400 CE. Great empires—

Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, and Rome—were carved out in

bloody wars and permanently changed the course of human

development. We will ask why these empires arose when and where they did, how they

worked, and what their legacy is. We will balance their economic, religious, and artis-

tic achievements against their record of genocide, enslavement, and brutal warfare. We

will ask what these empires meant, not only for the people who created and ruled

them but also for those who lived within their power or struggled to resist them. What

drove some people to conquer, others to submit, and others still to fight back? How do

we set the turbulent details of their histories against the deeper currents of economic

and environmental changes across a thousand years?

In this course you will examine the

rich evidence surviving from ancient

literature and archaeology, trac-

ing the roles of religion, prop-

erty, and freedom across

these centuries and what

they meant for the shape

of the world today.

Students enrolled in any

autumn-quarter IHUM course

may elect this course sequence dur-

ing autumn quarter.

Classics—Ancient Empires

Roman, remember by your strength to rule

Earth’s peoples—for your

arts are to be these:

To pacify, to impose the rule of law,

To spare the conquered,

battle down the proud.

—Vergil, Aeneid

For more informationabout Classics atStanford, consult thedepartment’s website athttp://www.stanford.edu/dept/classics


3 hours of small-groupdiscussion

5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter: IanMorris, Department ofClassics

Spring Quarter: JenniferTrimble, Department ofClassics

SELECTED TEXTS

Assyrian and Persianinscriptions; the HebrewBible; histories ofHerodotus, Xenophon,Polybius, and Tacitus;epic poetry of Vergil; letters of Cicero andPliny; the writings ofearly Christian martyrs

Winter-Spring Sequence

Classics

20

How have some of our most cherished ideas

about our identities emerged through a his-

tory of encounters between people from different

areas of the globe over the past five hundred years?

What can the exploration of a vivid South African history of conquest, colonialism,

racial domination, and resistance tell us about our own dilemmas of identity today?

This two-quarter sequence will introduce you to the formation of ideas about

individual and collective identities in South Africa, Western Europe, and the United

States. We will trace contemporary ideas about identity, including national, racial, eth-

nic, and gender identity, to the historical encounters and social transformations link-

ing different areas of the globe. In emphasizing both the similarities and differences

among ideas of individual and collective identity found in different regions of the

world, we will challenge popular assumptions about the origins of our identities. The

course will equip you with critical concepts and methods of analysis from cultural

anthropology to help you face the challenges of your own social encounters and

changing identities.

Students enrolled in any

autumn-quarter IHUM course

may elect this course sequence

during autumn quarter.

Cultural and Social Anthropology—Encounters and Identities

Life is not determined by consciousness, but

consciousness by life.

—Marx, The German Ideology

For more informationabout Cultural and SocialAnthropology atStanford, consult thedepartment’s website at:http://www.stanford.edu/dept/anthroCASA



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter: JamesFerguson, Department ofCultural and SocialAnthropology

Spring Quarter: JaneCollier, Department ofCultural and SocialAnthropology

SELECTED AUTHORS

Ramphele, Biko, Mda,Marks, Locke, Marx,Rousseau, Malinowski,Hurston


Cultural and Social Anthropology

21

This sequence will introduce key issues in aesthetics and

performance through examples drawn from the classical

age to the present. Concepts of art and practice will be illu-

minated by close readings of texts and performances that

intersect with concerns such as imitation, instruction

through pleasure, the creative process, perception, social

analysis, and embodiment as a form of knowledge. We will highlight drama, dance,

music, visual arts and performance art practices that reflect these aesthetic ideas.

Questions over the two quarters will include, What is the relationship between the

performance and society, between utility and pleasure? How are lived experiences in

an historical moment embodied, restored, or represented in performance? How do art

media affect meaning? What does it mean for the body to be a medium? How does

performance embody and challenge the values of a culture?

Students enrolled in any autumn-quarter IHUM course may elect this course sequence


Drama—Art and Ideas: Performance and Practice

Works of art are not mirrors, but

they share with mirrors that elu-

sive magic of transformation

which is so hard to put into words.

—E.H. Gombrich

For more informationabout the DramaDepartment, consult thedepartment’s website athttp://www.stanford.edu/dept/drama/index.html



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter: AliceRayner, Department ofDrama

Spring Quarter: JaniceRoss, Dance Division,Department of Drama

SELECTED AUTHORS

Plato, Ibsen, Chekhov,Sidney, Shakespeare,Shklovsky, Kleist, Langer,Berger, Benjamin,Goodman


Drama

This two-quarter sequence will introduce you to the liter-

ary genres of poetry, drama, and fiction from the

Renaissance to the present day. The course will focus on the

interaction between art and life. How does literature come

alive on the page, vivifying personal and social experience?

