The Subject of the Course

The Humanities Sequence will introduce you to the European cultural tradition. From the early years of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s, that Americans regarded that tradition as THE tradition. Educated Europeans and Americans considered “Western”—i.e. European—civilization as the best civilization ever created. They thought that Judaeo-Christian values were the culmination of human moral development, and they could see that European civilization dominated the world through empires that competed politically and economically but that all represented a single cultural heritage. Through much of the twentieth century, Europeans and Americans thought that this domination represented the true relationship among the world’s civilizations and that it was a permanent relationship. Even after the empires began to break up, after World War II (1939-45), Europeans and Americans thought that they had civilized the colonial elites, if not the common people, and that the emerging independent nations would be subordinate members of the European cultural empire that would survive the political one.

Great changes in perception and understanding have occurred since the 1970s. First, scholars have shown that the cultures of China, India, and Islam are at least equal to European civilization. In the last five years or so, ordinary Europeans and Americans have begun to appreciate the qualities of those civilizations. Second, other cultures, in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia among other places, have reasserted themselves and acquired some respect among westerners, as Europeans and Americans call themselves. Third, the society of the United States, in particular, has become much more culturally diverse than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, and our attitude towards civilization in general and European civilization in particular has changed. This change calls for special comment.

The Humanities Sequence represents a peculiarly American approach to education. The course derives from the tradition of Western Civilization courses which originated at the beginning of the twentieth century at Columbia University. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period of massive immigration to this country, and the elite of this country was concerned that the immigrants would not understand the values and ideals of the republic. The Western Civilization course was the answer. It would inculcate those values and ideals in the new Americans and help to preserve what the founders and their successors had built. People saw American society as a melting pot. The Western Civilization course was one of the fires that would further the melting process by giving college students, who were destined to be leaders of the society, a common culture distinct from whatever culture they and their families had come from.

Note that the educators who created the new course, which quickly became a part of the core curriculum across higher education in the country, saw American civilization as an off-shoot of European civilization. For them, the best introduction to American culture was a course in European culture. The persistence of this attitude can be seen in the post-World War II movement to create American studies programs in our universities. Fascism and Nazism in Europe had called the values of European civilization into question, and it appeared that American culture was the true heir of the great tradition. American studies programs gave shape to this conception of American civilization, and they emphasized the European elements of our culture. The programs portrayed American civilization as a new and improved form of European civilization.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the renewed mass immigration that began in the 1980s and continues to today fractured this view of American society and culture. The civil rights movement led to a kind of cultural independence movement among Blacks and then among other minor groups. The leaders of the minority communities actively opposed the idea of the melting pot, seeing it as one of the principal expressions of cultural imperialism of Americans of European origin. Eventually, universities accepted this view at least in part and created programs in African-American, Chicano, Native American, Asian-American cultures. At the same time, the number of faculty teaching and doing research on the source cultures of these groups—Asian civilizations, Latin America, Africa—increased, displacing faculty in European and traditional (Euro-)American subjects.

So, how then do we justify a five-quarter sequence focused exclusively on European civilization? There are two answers to this question.

The first arises from the prehistory of the course. The faculty members who created the Humanities courses were deeply influenced by the University of Chicago, where many of them had been students or faculty members before they came to UCSD. Chicago was the first major university to challenge the Eurocentric tradition in higher education by insisting that students study at least two traditions, the western or European and another—Asian, Islamic, or African. In that curriculum, the study of the European tradition shifted its emphasis from the study of Europe as a master civilization to the idea of a tradition, of which European culture was one among many. The founding faculty members of Revelle College were certainly Eurocentric in their outlook, but they recognized that one of the important features of the course was that it taught students about cultural traditions.

The second answer to the question is that in our time, when people—both faculty members and students—challenge the hegemony of the European tradition, the value of studying and understanding cultural traditions has become one of the goals of education. The new American society and culture that is being formed around us and by us is an emerging amalgam of cultural traditions. Each of these traditions is strikingly strong; people raised in them cling tightly to their values, modes of personal relationships, arts, foods, and moral ideas. So, we must understand how traditions form and work, how they absorb influences from other traditions, how they resist challenges, how they relate to political and economic systems.

The Humanities sequence approaches this need by introducing you to one of the principal traditions in more depth than most introductory courses. The assumption of the course is that you will be able to understand all traditions, when you study them, if you have learned to understand one of them. The experience of your faculty and of the students who came before you justifies this assumption. You will find that once you have completed the Humanities sequence, you will gain knowledge of other civilizations more quickly and more deeply than you would have had you approached them without a grasp of what a tradition is and how it functions in one case.

