2003-2004 SEMINARS

1. Rituals of Remembering
Saturdays, October 18 and November 1, UW Simpson Center and the Burke Museum, 10am-2pm

How we anticipate dying and what we imagine happens to us next reveals the depth of human contemplation and creativity. How do different cultures remember those who have died, whether the deceased was a close relative, an unnamed soldier or a national leader? This seminar looks at the various ways that death and the afterlife have been imagined historically in Judeo-Christian cultures, as well as how contemporary American death practices compare with those of earlier times and with other cultures. Anthropologists think of each culture's death beliefs and practices as a "system," and we will consider the features of some of these systems, including the meaning of a dead body; competing ideas of what should be done with it; transitions from the earthly realm to some other; the stories of people who say they have been there; and on-going relations between the living and the dead. We will also explore some contemporary examples of these themes in the preparation of the body, memorialization, the language of grief, and current, even fashionable trends in do-it-yourself ritualization and remembrance.

Faculty: James Green

Associated Event: Reverent Remembrance: Honoring the Dead, The Burke Museum, October 3, 2003 ­ February 22, 2004

2. Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature and Theater
Saturdays, October 25 and November 8, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

Since the 1980s, the emergence of U.S. Latina writers has broadened the terrain of what constitutes American literature and theater. Latina writers seek and create new worlds through their artistic visions and often use language and narrative to escape the confines of categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality—categories that can keep Latina writers, among others, in their "place." Together we will explore the way these writers wage a struggle for the power to define new worlds and new ways of being in the world. Metaphors of travel will be the unifying theme of the seminar, traced in particular in the works of Sandra Cisneros, Cherrie Moraga, Marisela Norte, and Marga Gomez. Genres to be discussed include short stories, performance art, and the spoken word.

Faculty: Michelle Habell-Pallen

Associated Event: Sandra Cisneros, Seattle Arts & Lectures, October 27, 2003

3. Does Place Matter? Contemporary Art on the West Coast
Saturdays, November 8 and 22, Seattle Art Museum, 12:30-4:30 pm

This seminar will review the historical context and the critical issues invoked by the tension between the "global" and the "local" in art. Together will we will engage with these tensions in art and culture using a survey of representational artworks by West Coast artists who depict their local environments. With the pioneering exhibition, From Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast in Contemporary Art, as our starting point, the seminar will explore a number of issues in contemporary art, including a lingering nostalgia for "regionalism" in art, the relationship of visual practices on the margins to those in cultural centers (and vice versa), and the dominant position Los Angeles and Vancouver now occupy among West Coast visual art centers. We will also consider what the visual evidence in this show might tell us about a shared West Coast sensibility or aesthetic and how critics might evaluate the diverse achievements of individual artists.

Faculty: Patricia Failing

Associated Event: Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum, October 9, 2003 ­ January 4, 2004

4. Americans Abroad in the Jazz Age Novel
Saturdays, November 15 and December 6, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm


The years between the First and the Second World Wars were times filled with glamour and excitement, but they were also tinged by profound sadness and uncertainty. This range of feeling is masterfully portrayed in the novels and short stories of American writers of that era. The seminar will focus on the world of American expatriates in Europe between the wars, focusing in particular on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Both novels are set in the mid-1920s along the French Rivera and use as a backdrop the social and cultural ambiguities of the post-World War I world. Both novels draw heavily on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, examining the silences and the power of female madness. By exploring issues of life, madness, inspiration and writing in these novels as well as other works, such as Zelda’s own account of the time, this seminar will pose a series of questions including: whose narrative is it and who has the right to tell it? What is the process by which life is transformed into art? And what is the cost of such transformation?

Faculty: Ann Putnam

Associated Event: Zelda, Scott, and Ernest, Seattle Arts & Lectures, November 5, 2003

5. Understanding Abstract Painting
Saturdays, January 10 and 24, Seattle Art Museum, 10am-2pm

In the visual arts, the most radical new development since Renaissance perspective was undoubtedly abstraction, an invention that changed the face of twentieth-century art. Rather than faithfully replicating visual appearances, abstract artists explored the undiluted power of non-representational forms and colors. They believed their works were more "real" because they dispensed with the false illusion of objects and space, of dreams, fantasy, or otherworldly escapes. Instead, they presented painting and sculpture as real objects in real space, giving the artwork a different kind of presence, both engaging and confrontational. With the Seattle Art Museum’s exhibit International Abstraction: Making Painting Real as our starting point, this seminar will explore the history of abstraction, beginning in the twenties and thirties when abstraction became a truly international phenomenon, gaining in vitality and fulfilling its original promise to become a kind of simplified "universal" language, understandable to all. We will also examine what socio-historical, scientific, and psychological circumstances led artists to explore radical new territories.

Faculty: Marek Wieczorek

Associated Event: International Abstraction: Making Painting Real, Seattle Art Museum, May 2, 2003 ­ February 29, 2004

6. Shakespeare's Family Tragedies
Saturdays, January 17 and 31, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

Though all of Shakespeare's tragedies touch on family issues, three of them are unimaginable without them: King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. For this reason, perhaps it is not surprising that these are three of the most performed, and most read of the tragedies. Why, exactly, is family such a powerful tragic theme? How does family provide a particularly powerful connection between the "great" figures of classical tragedy and the lives of ordinary people? What dimensions of family thematics does Shakespeare rely on the most? Although we will reflect on how the theme of family works in all three of these tragedies, we will pay special attention on the play many have thought of as Shakespeare's greatest: King Lear. The seminar will explore broad notions of family tragedy and we will consider some of the implications bringing intricate family dynamics to life on the stage. After attending a performance of King Lear, we will consider how various productions of the family tragedies on stage and screen present issues of love, loyalty, duty and betrayal.

