David Lasson dlasson@cal.berkeley.edu

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Elective Course Proposals in the Arts and Humanities {Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities are noted where appropriate.}

The Heroic Temper: Beethoven’s Middle Period

Beethoven’s music has never been more beloved, played, and valorized than it is today.

What’s more, we are in the midst of a golden age of Beethoven scholarship: Maynard

Solomon, Lewis Lockwood, and Charles Rosen have made outstanding contributions to

our knowledge of Beethoven through psychological studies, biography, and

musicological analyses, respectively; students will also experience Thayer’s magisterial

Life of Beethoven, considered one of the greatest biographies ever written about anyone.

This course will try to discover why Beethoven’s life and music have so much to say to

us. And although we will be reading the scholars mentioned above, as well as

Beethoven’s own intensely moving “Heiligenstadt Testament” and unsent letter to the

“Immortal Beloved” (whose identity remains unknown after all these years), we will

never lose sight of the profoundly nourishing music itself. We will concentrate on

Beethoven’s middle period compositions, leading up to—and climaxing with—his only

opera, Fidelio, which will be viewed in its entirety on DVD. {Interdisciplinary teaching

possibilities include: music (history and performance), literature (criticism and

biography), social and cultural history, and stagecraft.}

Introduction to Old Norse: The Viking Language Without Tears

Thanks to UCLA’s Jesse Byock it is now possible, through his outstanding and recently

completed textbook, to learn—without tears—the rudiments of the Viking language.

Students will learn the basic grammar and pronunciation and will, by the end of the

course, be able to work through some short reading passages with the aid of a glossary.

Indeed, they will be able to read a simple passage at the conclusion of the first hour of

instruction. Nightly homework and brief daily quizzes will keep everyone on track.

{Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities include: comparative linguistics.}

Njal’s Saga

Students will read what some scholars have called the greatest work in medieval prose

that we have; by any standard it is a masterpiece. The anonymous 13th

-century Icelandic

author tells the gripping story of a fifty-year blood feud. Despite its distance from us in

time and place, Njal’s Saga explores perennial human problems: from failed marriages to

divided loyalties, from the law’s inability to curb human passions to the terrible

consequences when decent men and women are swept up in a tide of violence beyond

their control. {Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities include: literature, social and

cultural history.}

Introduction to Linguistics

Why do the Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, English and Norse words for ‘father’ resemble each

other? Why do twins, both raised in Texas, go off to the same college in New England,

and come home during winter break to have their friends and family remark that while

one twin has lost her Texas accent completely, the other’s is even more pronounced than

ever? Where did the words we speak today come from? And how do new words come

into our language? The science of Linguistics seeks to answer these questions.

David Lasson dlasson@cal.berkeley.edu

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The course will have units on historical, comparative, and socio-linguistics. After an

overview of the discipline, students will form groups based on mutual interest, perform

directed research on their selected topic, and present their findings to the class.

{Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities include: linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and

sociology.}

The “Silent” Cinema

The quotation marks above are there because these early films were not silent, although

there wasn’t any talking: they were designed to be shown accompanied by a full

orchestra, and later by the Mighty Wurlitzer theatre organs of the ’20’s. The thesis of this

course is that these first films were not embryonic strivings lacking the achievement of

their talking offspring, but are, in the best cases, fully realized works of art in their own

right, as eloquent and moving as any artistic statement that we have. We will view, on

DVD, examples of all of the genres from this era: comedy, drama, romance, horror, and

literary adaptation. {Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities include: social and cultural

history, literature (source adaptation and film criticism), and music.}

Introduction to Opera

This course will introduce students to a world of out-sized emotions, voices, and

orchestras: welcome to the world of opera. Granted: the language barrier, the sometimes

far-fetched story lines, and the imprimatur of “high art” make this world a forbidding one

to many would-be opera-goers. Yet New York’s Metropolitan Opera is doing its part to

overcome some of these issues: next season, for example, it is beaming 11 productions in

HD broadcasts to movie theatres nationwide (and in Europe and Asia); this course is

structured around those Saturday broadcasts (which are repeated on Sunday). We will

prepare by studying the musicological, dramatic, literary, historic, and cultural aspects of

those operas slated for HD broadcast. {Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities include:

music, literature (adaptation), languages, and drama (including stagecraft).}

The Art of Translation and Adaptation: The Case of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

This is Chaucer’s completed masterpiece (his uncompleted masterpiece is the Canterbury

