HUMA 5307 TOPICS IN GENDER STUDIES Tuesday 6-8:50 p.m

Susan Hekman

Description
This course will trace the evolution of feminist theory and its relationship to the political positions of the various contemporary "feminisms." It will begin with an examination of the systematic exclusion of women from political life in the west and the objections to that exclusion from feminist thinkers. It will then survey the first systematic expressions of feminist theory as an alternative to male-dominated politics: liberal and Marxist/socialist feminism. These positions form the core of feminist theory and practice as it has been expressed in the west. Although these approaches challenge malestream politics, however, more recent feminist theory departs from the western political tradition in more radical ways. Radical feminism, eco-feminism and postmodern feminism offer distinctively new visions of gender relations and political practice. The course will conclude with an analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of these positions and their implications for political practice.

 

HUMA 5306 Criticism, Language, and History Mondays, 6 - 8:50pm

Instructor: Lewis Baker
305 Carlisle. 817-272-2764.
Office hours M, 3:00-6:00

Description: Nature and History
This course will examine the history of the idea of nature, the idea of a history of nature, and where humans fit in. We will start with some anthropological views of the origins of ideas of nature in religion and language, then move on to the development of physics among the Greeks and Hellenistic cultures, the development of science in Europe, and some modern reactions to those developments. In the second half of the course we will look at the resurgence of biology and ecology at the expense of physics, the effect of science on the conditions of human life, and some literary and philosophical speculations on where all this might be leading. We will read and discuss the required books.

Evaluation
Grades will be based on seminar participation and a mid-term and final.

Required Readings
Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion
Jean Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought
Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man
Albert Camus, The Plague
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol.I: The Structure of Everyday Life
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Cormac McCarthy, The Road