How do writers create alternative worlds, stretching human

awareness? What have fiction and poetry to do with histori-

cal crisis, environmental urgency? We will also consider par-

allel cases from art and music.



English—Literature into Life: Alternative Worlds

The sharp swallows in their swerve

flaring and hesitating

hunting for the final curve

coming closer and closer-

The swallow heart from wing beat to

wing beat

counseling decision, decision:

thunderous examples. I place my feet

with care in such a world.

—William Stafford, “The Well Rising”

22

For more informationabout English atStanford, consult thedepartment’s website at:http://english.stanford.edu



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter: DavidRiggs, Department ofEnglish

Spring Quarter: JohnFelstiner, Department ofEnglish

SELECTED AUTHORS

More, Cervantes,Shakespeare, Milton,Defoe, Swift, Keats,Hopkins, Dickinson,Whitman, Yeats, Frost,Williams, Bishop,Levertov, Celan, Vietnam-era poets


English

Through the image and metaphor of the journey, epic

poems externalize the human quest for identity and

self-definition. The epic hero crosses the physical world and

descends into the underworld to visit the dead and seek

counsel from them. We will examine the different goals of

such journeys and the evolution of the epic hero as he

struggles to reach his destination, with particular attention

to how exile and alienation, the encounter with ancestors,

and divine guidance define the trajectories traced by the

various epics in question.

As the course develops, we will examine the diminished

importance of the dead and the increased emphasis on the power of the living in various

literary genres. We will pay particular attention to how concepts of humanity and society

are defined by the sense of rupture with the past, including a heightened importance given

to innovation, the present, the living, and the everyday that contrasts with the formative

power of the afterlife, tradition, and the dead.

Students enrolled in any autumn-quarter IHUM course may elect this course sequence during

autumn quarter.

French and Italian—Epic Journeys, Modern Quests

When I understood those

injured souls, I bent my face

downward, and

I held it down so long that the

poet said, “What are you pon-

dering?”

When I replied, I began,

“Alas, how many sweet

thoughts, how much yearning

led them to this grievous

pass!”

—Dante, Inferno

For more informationabout French and Italianat Stanford, consult thedepartment’s website at:http://www.stanford.edu/dept/fren-ital



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter: JohnFreccero and RobertHarrison, Department ofFrench and Italian

Spring Quarter: DanielEdelstein and JoshuaLandy, Department ofFrench and Italian

SELECTED AUTHORS

Homer, Vergil, Dante,Boccaccio, Baudelaire,Diderot , Kafka

23


French and Italian

24

This course explores the tension between tradition and

progress through an examination of German cultural

history. Individualism, as a key figure of modernity, can

challenge community values, but meaningful lives also

depend on shared cultural structures. The experience of modernity typically involves

overcoming—or denying?—the past, but that same past can return to haunt the pres-

ent in the form of myths. This course sequence investigates the interplay of myth and

modernity, the irrationality of narrative and the reason of progress, through the exam-

ple of German culture, especially in literature, from the heroic epics of the medieval

era through the catastrophes of the last century. We will ask about the distinctiveness

of the German experience within the larger frame of Western culture—how different

is Germany?—as well as the standing of the values of that Western culture in the con-

tentious clash of cultures today. Do cultures require myths, or should mythic thinking

be overcome? Are individuality and freedom necessary components of culture, or are

they only a myth?

Students enrolled in any autumn-quarter IHUM course

may elect this course sequence during autumn quarter.

German Studies—Myth and Modernity: Culture in Germany

Not only children can be quieted

with fables.

—Lessing, Nathan the Wise

For more informationabout German Studies atStanford, consult thedepartment’s website at:http://stanford.edu/dept/german/



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter: RussellBerman, Department ofGerman Studies

Spring Quarter: AmirEshel, Department ofGerman Studies

SELECTED WORKS AND

AUTHORS

Nibelungenlied, Bach’sSt. Matthew Passion;Expressionist poetry andpainting, Nazi cinemaand architecture;Wagner’s Lohengrin;Kant, Goethe, Marx,DuBois, Nietzsche, Freud,Kafka, Mann, Celan


German Studies

25

This course provides students with a chronologi-

cal and geographical overview of a broad range

of times and places in which Islam has been the

dominant cultural framework. Over the course of

two quarters we will examine the basic elements of

the Muslim faith and its related political, social, and

cultural practices. The chronological range of the

course stretches from the rise of Islam in the 7th century CE to the very recent past.

