HUM 225 - Values in American Life
Welcome to the course.
This syllabus defines course objectives, learning activities, requirements, and grading policies. If anything is still unclear, come see me in the office—my hours are conveniently located right after class, and my office is in HUM 530.
Here are my Teaching Policies and Mark Policies.
What is this professor like?
I'm a working author and have to have a professional website. You can browse through my books here on my website and decide if my interests are similar to yours.
An old, but accurate, interview which shows how the professor's interests fit together: David Carrier Interview
Dated, but accurate -- lists books about Prof. Leonard's work, including ones critical of him. Note: 2015 was Prof. Leonard's 43th anniversary as a college professor. About Dr. Leonard
GE Credit
The course satisfies Segment II, ARTS AND SCIENCES CORE REQUIREMENTS, Humanities and Creative Arts Area, Category C: Historical/Social/Ethnic/Cultural Contexts. It further satisfies the AERM-- the requirement that you take one course in American Ethnic and Racial Minorities.
This is an intermediate-difficulty course.
We originally conceived this course as a more advanced companion to other courses I teach on this topic.I won't make it a formal prerequisite, but it would help if you have taken my California Culture course first. There's a reading list which is lengthy and expensive by Humanities standards (though the whole list costs list than a single one of your business or nursing textbooks, so don't ask me to feel sorry!)
Marks
There is a museum visit held on a Saturday or Sunday. Attendance is optional but a paper on the museum isn't. Be sure to see what is said about submission requirements and grading elsewhere on this website, as described above.
The Class as Think Tank
Since you live in San Francisco, in the thick of the action, you may know more than any professor back at Yale knows about this. The years when this class has really worked, the students began to realize they were more like a think tank than a class. You really have a lot of information which America wants to know about. I'll help you educate each other. Some of these groups have so recently begun to produce a nationally-known literature or art, no-one knows who their "classics" will be. I'm going to ask your help deciding that. I'll often ask you (as another typical assignment) to read a bunch of new writers and tell me who moved you, who you think deserves to be more widely known. This is a great time to be studying this: the professors haven't got it All Figured Out, there's plenty of room for original ideas and opinions.
So what's the course about?
The course is an ambitious attempt to talk about class, race, and religion-- every topic you're not supposed to talk about at a dinner party. In our controlled setting here, with myself as a strong moderator, you can get a chance to tell people what you think without being shouted down or cut off.
One of the crucial historical values which sets us apart from other nations is our extraordinary diversity. From the first, the dollar bill had the motto: "E pluribus, unum." "Out of many-- one." This part of the course could very well be called, "What you need to know to live and to work in the new cosmopolitan America." It's the most practical work you can do, quite apart from the intellectual appeal.
By "diversity" I mean diversity of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, political opinion, religion-- all manner of diversity. We'll discuss ethnicity as we encounter a variety of films and creative works related to some of America's, and America's most rapidly growing ethnic cultures. When you think about what gives America its flavor, and its unique place in the modern world, perhaps the first thing is, the interplay of ethnicities.If we mean American "culture" in the sense of what gives a place its special flavor, we'd have to say "ethnicity." But what is it? How does it function in our lives? And we'll ask if "gay" can now be discussed as if it were an ethnicity. (I'm not telling you-- I'm asking you. These questions are new and unsolved.) David Sedaris's comic works should come in here.
A lot of what we do in this part of the course is the basic job of learning to decipher "multicultural" works. What's a shiksa, what's a shmuck? I'll give you a lot of insider Yiddish swear words and concepts that you'll realize you've been hearing all your life, since you watched the Genie pop out of the lamp in the Disney classic yelling "Oy!" and kvetching about his back. We'll see how Maus fits here.
What's a pendejo, a coyote or a pollo-- and who is La Migra? When a Japanese American writer refers to his issei father or his happa child, what does he mean? Until you know, you can't begin to enjoy his story.We'll pay attention to the specialized language the different cultures use, and their slang. Sometimes it reveals their interests. For instance, there are no theological curses in Chinese, but Latin American Spanish abounds in them. I'll often ask you, as a short assignment, simply to tell me what words you found hard to understand in some work, and then we'll try to get them explained. You'll discover that many words exist in languages which can't be translated, because they're based on values another culture doesn't share.
But we also talk about "class" not just ethnicity and race. Increasingly, that's where the discussion is going-- beyond, for instance, the early 1990s assumptions that certain races were always oppressed, others were always oppressors. Whatever happened to "the poor"-- to concern for Tom Joad? Are the Okies now just patriarchal white guys, as if they were running the world with the Rockefellers? We read a great new novel, "Old School," about class and prejudice within the white world.
We read two key works about the modern African American experience: the novel, Imani All Mine, and selections from the theoretical work, The Future of the Race, by Gates and West, America's two most famous African American scholars. We'll take a look at some of Tyler Perry's work for insights, and Spike Lee's movie about black college fraternities.
We'll hear George Orwell's ideas about liberal vs. totalitarian societies, and Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas about "the transvaluation of the values." Then we'll relate their ideas to The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. Rand's books routinely sell 300,000 copies a year. Rand made it onto a postage stamp, and she has disciples like Alan Greenspan in the highest places in government. Yet she is never taught, probably because university courses typically trend left. I had never read the book before this summer, though students mentioned it to me for years. If we believe in diversity, we must believe in diversity of opinion as well, and we'll read selections from this long work. I'm happy to report that all the attention paid to her philosophy obscured the fact that it's a good read-- and the heart of it is an amazing, powerful sexual relationship.
