2002-2003 SEMINARS

1. Controversial Images: Telling the History of Modern Science
Saturdays, Oct 19 and Nov 2, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

The relationship between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg as depicted in the play Copenhagen is fascinating precisely because it intersects and intertwines two of the most noteworthy happenings of the twentieth century-the development of the revolutionary theory of quantum mechanics and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. These events are a provocative backdrop for exploring the connections between science, history, and social policy in our modern age. Traditionally, this history has been limited to the intellectual content of scientific developments coupled with heroic stories about scientists conceived as lone discoverers. More recently, historians have begun to focus on the deeply social nature of modern science, both in its internal operations and in its connections to broader social and political structures in which it is embedded. What sort of history of science should we tell, and what is at stake in how we answer such a question? Furthermore, how should our answers influence the manner in which we teach science itself?

Faculty: Andrea Woody

Associated Event: Copenhagen, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Sept 23-Oct 26

2. Modern Mexico in Art and Literature
Saturdays, Oct 26 and Nov 9, Seattle Art Museum and UW Simpson Center, 10am-2pm

This seminar will explore some of the major developments in Mexican culture over the past 100 years. We will discuss how and why the work of Mexican writers and artists, including Rufino Tamayo, Frida Kahlo, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Elena Poniatowska attracted international attention during the twentieth century. We will also examine how younger writers and artists are now adapting and transforming this great modernist tradition. The seminar will focus on two instances from the visual and literary arts, situated in their cultural and historical contexts: the life and work of painter Frida Kahlo and contemporary Mexican poetry. Since the 1980s, Frida Kahlo has been reclaimed as a major Mexican artist, initially by Chicana and Mexican feminist critics, and later by the international art
establishment. We will discuss the significance of Kahlo's artistic contribution and
the implications of "marketing" her as an icon to the international public. Furthermore, we will study poems by a number of contemporary Mexican poets and reflect on the evolving significance of Mexican nationalism and cultural identity in the twenty-first century. While examining the unique vision presented by each poet, we will also discuss the larger movements and trends shaping Mexican culture today.

Faculty: Cynthia Steele

Associated Events:
Mexican Modernism, Seattle Art Museum, Oct 17-Jan 5
A New Generation of Mexican Poets, Seattle Arts & Lectures, Oct 29

3. American Song
Saturdays, Nov 9 and 23, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

This seminar will begin with a broad consideration of the issues surrounding "American music," including an historical overview of American song and move on to a specific study of representative American songs, from Stephen Foster to Randy Newman. In a nation whose musical heritage runs so wide and so deep, why is "American music" still an issue, a cause, a rallying cry? Why should we need specific courses addressing "American music" in America? Why do classical performing organizations always, and self-consciously, call it to our attention when they are programming "American music"? And can the phrase "American music" really mean that much when it encompasses styles as diverse as those of Stephen Foster, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, and Dolly Parton?

Faculty: Larry Starr

Associated Event: The Education of Randy Newman, ACT Theatre, Oct 24-Nov 17

4. Myth, Art, and Metamorphoses
Saturdays, Nov 16 and Dec 7, UW Simpson Center and Seattle Art Museum, 10am-2pm

Continuously retold and re-imagined, Greek and Roman myths have provided the Western world with artistic and literary inspiration for millennia. Ovid's Metamorphoses collects dozens of myths of transformation from ancient Greece and Rome. Together we will explore Ovid's lively adaptation of traditional materials. How does the poem itself explore the transformative processes of art and mythmaking? How does Ovid transform the ancient Greek stories he has inherited to comment on the cosmopolitan Roman world in which he lives? In
addition, we will consider a variety of ways in which Ovid's own work has in turn been inherited and transformed by poets and painters in the Western European tradition, from Medieval book illuminators to Renaissance painters to Shakespeare and modern novelists.