The geographic range includes the historic Arab heartland of Islam, Africa, Persia, the

Ottoman Empire, the Muslim lands conquered by the British Empire, Central Asia,

and some of the Muslim-majority states that have been in conflict with the United

States since the end of World War II. For much of the period from 1000 CE to 1750

CE, Muslim societies, along with East and South Asia, were far wealthier and cultural-

ly and scientifically more sophisti-

cated than Europe and its periph-

eries. Consequently, to study Islamic

history is to study global history and

also a pre-modern form of global-

ization.



History—Worlds of Islam: Global History and Muslim Societies

Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have

come to destroy your religion; do not

believe it! Reply that I have come to restore

your rights, to punish the usurpers, and

that I respect more than the Mamluks God,

His Prophet, and the Qur’an.

—Napoleon’s Proclamation to the Egyptians

July 2, 1798

For more informationabout History atStanford, consult thedepartment’s website at:http://history.stanford.edu/



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter: JoelBeinin, Robert Crews,Sean Hanretta, AronRodrigue

Spring Quarter: JoelBeinin, Robert Crews,Sean Hanretta, AronRodrigue, Priya Satia

SELECTED TEXTS

Qur’an, Averroes, On theHarmony of Religion andPhilosophy, The Travelsof Ibn Battuta, NigerianSharî’a law cases,Edward Said, CoveringIslam


History

Every day, every one of us faces problems about

what to believe and how to act. Socrates began

the tradition of philosophy by insisting that our

answers to these problems ought to be guided by

reason—that if we could only believe and act more

rationally, our lives would be better for us overall.

This course explores the fate of Socrates’ proposal.

Some of our authors defend the power of reason to improve our lives. Others

insist that purely rational principles demand too much of us, or else are insufficient to

help us act well or reach important truths. We will trace the fate of reason in several

cultural traditions, thereby exploring the fundamental basis for our commitments

about how to live, and for our most important beliefs about God, ourselves, the world,

and our place within it.



Philosophy—The Fate of Reason

Tell me, Socrates, are you serious now or

joking? For if you are serious and these

things that you’re saying are really true,

won’t this human life of ours be turned

upside down, and won’t everything we do

be the opposite of what we should do?

—Plato, Gorgias

26

For more informationabout Philosophy atStanford, consult thedepartment’s website at:http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter:Christopher Bobonich,Department ofPhilosophy

Spring Quarter: NadeemHussain, Department ofPhilosophy

SELECTED AUTHORS

Plato, Sextus Empiricus,Maimonides, Al Ghazali,Ibn Tufayl, Descartes,Hume, Nietzsche


Philosophy

27

One cannot open a newspaper in these first years of the

new millennium without encountering the serious

challenges posed to the contemporary world by religion,

or in the name of religion. Less visible, but no less impor-

tant, are the challenges posed by the contemporary world

to the world’s religious traditions and communities.

Such challenges to religious traditions are not

unique to the modern world. In fact, all major religious

traditions have grappled with controversy and dissent

since their founding moments. But the modern experience

in religious transformation has been marked by the num-

ber of such challenges. Science, politics, feminism, a world

grown much smaller—these and other factors have con-

spired against the religious status quo, forcing the world’s

religious leaders and adherents to wonder whether religion can keep pace. Can the

world’s faiths be transformed rapidly enough to meet the many challenges they face

right now? And can they make the changes required while remaining true to all they

have stood for in the past?

This course sequence will equip you to begin addressing these questions.

Focusing on three religious traditions—Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam—we will

investigate a founding moment in each tradition, followed by an instance of premod-

ern transformation—thus emphasizing that religions have faced the problem of

change long before the advent of the modern world. Finally, we will investigate the

various responses offered by the world’s religions

to the challenges of the present, ranging from the

rise of the nation-state and new notions of the

self to tolerance and pluralism in the face of dif-

ference.

Students enrolled in any autumn-quarter IHUM

course may elect this course sequence during

autumn quarter.

Religious Studies—Approaching Religion: Tradition, Transformation, and the Challengeof the Present

When faith is replaced by creed, wor-

ship by discipline, love by habit;

when the crisis of today is ignored

because of the splendor of the past;

when faith becomes an heirloom

rather than a living fountain; when

religion speaks only in the name of

authority rather than with the voice

of compassion—its message

becomes meaningless.

Religion is an answer to man’s ulti-

mate questions. The moment we

become oblivious to ultimate ques-

tions, religion becomes irrelevant,

and its crisis sets in.