Tales), whose theme is human love, with all of its potential for ecstasy and anguish in

body and mind: love as desire and its fulfillment; love at its most idealizing and

transcendent. It is also a novelistic psychological study written in what some sense is the

most ravishingly beautiful poetry in English. Although our approaches will include the

linguistic (we’ll read the poem in the original Middle English) and the stylistic (we’ll

explore the changes—mostly additions—Chaucer made to his source, Boccaccio’s Il

Filostrato, and how his reading of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy heavily

influenced Chaucer’s project), our main concern will be aesthetic: How does this poem

achieve its awesome power to move the reader to contemplate his or her own relationship

with the profoundly flawed world and with the many opportunities to engage the equally

profound beauties on offer here on Earth? {Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities

include: literature, philosophy, social and cultural history, and language (Italian, Latin,

and Middle English.)}

David Lasson dlasson@cal.berkeley.edu

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Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Study in Ambiguity

This body of work remains unchallenged in English poetry for its quality, diversity,

beauty, and intellectual challenges, all of which recommend it a good choice for life-long

study. These sonnets require and reward close reading and kaleidoscopic thinking,

perhaps more so than any others in the canon. While we will give ample attention to the

speakers’ motivations, preoccupations, and utterances, our chief focus will be the reader’s

response in the fullest sense: emotional, intellectual, psychological, and even physical

reactions will be plotted, discussed, and analyzed. What makes a sonnet Shakespearean?

Why do we valorize ambiguity in art and shun it in life? Students will ponder these

questions as they try their hand at the sonnet form. Along the way, we will marvel at

how a reader’s pleasure is augmented considerably by Shakespeare’s ubiquitous

ambiguity, and we’ll consider why this should be so. {Interdisciplinary teaching

possibilities include: psychology and neuroscience.}

The Traitorous Art of Translation

The Italians have a saying: “Tradutore traditore” [‘The translator is a traitor.’]. And,

indeed, many of us have felt betrayed by translations at one time or another; yet, as a

matter of necessity, we are obliged to rely on them whenever our interests take us beyond

what is written in our native or learnt languages. Our starting point for discussion will be

an exploration of two very different English translations of a Sanskrit creation hymn, as

we probe these basic questions: What makes a good translation? What exactly is it that is

“free” in a “free translation”? Should poetry and prose be translated according to

different rules? What about fiction and non-fiction? Students will be asked to consider

these questions as they try their hand at becoming traitors themselves—that is, by

building a portfolio of artful translations. Class time will be divided between instructor

led lectures on basic points of translation theory with student presentations on their

translations—including explanations of their choices and rationale. Time will also be

allotted for students to design and construct a non-language-based accompaniment

(musical, artistic, photographic) to their portfolio-worthy translations. The central thesis

of the course is deceptively simple, yet absolutely crucial for students—at any level—

working with translated texts to fully absorb. It is this: Every translation choice is also

an act of literary analysis and interpretation. As such, our best translations are not only

profoundly useful, but also profoundly beautiful and strikingly original works.

{Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities include: translation theory and comparative

literature.}

A Dream Deferred: The Power and Limitations of Social Activism in our Era of the

New Jim Crow and Colorblindness

In the 1950’s and ’60’s, Martin Luther King and others inspired a generation of

Americans to push through legislation to bring about equal rights and treatment in

housing, the polling booth, and schools (to name but three of the most important areas).

But today, despite the fact that there are highly-placed African Americans in virtually all

areas of American society, The War on Drugs, the closing of the courtroom doors, and

just plain apathy have worked in ghastly concert to bring us where we are at present: to a

place where, in many of our major cities, up to 80% of young African American men

have criminal records, and are thus liable to life-long penal control. By taking the long

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view of history, writers like Michelle Alexander have come to view slavery, Jim Crow,

and our own era of colorblindness as three incarnations of the same phenomenon: as Prof.

Alexander has written, “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely

redesigned it” (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,

The New Press, 2010). Students will familiarize themselves with the relevant literature

on the topic, add to it by undertaking their own field research, and then formulate a plan

to dismantle the racial caste system in America once and for all. {Interdisciplinary

teaching possibilities include: American history, African American studies, sociology,

and criminal justice.}

Eugene O'Neill and the Invention of American Tragedy

"I'll write about happiness, if I ever happen to meet up with that luxury, and find it

sufficiently dramatic and in harmony with any deep rhythm of life. But happiness is a

word. What does it mean? Exaltation: an intensified feeling of the significant worth of a

man's being and becoming? Well, if it means that—and not a mere smirking contentment

with one's lot—I know there is more of it in one real tragedy than in all the happy-ending

plays ever written." So said Eugene O’Neill in an interview he gave to the Philadelphia

Public Ledger in January of 1922. American plays at the turn of the 20th

century could

be fairly described as bland, superficial, or blandly superficial. The characters were, for

the most part, stock and one-dimensional, and could be summed up easily in a couple of

words: the lecherous villain; the innocent ingénue; the attractive but shallow savior/hero.