Faculty: Catherine Connors

Associated Event: Permanent Collection, Seattle Art Museum

5. Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres
Saturdays, Jan 11 and 25, UW Simpson Center 10am-2pm

Throughout the twentieth century, writers have played with and countered traditional genres in order to communicate differently with their readers. For writers whose
ethnicity and gender sets them apart from mainstream American culture, cross-genre experimentation has enabled them to unsettle readerly expectations and to forge new understandings. This seminar will focus on three women writers of diverse ethnic backgrounds whose cross-genre experiments span the last several decades. In Borderlands: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua stages her writing at the borderland between Mexico and the U.S., engaging multiple languages as well as genres. Haryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary explores African American vernaculars in relationship to English and Anglophone dialects, exploring such diverse genres as sonnets and airplane instruction manuals. Finally, in her book Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha explores her existence as a Korean American, taking on nine different genres. We will look at Dictee in relationship to Cha's other artistic engagements as a visual artist and film maker, newly brought to the public's attention in the traveling exhibit on her work, The Dream of the Audience.

Faculty: Jeanne Heuving

Associated Event: The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), Henry Art Gallery, Dec 6-Mar 2

6. Shostakovich and His Contemporaries: Early Soviet Art, Music, and Literature
Saturdays, Jan 18 and Feb 1, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

The era Dmitri Shostakovich and his contemporaries inhabited was artistically daring and exciting, yet devastating for the artists. It began for many with boundless optimism and enthusiasm and ended in the unprecedented cruelty of the Stalin purges during which many of the brightest stars of Russian culture were arrested, executed, sent to camps, or otherwise silenced. This seminar will explore this poignant period in Soviet cultural history by looking at some of its grandest artistic achievements. We will read and discuss literary works by such masterful practitioners of the craft as Isaac Babel, Anna Akhmatova, and Mikhail Bulgakov. We will analyze early Soviet film-making by Sergey Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin. We will also look at some examples of innovative art by
Soviet Con-structivist artists, designers, and architects, and we will listen to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and his contemporaries. Although this seminar only scratches the surface of this period, it will, however, serve as a forum for discussing larger issues pertaining to art and ideology.

Faculty: Galya Diment

Associated Event: Shostakovich Festival, Seattle Symphony Jan 23-Feb 2

7. Native Voices
Saturdays, Feb 8 and 22, Burke Museum and UW Simpson Center, 10am-2pm

Since contact began five centuries ago between Native American and European people, American Indians have been misrepresented much more often than they have been represented. These distortions have influenced the course of cross-cultural interaction, and a great number of false depictions of Native Americans have depended on the "silencing" of Indian voices. This seminar will explore representations of Native Americans and the "silencing," and "rearticulation" of Indian voices. Together, we will examine romantic stereotypes of Native Americans and the appropriation of Native culture and art. The instructor will introduce participants to a range of Native voices and works, including Gretchen Bataille's
Native American Representations and Louis Owne's Mixedblood Messages. We will also view and discuss the documentary White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men in context with other course materials.

Faculty: Tom Colonnese

Associated Event:
Out of Silence: The Enduring Power of the Totem Pole, Burke Museum, Oct 2002-Sept 2003

8. How American is Asian American Literature?
Saturdays, Mar 15 and 29, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

In recent years, discussions of nation, national identity, and race have become the subject of intense debate among writers and critics of Asian heritage, inspiring new styles of writing and effectively changing both the objects and methods of Asian American Studies. Thirty years ago, Asian American literature was seen as a subset of American literature. Today, writers and critics are more likely to see Asian American literature as part of a transnational phenomenon that includes writers from many countries. In this seminar, we will examine Asian writing in English, a literature that bridges several diasporic communities. In particular, we will read the work of Hong Kong writer Xu Xi, Australian novelist Hsu-Ming Teo, and British novelist Timothy Mo, as well as selections from Asian American writers. Among the questions we will consider will be: What does it mean to be Asian American in an increasingly global world? Is there anything particularly "American" about Asian American literature? Is there anything particularly "Asian" about Asian writing in English? We will also explore how these questions inform both the critical debate as
well as the imaginative literature itself.