—Heschel, God in Search of Man

For more informationabout Religious Studiesat Stanford, consult thedepartment’s website at:http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter: CharlotteFonrobert and MichaelZimmermann, Depart-ment of Religious Studies

Spring Quarter: ArnoldEisen, Department ofReligious Studies

SELECTED TEXTS

Readings from HebrewBible, Buddhist sutras,the Qur’an, and otherreligious texts as well as works by leading contemporary theoristsand religious thinkers


Religious Studies

What is the difference between justice and law? And what do

literature and other arts have to do with this question?

The great Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-

turies and their counterparts in other arts, including cinema,

wrestled with these issues as they imagined and then tested various religious and sec-

ular ideas about human nature, society, and history. As we study their works, we focus

on what we call “poetic justice,” namely, the artistic representation of order, whether

divine, natural, or human, that appears both beautiful and true. The aim of this course

is to heighten awareness of “poetic justice” in familiar narratives, mythologies, ideas,

and images—and at the same time to convey a sense of Russia’s long-established cul-

ture, with its own dynamics and vision. Poetic Justice maintains an extensive website

at: www.stanford.edu/class/ihum28a/.



Slavic Languages and Literatures—Poetic Justice: Order and Imagination in Russian Culture

Long live the United State! Long live

Citizen-Numbers! Long live the

Benefactor!

—Zamyatin, We

28

Poetic Justice may beused towards the elec-tives in the RussianMajor or Minor. For moreinformation about SlavicLanguages and Litera-tures at Stanford, consultthe Stanford Bulletin andthe department’s websiteat: http://slavic.stan-ford.edu



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter Quarter: GabriellaSafran, Department ofSlavic Languages andLiteratures

Spring Quarter: GregoryFreidin, Department ofSlavic Languages andLiteratures (www.stan-ford.edu/~gfreidin/)

SELECTED TEXTS

Genesis, the Gospel ofMatthew, Russian folk-tales, works by AlexanderPushkin, Fyodor Dostoev-sky, Leo Tolstoy, AntonChekhov, Karl Marx,Evgeny Zamyatin, IsaacBabel, Andrey Platonov,Boris Pasternak, AnnaAkhmatova, JosephBrodsky, Tatyana Tolstaya

SELECTED FILMS

Sergey Eisenstein’sBattleship Potemkin andAlexander Nevsky,Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Endof St. Petersburg, TheVasiliev bothers’ Cha-paev, Nikita Mikhalkov’sBurnt by the Sun


S lavic Languages and Literature

29

Woo

deng

ravi

ng c

ourt

esy

ofA

nna

B.H

ogan

,art

ist

The New World’s original inhabitants told stories

about how the world began, creating a body of texts

remarkable in their scope and vitality. These Native

American creation stories worked together in important

ways, corroborating each other in terms of cultural

experiences extending back far beyond contact with

Europe. From the first moments of contact, too, native

mythic texts radically affected European beliefs.

Subsequently, this tradition prompted whole clusters of

writers, painters, and other artists working in what have

become the nation-states of the American continent.

Today, this legacy lives on among those peoples who,

despite the ever-near menace of harm and extermina-

tion, have survived since Columbus, celebrating the fact in art and literature written

in their own languages.

In this course sequence we will become familiar with these ancient texts, the

cultural traditions they communicate and preserve, and their legacies. We will com-

pare these stories with other, perhaps more familiar, traditions from the European tra-

dition, and we will consider them within broader literary and philosophical frames to

discover their shared paradigms and the ethics that derive from them.



Spanish and Portuguese—American Genesis: Indigenous Texts and Their Resonance

Here is the Account:

Now it still ripples, now it still

murmurs, ripples, it still sighs,

still hums and it is empty under

the sky.

Here follow the first words, the

first eloquence:

There is not yet one person, one

animal, bird, fish, crab, tree,

rock, hollow canyon, meadow,

forests.

Only the sky alone is up there;

the face of the earth is not clear

—Popul Vuh

For more informationabout Spanish andPortuguese at Stanford,consult the department’swebsite at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/span-port/



5 units per quarter

FACULTY

Winter and SpringQuarters: GordonBrotherston, Departmentof Spanish and Portu-guese, Lucia Sa, Depart-ment of Spanish andPortuguese

SELECTED WORKS

Popol Vuh (Maya);Legend of the Suns(Nahuatl); Watunna(Carib); Dine Bahane(Navajo); Guaman Poma’sChronicle; trickster narra-tives from North andSouth America; essays byMontaigne andRousseau; and 20th-cen-tury works by Asturias,Andrade, Silko, Mench’u,and Diego Rivera


Spanish and Portuguese

Do I have to fulfill the IHUM requirement in my freshman year?

