Fall Course 08: Humanities 101 / Humanities 210 "Brave New Worlds" Instructors: Henry Binford (History), Kasey Evans (English), and Carl Smith (English, History, American Studies)

"Captain Gosnold Trades with the Indians" (Theodore De Bry Woodcuts)

Henry Binford Professor Henry Binford is an urban historian specializing in the nineteenth century evolution of cities, suburbs, and slums. His publications include The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860. He was named a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence in 1998.

Kasey Evans Professor Kasey Evans teaches and writes about medieval and Renaissance literature, especially narrative poetry. She is currently working on a book about changing representations of temperance in Renaissance literature, where the virtue is transformed from a broad concept of moderation to a specifically pre-capitalist notion of time-management. Her forthcoming publications include articles on allegory and personification; scenes of misreading in Shakespearean drama; and New World slavery in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. She is particularly interested in questions of race, gender, and sexuality as they shape Renaissance English literature.

Carl Smith Professor Carl Smith is the author of Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (1995). His most recent book is The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (2006). Like Professor Binford, he was designated a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence.

Hans Holbein, Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia, 1516

Students in this coordinated lecture and seminar course will examine and discuss the distinctive visions of what constitutes “the good society” offered by several different authors and artists during three major moments in Western cultural history: the Northern European Renaissance, the Enlightenment in Europe and America, and the Technological Revolution in Britain and the United States. The written and visual texts to be studied raise many critical questions about the good society: What is the proper relationship between the individual and community? How are politics to be conducted? What about the relations between and among the sexes? What constitutes a meaningful education? This course is entitled "Brave New Worlds" because people in all three periods claimed that theirs was a genuinely new age full of wonderful possibilities. The title is also apt because in both its original use by Shakespeare in The Tempest and in its appropriation by Aldous Huxley for the title his 1932 novel, the term expresses an ironic awareness that making a new world can lead to unintended and undesirable complications. These classes will explore the ironies as well as the achievements that result from the continuing attempts to envision and enact a better world.

Virginia Capitol

The classes will meet in alternating days as a lecture course and a seminar discussion course. The three instructors will divide the lectures and each will lead one of the seminars. Students will have the opportunity to read and discuss a wide variety of written and visual sources, along with some of the best work by modern scholars, supplemented by addition sources. For example, we will look at painter Hans Holbein’s stunning portraits of political and spiritual leaders when we are also analyzing Thomas More's ideas of a more perfect world in his Utopia (1516) and viewing a modern retelling of his sacrifice of his life for his principles in the Oscar-winning 1966 film, A Man for All Seasons. We will take advantage of the extraordinary array of cultural resources in the area with class trips to such places as the Art Institute of Chicago to see art works representative of the three periods we are exploring.

Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936

Some primary texts:
Thomas More, Utopia, 1516
Michel de Montaigne, Of Cannibals, 1575
John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, 1630
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
Robert Hooke, Micrographia, 1665
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932

Robert Hooke, Micrographia, 1665