Faculty: Shawn Wong

Associated Events:
Asian American Culture(s) Critique, Simpson Center for the Humanities,
University of Washington, Oct 2002-Jun 2003

9. Shakespeare's Tragedies: Text, Interpretation, Production
Saturdays, Mar 22 and Apr 5, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

Shakespeare's tragedies have long inspired theater goers to grapple with love and loss. Modern audiences often have their initial encounters with these plays through various productions either on stage or screen. With Romeo and Juliet as our anchor, we will explore the complex relationship between text and production, as well as the cultural, social, political, aesthetic, and scholarly influences on the production of some of Shakespeare's tragedies. After a look at the play as it is written, we will go on to focus on how the play can be produced. Our seminar will consider production issues by looking at how different parts of Romeo and Juliet have been filmed and by discussing the different kinds of interpretations and decisions that go into a cinematic production. We will also discuss the choices involved in producing all or part of a Shakespearean tragedy on stage. During the second session, we will examine how a local theatrical production of Romeo and Juliet approached and solved various production issues.

Faculty: John Webster

Associated Event: Romeo and Juliet, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Mar 10-Apr 20

10. America: A Sentimental Adventure
Saturdays, Apr 19 and May 3, UW Simpson Center and Seattle Arts & Lectures, 9am-1pm

In the decades following the Revolutionary War, Americans were deeply concerned with questions of national identity. What did it mean to be an American? How were Americans different from the British and other Europeans? And how were they different from the Native peoples with whom they shared the land? These were questions that animated politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens; but they also drew the attention of imaginative writers. These decades marked the beginnings of
American fiction, and the two most popular forms were the sentimental novel and the adventure story. In this seminar, we will read some of the best-selling fiction from the Early Republic, including Hannah W. Foster's The Coquette and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Among the questions we will consider are: Why were themes of marriage and seduction, captivity and escape so appealing to early Americans? What roles did gender and race play in establishing
prevailing notions of national identity? Did sentimental novels and adventure stories present radically different versions of "the American," or were they the opposite sides of the same coin? And how do the notions of national identity presented in these books continue to influence our image of the American character?

Faculty:
Matthew Brogan

11. The Great Migration
Saturdays, Apr 26 and May 10, Seattle Art Museum and UW Simpson
Center, 10am-2pm

In the early twentieth century, successive waves of out-migration from the rural South to the urban North remade black Americans into urbanites and remade the largest American centers into "chocolate cities," as they were called in popular culture. Collectively known as the "Great Migration," these flights formed an exodus from a land of slavery and persistent exploitation to a "land of hope." The Great
Migration offered the hope of meaningful freedom and progress in the history of a people, and it presented "the Negro problem" as one for American society more widely. What set so many people flowing? How did family and social relations, gender ideals, southern planters, businessmen, police, northern black newspapers, and activists all play a part in the Great Migration? What did migrants find in the
North, this "land of hope"? This seminar will explore these and other questions. Readings will address the roots, processes, and consequences of emigration from the South.

Faculty: Stephanie Camp

Associated Event: Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, Seattle Art
Museum, Feb-May 2003

12. Latin American Artists and the Spanish Civil War
Saturdays, May 3 and 17, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) galvanized artists, intellectuals, poets, and working people throughout the world in defense of democracy in Spain. The war is still understood as the first armed confrontation between the forces of democracy and fascism. People came to the aid of the Spanish Republic in overwhelming numbers: 40,000 volunteers from over fifty countries joined the International Brigades to fight Franco's fascist troops. Artists and writers also turned their art to the defense of Spain, and Latin Americans were no exception. Two of the most outstanding poets of their generation, Pablo Neruda (Chile) and César Vallejo (Peru) wrote perhaps the most powerful books of poetry generated by that historic struggle. In addition, the works of the Mexican muralists from the same period-Diego Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros-show a similar concern for the pressing social issues of the day. We will read Neruda's Spain in the Heart and Vallejo's Spain, Take This Cup from Me in the context of the poets' earlier works, as well as examine their works in the turn from avant-garde art to engagement that took place in the '30s. We will also consider the broader cultural and artistic themes of the twentieth century in Latin America.

Faculty: Anthony Geist

Associated Event: Viva la Musica!, Seattle Symphony, May 6-17