This is the world in which Eugene O'Neill found himself in the second decade of the

1900's; the day he decided to pick up a pen, this world changed forever. With his early

sea plays, he began to investigate a new kind of American theatre--one based on realism

and complexity of character. He was able to inspire a great rank American of dramatists

to produce a series of tragic visions, the quality and eloquence of which had been

attempted only twice before in the western tradition: first in 5th

-century Athens, and then

in Elizabethan / Jacobean England. We will begin with two of O'Neill's haunting one-act

sea plays; then move on to his tale of passion and infanticide, Desire Under the Elms;

we'll then read Elmer Rice's Street Scene, where the plot involving a stagehand's

murdering his wife and her lover seems ripped from the headlines. We'll then read

Steinbeck's own adaptation of Of Mice and Men; then the realistic treatment of the

physical and emotional scars of war in Arthur Laurents' Home of the Brave; Arthur

Miller's All My Sons, a story of family values gone awry; and Tennessee Williams'

memory-induced dream, The Glass Menagerie. We'll conclude with a final play by

O'Neill, chosen according to the interests of the group. By mid-century, the American

tragedians had established beyond doubt the course of American tragedy for the next 50

years. As we explore this brief period of greatness and authenticity, we'll consider what

provokes a society to call forth from its greatest playwrights a series of tragic visions, and

try to determine why this has happened only three times in the Western literary tradition.

{Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities include: stagecraft, acting, and comparative

literature.}

The Song of the Nibelungs, The Saga of the Volsungs, and Wagner’s Ring

From 1848-1874, Richard Wagner devoted his artistic life to writing the librettos and

music for the four operas that became his Ring cycle. The idea of a tetralogy was

David Lasson dlasson@cal.berkeley.edu

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suggested to him by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (originally performed at a drama

festival/competition as three plays plus a “bonus” satyr play), from which Wagner also

borrowed some thematic and philosophical ideas that he reworked in his librettos. The

main sources for his Ring come from Germanic lore as retold in the Middle High German

Nibelungenlied and the Old Norse Völsunga saga. After we familiarize ourselves with

his source material, we will turn our attention to how Wagner fashioned it into what has

become one of the most demanding works of art—demanding for both performers and

audience—to hold the world’s stages. Ring-mania has taken hold worldwide, and, at the

center of our exploration, we will try to suggest why this work, almost preposterously

difficult to execute properly, has so much to say to us today. Along the way, we will

discover how Wagner invented leitmotifs—musical calling cards—not only for the

characters in his drama (whose goal was gesamtkunstwerk, “a complete work of art”), but

also for inanimate objects like “fire” and “sword,” as well as concepts like “arrogance of

power” and “redemption through love.” These leitmotifs add a psychological dimension

to the proceedings—another requirement present in Greek tragedy that Wagner

embraced. Luckily, there is no shortage of audio as well as video recordings; we will

avail ourselves of the best of these as we attempt to understand both the Ring itself and its

present-day popularity. {Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities include: Stagecraft,

Acting, Literary and Music criticism, and Comparative Literature.}

Nine Plays That Every (American) College Freshman Should Know

Cultural literacy meets great drama: that’s what this course is about. We’ll start with

what might be called our “European heritage”: first, with what could be the oldest

surviving detective story, namely, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannous, where the object of

the detective’s search is actually—and horrifyingly—himself; then we’ll look at Ibsen’s

Doll’s House, which contains, without exaggeration, the door-slam heard around the

world; then Chekhov’s prescient farewell to the aristocratic class and the beauty attending

it, The Cherry Orchard. The second part of the course is devoted to two Shakespeare

plays, Hamlet and As You Like it, chosen as outstanding representatives of his tragedy

and comedy, respectively. The third part of the course attempts to make a strong case for

the Americans being the worthy inheritors of the tragic form, starting with Eugene

O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night; then Arthur Miller’s fervent

plea that “attention must be paid” to the common working man, Death of a Salesman;

then Tennessee Williams’ memory induced dream, The Glass Menagerie; and we’ll

conclude with the revelation,“Oh Earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you,”

Thornton Wilder’s deceptively simple Our Town; indeed, Wilder’s “town,” as is the locus

of all of these plays, is nothing less than the place where the human condition resides, in

all of its degradation and exultation. {Interdisciplinary teaching possibilities include:

stagecraft, acting, literary criticism, and comparative literature.}