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HUMN STUDENTS:If you run into ANY problems enrolling for classes please contact napodano@colorado.edustating your full name, the class in which you are trying to enroll and the error message you are receiving. If you are enrolling in a lecture class that also has a recitation, please include the applicable recitation section number.

If you get a message that a class is full even though there appears to be spaces in the recitation you want, this is a known systems issue. Please go ahead, waitlist yourself for the class and email napodano@colorado.edu. We are actively monitoring this and will move you into the lecture/recitation if there is space.

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HUMN 1001 Forms of Narrative: An Introduction to Humanities

Introduces students to forms of narrative from different historical, geographical, and cultural contexts in different media in order to explore how narrative, as cognitive tool and form of representation, functions as a means of understanding human experience. Students learn to analyze and interpret narratives and improve critical thinking, the practice of close reading, and written and verbal communication. Serves to introduce students to the types of questions and methods of interpretation encountered in Humanities.

HUMN 1003 Conflictions in History: Civilization and Culture: An Introduction to Humanities 

Introduces students to concepts of culture, history, and civilization as sites of conflict across different historical times and geographical locations. Course materials address political and artistic questions that intersect across different ages through their different histories and guiding concepts. Students will learn to read and understand critical, historical, political, and artistic works. Emphasis will be placed on developing critical thinking, close reading, and the ability to articulate and develop issues in writing and verbally.

HUMN 1004 Sound and Meaning: An Introduction to Humanities
Matthew Peattie

This course examines how music creates meaning. Topics include: How ancient and modern writers conceive of the effects of music on its listeners; how the meanings of canonic texts are transformed in contemporary digital culture; how musical works are established though music writing and sound recording; and how music is used to voice identity. Musical examples are drawn primarily from historical repertories of western art music with comparative perspectives from more recent popular and recorded music.

HUMN 2000 Methods and Approaches to Humanities
Annje Wiese

Provides a transition from the introductory courses to the upper-division courses. The goal of this course is to introduce Humanities majors and minors to a rich range of interdisciplinary interpretive strategies and theories and to apply those strategies to a broad selection of cultural products. The “methods and approaches” in the course title points toward this process: we will look at different methods of interpretation and different ways that particular lenses or theories might inform our acts of interpretation. By taking this course, you will gain an understanding of some of the key developments and perspectives that inform studies in the Humanities and you will put those methods and theories into practice. Approved for A&S Gen. Ed. distribution: Arts and Humanities.

HUMN 3092 Studies: Modern Poetry
David Ferris

Explores the literary and critical significance of lyric poetry in the modern age. Begins with the modern turn of poetry in Romanticism, in particular, Wordsworth and Shelley, then works through the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Dickinson, Yeats, Hughes, Celan, Bachmann, Bishop, Sexton, Attridge, Adonis, and Hill.  Will also include critical material on the concept of “modern” poetry.

HUMN 3092 Studies: Capturing Sound
Matthew Peattie

Examines how musicians and writers have attempted to describe the sonic, aesthetic, and affective aspects of sound, with an emphasis on notation, writing, and visual representations of sound.

HUMN 3093 Topics: Law and Literature
David Ferris

This course will examine how literature engages with how law (legal, scientific, aesthetic) is established and enforced and with how literature exposes contradiction and violence within law.  The course will cover a wide range of material and forms each of which present a conflict between literature’s tendency to defer and suspend judgement and law’s desire to enforce it.  Works and authors to be examined include Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sophocles’ Antigone, selected stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron, The Return of Martin Guerre (book and film), Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile,” “The Foundling” and “Improbably Veracities,” Kafka’s “Before the Law” and “The Problem of Our Laws,” Carl Schmitt on law and sovereign decision, and excerpts from Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”

HUMN 3200 Fictions of Illness: Modern Medicine and the Literary Imagination
Audrey Burba

Examines the ways in which the rise of modern medicine fueled the literary imagination with a new focus, new patterns of perception and potent metaphors. Through a study of various works of fiction, critical theory and medical history, the course traces how medical discoveries and the increasing professionalization of medicine manifested itself in modern literature.

HUMN 3240 Tragedy
Jeffrey Cox

Description to come.

HUMN 3310 Bible as Literature
K. Little

Description to come.

HUMN 3666 Critical Futures: Theorizing Climate Change
Annje Wiese

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding environmental humanities and explores the insights that arts and humanities can provide in the face of climate change, environmental injustice, and our uncertain futures. By looking at diverse representations/theories about the Anthropocene, this course considers how we account for humans’ relationship to nature and what the consequences of this are. It also discusses how art and fiction might harness individual and group will to sustain our world.

HUMN 4006 Game Studies
Andrew Gilbert

Game Studies introduces basic media literacy by exploring the aesthetic and cultural principles behind the use and creation of one of (if not the) largest cultural forms of modern media. As 60% of all Americans play video games daily, and the industry itself surpasses cinema as the global games market reached 148.8 billion, it is wise for us to be able to read and critique such a massive part of our culture. This class will explore the specific theories associated with the media of gaming as well as dive deeply into several aspects unique to gaming (the avatar, the Dungeons and Dragons live stream, etc.).

HUMN 4720 Architecture and the Feminine
Audry Burba

This course examines women’s depictions of space, confinement, and liberation in literature, art, and film. Women’s artistic productions have long sought to conceptualize, expose, and subvert the ways that gender and power relations are inscribed into the spaces they inhabit. Together, we will trace the rich history of these visions of spaces (physical, geographical, psychological, and imagined) and explore their relationship to gender, subjectivity, power, and creativity.

Over the course of the semester, we will consider how representations of the traditional places assigned to women are used to comment on the physical, intellectual, economic, and religious boundaries erected by these spaces. Most notably, we will examine how the home, sometimes painted as a valuable and meaningful source of identity, also represents male dominance and female subjugation.

HUMN 4835 Literature and Social Violence
Cathy Comstock

Social violence affects us all, and the most vulnerable are affected the most profoundly by these “savage inequalities.”  But we can change our society and also ourselves in ways that can bring help and hope for everyone.  In this seminar we will use the insights of both great literature and social science to bring light to the sources of darkness in our schools, our mass incarceration, our immigration policies, and the wars on drugs and disease that too often have effects more like a war on the poor.  

As we discover the surprising and successful solutions that the media neglects to tell us, we will also consider the best ways to cure the personal consequences of living with the kind of stresses that have led to all-times highs in depression and anxiety.  The good news from neuroscience is that we have astonishing capacities for health and happiness, from mindfulness to the immune system, just waiting to rescue and restore us in the very process of trying to help others.   

Through our contact with great authors and films as well as each other this seminar will explore intriguing possibilities that promise to be as transformative as they are heartening and sometimes even humorous. 

There is also the option (not a requirement) for one to three hours of extra credit by doing service work in the community, since that kind of the personal experience helps us to understand the class materials—and our culture overall—more deeply.

The class texts include Angels in America, The Bluest Eye, Bliss Brain, Tattoos on the Heart, Freedom Writers’ Diary, Savage Inequalities, Gandhi the Man and Tortilla Curtain.