And we don't forget religion. One great difference between us and the Europeans which scholars increasingly notice is our interest in unique national forms of religion and spirituality. By contrast with us, Europe has been called "post Christian" and secular. (Maybe that's what their problem is?) Is there an underlying body of values to most of our religions here-- a bedrock "American religion," as Harold Bloom and countless others have argued? Many call it, popularly, "spirituality." We'll learn about it by doing Cage's 4'33" and using Alan Lakein's classic business text, "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life." Even there, in that 1970s commercial book, you'll find underlying it the American Zen idea that "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."
Starting with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Muir, Americans in general have had a religious attitude to the countryside from the start, which led us to pioneer in the ecology movement, and in a related form of art. This religious, mystical current, "natural supernaturalism," will be the subject of our museum visit. As an artist, I'm usually grouped with the wing of the avant garde that comes down from them: Cage, Warhol, Antin, Kaprow, Zen Happenings, Pop Art, Arthur Danto, Woodstock, Fillmores. I can give us an insider's picture of this current, and class allows me to say things I don't put in my books. (One of the reasons I say no taperecorders of any kind, including cell phones, allowed. I want to be completely off the record in class.) We'll do a museum project on this spiritual topic vital to America's culture. Some of our authors are sure to tackle it as well. I'll lecture at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. The lecture is optional; the museum paper on the art isn't.
So: is that enough for you?Everyone from black theorists like Gates and West to libertarians like Rand; plus Cage and Warhol and spirituality. That's "diversity"! We all should know quite a bit more about America, and ourselves as Americans, after watching all these thinkers collide.
Such, anyway, are the topics which have worked in the past. When I know more about you from reading your biographies and computer questionaires, I'll steer the actual course towards this class's interests.
Museum Fieldwork Assignment
ASIAN ART Museum Assignment: ZEN, POP, CONCEPT ART
DOING JOHN CAGE'S 4'33" WITH GEORGE LEONARD: THE DIRECT TRANSMISSION OF THE DHARMA FROM CAGE AND ALLAN KAPROW TO YOU
This year we'll go to the Asian Art Museum. Here's the museum's location. Download these pages and bring to museum, if you don't have them on an iPhone or other device that you can bring. You'll need them there. Bring From Humanism to Mysticism (or Into the Light of Things, if you already bought it) and a pen.
Family and friends welcome. If you buy a membership, you can take a person in free with you and you get a bonus on your paper. Get there fifteen minutes early in case you're stuck on line for tickets. There's a free coat check as you enter. You can't bring backpacks up, they knock into stuff. There's a fine inexpensive snack bar so the best bet is come early and eat lunch there.
For godssake, so you don't wander around in a daze, do yourself a favor and read at least the section labeled The Blissful Hour: 4'33" in Part IV, Chapter C of From Humanism to Mysticism (or Into the Light of Things, if you already bought it) before we do 4'33". Okay? Good. See you.
Prof L.
THE WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT, DUE TWO WEEKS FROM OUR NEXT CLASS:
Part 1: Go through the permanent collection in the rooms that I said would work with our assignment—and only those rooms. Describe in minute detail ONE artwork or object which reminded you of Cage, Kaprow, and what I said about Zen. Check with me to make sure. Take a photo of it, no flash, unless a guard forbids. Make notes in the museum. Number that, Part 1. One page, maximum! Weight: ONLY 10 points. For a bonus: write the whole page without using the word “is” or “was”!
Part 2: Part 2: Sit, contemplating the piece you chose, for at least four minutes and thirty three seconds. Once one of my students contemplated a Robert Ryman for nearly two hours, but he had been a Zen monk. Expect it to be hard work. There will be alternating periods of boredom and interest. You've practiced.
Back at home, in From Humanism to Mysticism (or Into the Light of Things, if you already bought it), re-read Part I, Chapter A. Arthur Danto and “the End of Art,” and Part I, Chapter C, from the section titled, “Emerson, Whitman, and Concept Art,” through the section titled, “Emerson, Whitman: ‘I cannot go back to toys,’” to learn about this kind of art's goal: the “transfiguration of the commonplace,” the mystical wonder of ordinary things. Does it relate to your experience with the painting? Explain how. Quote the book, be specific. Title this Part 2. Minimum, three pages. I'm only looking for your new command of the technical terms and concepts relating to this topic! I MARK ON THE PROSE. THIS IS JUST A WRITING ASSIGNMENT, AS FAR AS THE MARK IS CONCERNED. You don't have to reach nirvana or satori! Weight: Eighty points! Spend time here. Write according to the hints in Break Writer's Block. Change passive to active, cut “is” and “was” every chance you can and substitute just the right word. Use simple active verbs.
Part 3, one page only. OPTIONAL. Tell me if you had any visual or auditory experiences after contemplation that struck you as novel or unusual. (Avoid telling me you found faces, skulls, etc. hidden in the painting. People can find them even in clouds, if they look long enough.) The experiences usually will happen within 72 hours after you left the museum. You may not realize they happened until well after they did. If you had none, just report that, in good prose. Amazingly, most people will have one. That's why we value this kind of art: it works. Weight for Question 3: 10 points IF YOU CHOOSE TO DO IT. (for the prose, not for the experience or lack of it.) NO DEDUCTION FOR SKIPPING THIS QUESTION.