What do I mean by a tradition? The word “tradition” means literally a handing down of ideas and practices from one generation to another. The way your parents teach you to interact with others—with your parents themselves and other elders, with siblings, with friends, with classmates, with enemies—derives from a tradition that could be traced back for generations in your family and in families from a similar cultural background. Within each tradition there are sayings, stories, ways of doing things (preparing food, practicing religion etc.) and works of art that people within the tradition regard as emblematic. Do you want to know what the tradition is? Study those things; the tradition is conveyed in them. In the Humanities, we focus on literature of different kinds, in part because literary works are the most public or shared conveyers of cultural tradition and in part because literature reveals in its stories, characterizations, and descriptive passages many of the private conveyances of culture. Literature broadly understood to include philosophy and religious texts as well as what we now call fiction is a rich source of knowledge about the formation and content of a tradition.

The European cultural tradition is unusual in that it originated not in Europe but in the Near East and the Mediterranean Basin in the cultures of the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans. European culture as such started to develop in the fifth and sixth centuries of Common Era (C.E.), after the collapse of Roman authority in the continent. So, the study of the European tradition must begin with the traditions of the Jews and the Greeks, the subject of the first quarter of Humanities.

Both of these traditions began to form in the twelfth century Before the Common Era (B.C.E.), and both rest on literary works compiled or written down centuries later. These writings rested on a long oral tradition—the transmission of stories about the history of the people passed by mouth from generation to generation. In both cases the writings in which we can first discover the tradition captured a portion of the oral culture and shaped it into a coherent picture of society and the way people were supposed to behave in it. Each tradition presented a world view—a notion about how the world as the writers and their readers knew it came to be and what constituted good and bad behavior. Each defined the characteristics of the culture’s notions of ideal persons and what the culture expected of people. Each found a way to explain the mysterious ways of the world: Why did some succeed and some fail? Why did one people win wars and another lose them? What were the proper roles of men and women? What was the relationship between parents and children? What was the place of mankind in the world? These questions and others will be the subjects for the course.

Communications

The best way to communicate with me is by email rather than by telephone. I will be in my office during my office hour, but I’m not often there during other times. My office phone does not have a message service. I will try to answer email quickly—though not instantaneously. If you drop me a note at 2AM, don’t expect an answer until the next morning.

Office Hour: I have set up an official office hour, Thursday 9:30-10:30—i.e. before class. I know that for some students the office hour conflicts with other classes and work schedules. I’ll be happy to make an appointment to see you at another time during the week. Set up an appointment by email.

Occasionally, I will communicate with the class by email to make an announcement or inform you of something you should know. The WebCT platform has your UCSD email addresses in it, so I’ll be communicating with you through that address. Many of you do not use UCSD email, and if that is the case then be sure to set a forwarding command in your UCSD mailbox. Then, you’ll receive any communications we send to the class through WebCT.

The Components of the Course

This course has three main components: Lectures, discussion sections, and readings. I may also mount narrated slide lectures and historical geography movies on the class web site.

You will be able to watch and listen to any slide lectures I mount on the web site in campus computer laboratories or at home. However, you may find that unless you have a cable modem or DSL accessing them from home is unsatisfactory.

The slide lectures and geography movies use Flash technology. Flash plays in your browser but requires a free plug-in. You can get the plug-in through the course web site.

I will assign readings for each lecture, and if you have not read the materials listed for a lecture, you may find yourself lost when I’m talking about them.

I believe that geographical orientation is important. The societies that produced the Hebrew bible, the Homeric poems, and classical Greek drama existed in space and time. I think it is necessary that you understand the geography of the events. So, I will put maps on the web site and will have maps in many classes. I have created my own historical “atlas” for the course, based on digital versions of base maps. All of the maps I use in class will also be on the web site, so you can look at them at your leisure. If I create historical geography movies for the course, they will put the maps into motion. I want to show you how things developed over time and space and to pull together the material on the maps. They will give you a narrative introduction to the historical geography of each region and society. I think you’ll find them a great help in pulling together all of the geographic information you get in lecture. I’ll expect you to know the geography of the Near East and of the Mediterranean.

Class Web Site: Go to the WebCT server, http://webct6web.ucsd.edu. Sign in with your UCSD username and password. Click on Humanites 1.

The class web site will contain the syllabus for reference, the maps, lecture outlines, announcements, and the slide lectures and historical geography movies if I develop them. There will also be a discussion board to permit you to post questions for me, for the TAs, and for your fellow students on the readings, lectures, and any other course materials. My intention is to give you an opportunity to ask questions or make comments as they occur to you. I will check the discussion board frequently, if I find that you are using it.

To gain access to WebCT and the class web site, you need your UCSD email username and password. These were assigned to you when you registered. Some of you do not use UCSD email and have ignored the username and password you received. You need them to gain access to any controlled web site at UCSD. If you do not know your UCSD username and password, you can get it from APM 2113 (open Mon-Thurs. from 10 AM - 3:30 PM). You must present your student ID card.

Technology requirements: You can access the web site and all its materials on either a PC or Mac.

Technical Assistance: If you need some technical assistance with the course, you can email the Instructional Web Development Center (iWDC): iwdc@ucsd.edu. Students often ask me for help, but I am, relative to most of you, a techno-peasant. You are better off seeking help from iWDC.

Grading in the course will be based on your participation in discussion section and the completion of all assignments—the papers and the final exam. To pass the course, you must complete all assigned work and participate actively in discussion sections.