Yes. IHUM courses are designed as introductions and foundations for further university-level studies,

so you are expected to fulfill this requirement in your first year at Stanford. It is to your benefit to have

this experience as early as possible in your undergraduate career.

Once I receive my IHUM course assignment during orientation, can I change it?

Because each IHUM course has a specific allotment of spaces, it may be difficult to change your assign-

ment. We do our best, however, to accommodate students who have a pressing need to change. You’ll

receive further information about requesting a change in your IHUM assignment during New Student

Orientation.

If I am assigned to an autumn-quarter IHUM course, how do I complete the three-quarter

requirement?

You complete the requirement by taking any of the two-quarter IHUM course sequences offered in the

winter-spring. During autumn quarter, you will have an opportunity to rank your preferences among

these winter-spring course sequences.

How can I plan my other courses around IHUM?

The University publishes a Time Schedule containing the meeting times of courses for the academic

year. This information is available online in September, and will enable you to plan for the year. Your

academic advisor will assist you in making your other course choices for autumn quarter and

throughout the year.

The Epic Journeys course in French and Italian looks really interesting, but it’s only offered in the

winter-spring. Can I sign up to take it now?

As long as you are not enrolled in the SLE sequence, which encompasses all three quarters, you’ll be

eligible to take Epic Journeys, or any one of the other winter-spring IHUM sequences. For now, you

should rank your top choices from among the various autumn IHUM courses described here; you’ll be

able to state your preference for winter-spring sequences during autumn quarter.

Which is the easiest IHUM course? How big are the lectures? the sections?

Individual variations among courses are to be expected as the IHUM course topics and approaches are

different. IHUM lecture enrollments range from 90 to 225, with most of the 21 IHUM courses

enrolling about 150 students. Section size averages about 15 students, and workload equity across

courses and sections is ensured by a variety of means. A Faculty Governance Board appointed by the

Vice Provost oversees the courses for comparability in the length and quantity of required readings,

and a Teaching Fellow Coordinating Committee monitors the writing assignments so that all students

experience equitable academic demands.

Frequently Asked Questions

30

Will I be assigned to my first choice of IHUM course?

We would like to give all students their first choices, but in order to keep the discussion sections small

(15 students on average), we have to impose enrollment limits. This is why we ask you to rank all 11

of the IHUM courses on the Approaching Stanford online preference form. We will do our best to

assign you to one of your top choices.

I’m a varsity athlete and have to attend practice every day. How can I fit an IHUM section meet-

ing 90 minutes twice a week into my schedule?

The discussion sections accompanying the IHUM courses are scheduled at a range of different times,

including evening; the IHUM program staff can help you find one that fits your needs.

I’m in ROTC and I have to spend some time every week off campus. How can I fit an IHUM course

into my schedule?

IHUM lectures are offered either Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday. You should be able to

enroll in one that accommodates your ROTC obligations. The discussion sections accompanying the

IHUM courses are scheduled at a range of different times; the IHUM program staff can help you find

one that fits your needs.

SLE sounds like an interesting option, but SLE classes are scheduled in late afternoons and

evenings. If I take SLE will I be able to fit other courses into my schedule?

Yes. SLE meets in the afternoon from 3:15 Tuesdays through Thursdays; that schedule frees you to take

courses all day on Monday and Friday and any time on Tuesdays through Thursdays before 3:15.

However, you should be aware that approximately one-third of the 100-plus freshman seminars are

scheduled at the same time as SLE classes, so if you are an SLE student your freshman seminar choic-

es will be limited to the other two-thirds (still a large number). You should also be aware that if you

plan to go out for a varsity sport that trains in the afternoon, you won’t be able to take SLE.

Where do I find the IHUM course preference form? And how do I return it?

Rank your preferences for autumn IHUM courses by filling out Form 4, online, at http://approach-

ing.stanford.edu. Make sure you’ve submitted this form, as well as the remainder of your reply forms,

online, by the June deadline.

31

ANY QUESTIONS?

Approaching Stanford

website: http://approaching.

stanford.edu

email: [email protected]

phone: (650) 724-2625

IHUMIHUM program website: http://ihum.stanford.edu

2005–06 Course Catalogue

ihum_coursecatalogue_0506

Documents

structured liberal education

rhetoric ii requirements

discussion sections accompanying

ihum program staff

contemporary culture visions

survival representing nature

ihum open house

alternative worlds french