Faculty: John Webster

Associated Event: King Lear, Seattle Shakespeare Company January 22 ­ February 15, 2004

7. U.S. Poetry Today
Saturdays, February 7 and 21, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

This seminar will provide an introduction to the diverse, ambitious, and exciting poetries being written in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. After exploring some of the recent verse by the first generation of postmodern writers (John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, and Adrienne Rich), we will then take a look at poetry by some of today’s most eminent figures (Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham, and Charles Wright) as well as by a number of other talented, visionary authors (including Billy Collins, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, Robert Pinsky, Luci Tapahonso, and C.D. Wright). Over the course of the seminar we will consider a range of topics, including the popularity of oral poetries, especially slam and spoken word; the possible obsolescence of postmodernism; and shifts in the production and reception of verse brought about by the Internet and other digital media.

Faculy: Brian Reed

Associated Events: Billy Collins, Seattle Arts & Lectures, January 13, 2004; Poetry Series, Seattle Arts & Lectures, February-April 2004

8. Euripides: Ancient Drama, Modern Sensibilities
Saturdays, February 14 and 28, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

Writing as a member of an intellectually vibrant community and against the backdrop of Athenian imperialism and its collapse, the ancient Greek playwright Euripides seems strangely modern to us today. Aristotle tells us that Sophocles maintained that he "portrayed people as they should be," but Euripides "portrayed them as they are." Considered by his contemporaries as an iconoclast, Euripides used the traditional tales of Greek mythology to probe, often in disturbing ways, issues of passion, knowledge, madness, violence, divinity, and mortality. We will consider his explorations of these issues with a focus on three of his most influential plays—Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.

Faculty: Michael Halleran

9. Flamenco: Roots and Wings
Saturdays, February 21 and March 6, UW Simpson Center, 10am-2pm

Flamenco has become the emblem of Spain: passionate guitars, wailing song, stomping feet and flashing eyes. Yet as much as music, Flamenco is the expression of an entire culture. As the musical culture of the Spanish gypsies, Flamenco has, since its origins in ancient India, taken on the influences of surrounding cultures, whose echoes can be heard in it today, from Arabic and Hebrew ritual chants to Spanish folk music. Flamenco varies from the primitive rhythms of martinets and tonás, accompanied by instruments as rudimentary as bottles, frying pans, anvils and canes, to the most sophisticated contemporary fusion with jazz and salsa. We will learn how Flamenco emerged in the late eighteenth century from private gypsy ceremonies and from tavern culture and then went on to capture the imaginations of writers and artists such as Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca and the painter Julio Romero de Torres. It has also caught the hearts of innumberable foreigners. Together will study Flamenco as poetry, music, dance and, ultimately, as a way of life.

Faculty: Anthony Geist

Associated Event: Ballet Flamenco Eva Yerbabuena, World Dance Series, Meany Theatre, University of Washington, March 4-6, 2004

10. The Realm of the Buddhas: Art, Iconography and Ritual Space
Saturdays, February 28 and March 13, Seattle Asian Art Museum, 10am-2pm

The study of Buddhist art, and particularly the figure of the Buddha, is a field that provides insights into the fascinating artistic, cultural and religious legacies of the Buddhist world – past and present. Making use of a new exhibition of Buddhist artifacts at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, this seminar will bring to life the representational imagery of the pre-modern Buddhist world and explore the visual and physical elements of Buddhist icons. Together we will examine relics and reliquaries, representations and ornaments, and the many types of icons and divinities. How did these images function within the Buddhist ritual and tradition? How were the appearance of Buddhist images designed to affect and transform their contemplators? What can we learn about Buddhist devotion and local cultures through the artistic style, materials, construction and embellishment of Buddhist images?

Faculty: Cynthea Bogel

Associated Event: Discovering Buddhist Art: Seeking the Sublime, Seattle Asian Art, Museum permanent collection

11. Considering Pocahontas: A Case Study in Authenticity and Historical Accuracy
Saturdays, May 1 and May 15, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

The popular 1995 Disney film, Pocahontas, provides a wonderful opportunity to explore the genesis of stereotype as well as to explore issues of authenticity and historical accuracy in regard to the Pocahontas/John Smith story. In this seminar we will view the film and study the controversy that surrounds the movie. For example, American Indian Movement activist Russell Means called Pocahontas "the single finest work ever done on American Indians by Hollywood," while Robert Eaglestaf, principal of American Indian Heritage High School in Seattle, said that the movie "is like trying to teach about the Holocaust and putting in a nice story about Anne Frank falling in love with a German officer." Participants will read a range of historical materials about Jamestown, Pocahontas, and Smith and discuss how the movie and the "Pocachontas myth" has been written and rewritten in history and in the popular imagination. Together we will examine in depth issues such as representation and stereotyping, using film to teach social science and literature, and directing student explorations of American history.

Faculty: Tom Colonnese

12. John Steinbeck’s America
Saturdays, May 8 and May 22, UW Simpson Center, 9am-1pm

John Steinbeck’s writings helped define America during the middle decades of the twentieth century. From his breakthrough novel, Tortilla Flat (1935) to his 1962 commentary, Travels With Charley, his books helped a generation think about the great challenges of their time. His was an age that moved through global depression and then through global war, an age that completed the shift from a nation of farms to a nation of cities and suburbs, an age that reinvented government and gave working-class Americans new rights and labor unions new power, and an age that started to remake the rules of race and gender. It was also an age that used art and literature in particular ways. In this seminar we will explore both the history and literature of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. We will read selections of Steinbeck and talk about the trajectory of the Popular Front artist. We will also read pieces by historians that help illuminate key aspects of American culture and society in that critical era.

Faculty: James Gregory

Associated Event: Travels with Charley: In Search of America, Book-It Repertory Theatre, May-June 2004