The assignments will consist of four papers and a final exam. We will mark but not grade the first paper. We want you to get an idea of what we expect of you as writers before we give you grades. Each successive paper will weigh more than its predecessor as a percentage of your course grade. You will see the breakdown below.

We will also assign a grade for participation in section. The success of the sections depends on your being there and on your participation. I will ask the TAs to record attendance. If you must miss a section meeting, you should contact your TA to explain the absence.

We will provide a study guide for the final exam. It will be posted on the web site at least one-week before the exam. All of the questions asked on the exam will be on the study guide, so you will be able to prepare answers. However, you will not be able to bring written materials to the exam; the exams are not take-home exams. We will monitor the exam for cheating.

The Humanities program uses Turnitin.com to screen for plagiarism on the papers. Turnitin is very effective. Many students who are caught claim that they were merely negligent in keeping track of bibliographical information on the sources they used. Negligence is not an excuse. Obviously, we will make a judgment about the seriousness of the offence, but you should know that even a small amount of plagiarized text can lead to a serious penalty, both disciplinary and academic.

If you have any problem understanding what plagiarism is, look at the UCSD Student Handbook. You’ll also find a very good, clear statement on plagiarism on the Princeton University web site (www.princeton.edu/pr/pub/integrity).

If you are caught cheating on the exam or plagiarizing parts of your paper, we may treat the assignment as if it had not been submitted at all. If that happens, you will automatically fail the course, because you must submit all assignments to pass the course. An F for cheating is permanently recorded on your transcript; it is not a good thing.

Your course grade will be computed based on the following weighting of assignments. (Note that even though we will not assign a grade for the first paper, which we’ve designated the Ungraded Paper, you must hand it in to pass the course. Also, you will not have to submit the Ungraded Paper to Turnitin.com.):

Paper 1: 10%

Paper 2: 20%

Paper 3: 25%

Section: 10%

Final Exam: 35%

Course Calendar:

Lectures: Tues.-Thurs., 11AM-12:20PM, Peterson Hall 108

Final Exam: Thursday, March 20, 11:30AM-2:30PM, Peterson Hall 108

Required Texts:

The New Oxford Annotated Bible, OUP 1971

Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, Penguin

Plato, Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill, Penguin

Greek Tragedies, vol. 1, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, U of Chicago Press

Aristophanes 3, ed. David R. Slavitt, U. of Pennsylvania Press

Dornan and Dawe, The Brief English Handbook, 7^th edn., Pearson-Longman

Syllabus

1/8: Introduction to the Course and Approaches to the Bible

1/10: Israelite Religion and the Patriarchs

Readings: Genesis 1-36

[Ungraded Paper assignment handed out]

1/15: Jacob, Joseph and the Formation of the Nation

Readings: Genesis 37-50; Exodus 1-15

1/17: Wandering in the Wilderness

Readings: Exodus 16-20, 24, 32-34, 40; Numbers 11-14, 16-17, 20, 25; Deuteronomy 29-34

[Ungraded Paper due; Paper 1 assignment handed out]

1/22: The Rule of the Judges

Readings: Joshua 1, 3, 6, 10, 24; Judges 2, 4-5, 11, 13-18

1/24: Foundations of the Monarchy

Readings: 1 Samuel 7-10, 13, 16-18; 2 Samuel 1-3

1/29: The Two Kingdoms

Readings: 1 Kings 1-13, 16:29-19:21; 21-22; 2 Kings 1-7, 17-25

1/31: Exile and Restoration

Readings: Ezra 1, 3, 7; Nehemiah 1-2, 8-9; Esther

[Paper 1 due]

2/5: Prophecy

Readings: Isaiah 1-12, 40-55; Jeremiah 1-8, 20, 28, 32-33, 36, 38-43

2/7: The End of History – Jewish Apocalyptic and the new kingdom

Readings: Daniel, 1 Maccabees 1-4

[Paper 2 assignment handed out]

2/12: Mycenaean Greece and the Homeric Poems

Readings: Homer, The Odyssey

2/14: Return of the Hero – Trials

Readings: Homer, The Odyssey

2/19: Return of the Hero – Chaos and Order

Readings: Homer, The Odyssey

2/21: Return of the Hero - Agamemnon

Readings: Aeschylus, Agamemnon

[Paper 2 due]

2/26: The Trials of Greek Culture I - Oedipus

Readings: Sophocles, Oedipus the King

[Paper 3 assignment handed out]

2/28: The Trials of Greek Culture II - Antigone

Readings: Sophocles, Antigone

3/4: The Trials of Greek Culture III - Hippolytus

Readings: Euripides, Hippolytus

3/6: Comic Relief I – The Birds

Readings: Aristophanes, The Birds

3/11: High Seriousness – Socrates

Readings: Plato, The Symposium

[Paper 3 due]

3/13: Comic Relief II – The Clouds

Readings: Aristophanes, The Clouds

3/20: FINAL EXAM: 11:30AM – 2:30PM