NCSSM COURSE CAtAlOG - North Carolina School of Science and ...

Meeting pattern: Two 100-minute evening class meetings.
This course begins with the splintering of medieval Christendom and continues
with the twelfth-century Renaissance, the rise of universities, and the philosophic
debate over the nature and source of knowledge. We examine the
development of national languages and vernacular literatures. We read lifewriting
by medieval Anchoresses who, by choice, spent their lives walled into
tiny cells. We read Dante’s Inferno, selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,
literary theorists like Boccaccio and Hugh of St. Victor, poems and letters by
Petrarch, political treatises by Machiavelli, and plays by Shakespeare and
Christopher Marlowe. We encounter characters like Dr. Faustus, who barters his
soul for knowledge, and Hamlet and Macbeth, who find themselves imprisoned
in the private spaces of their minds. The course concludes with Thirty Years’ War
and the English Civil War. We close with the philosophy of Descartes, who
redefines the personal self, and with the poetry of the English Civil War and
French Absolutism.
EN440 Western European Cultural Studies III: 1650 to Present
One trimester
Credit: One unit core English credit, one unit core elective credit.
Prerequisite: Completion of three trimesters of AS303 Writing and American
Studies or AS305 American Studies or completion of two trimesters of AS303 or
AS305 and permission of the Dean of Humanities. EN436 WECS I and EN438
WECS II suggested, not required.
Meeting pattern: Two 100-minute evening class meetings.
This course explores the emergence of the modern world, the modern self, the
modern state, the modern balance of power, and modern commercial
enterprises and empires. Topics include the emergence of Romanticism, the
alienating world of industrial culture, and new theories about nature and history.
We examine Modernism in all its forms—in psychology, in narrative, in the visual
arts, in social planning, and in cinema. We also examine the impact of world
wars, globalism, the newest versions of cultural imperialism, and the modern
world’s obsessions with self and self-revelation. Students sharpen their skills in
reading, writing, and critical thinking. Readings include Rousseau, the English
Romantics, Darwin, Marx, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad, as well as contemporary writers.
EN442 Western Civilization: Wisdom, Revelation, Reason & Doubt I (The Ancient
World to the High Middle Ages)
One trimester
Credit: One unit core English credit, one unit core elective credit.
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