Kiss of the Spider Woman

Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary of the English Language, defines love as "to regard with the affection of a friend." In this seminar, using Johnson's definition as a starting point, we explore friendship and love in works such as Books VIII and IX of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Michel de Montaigne's "On Friendship," "Friendship" from Immanuel Kant's Lecture on Ethics, "Wednesday" from Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the poetry of Whitman and Neruda, the letters of Abelard and Heloise, novels of romantic, even obsessive, love, including Goethe's Sorrows of the Young Werther and Ivan Turgenev's Spring Torrents, and films such as Butterfly (La Lengua de Las Mariposas), Kiss of the Spider Woman, Akira Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala, When Harry Met Sally, Stand By Me, Il Postino, and Sex and the City.

Richard Blot, Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist (New School for Social Research, 1985), is Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism, Communication & Theatre at Lehman College, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Program in Linguistics and teaches regularly in the Lehman Scholars Program. He also teaches Seminar 4: "Shaping the Future of New York" for Macaulay Honors College, including the cross-campus section of Seminar 4 this semester, as well as anthropology courses. He co-authored Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and edited Language and Social Identity (Praeger, 2003).

Richard.Blot@lehman.cuny.edu

MHC 356.01A (0868) | Offered by Lehman

Gateway NRA

Join us at Brooklyn College this summer in our effort to reach the Caribbean and Guyanese communities to better connect them with Gateway and the National Park System (NPS) through a grant from the National Park Foundation and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund for "America's Best Idea Program." During the summer session, students will acquire visual research skills to engage the communities and learn about their impressions, expectations, and appreciations of Gateway and the NPS. In this way, the class will also contribute to building stronger connections between them and Gateway. NPS staff will also be interviewed. As a bonus, students will help produce a documentary video of their own efforts, which will be presented to the community during viewings of the Public Broadcasting Service broadcast of "The National Parks: America's Best Idea."

Jerome Krase, Murray Koppelman Professor and Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn College, received a BA in Sociology at Indiana University (1967) and a Ph.D. at New York University (1973). He is an activist-scholar who serves as a consultant to public and private agencies regarding inter-group relations and other urban community issues and twice served as chair of the Department of Sociology at Brooklyn College. He has written and photographed widely on urban life and culture and has conducted research on urban and ethnic neighborhoods in the US and abroad, and for the past few years he has taught Seminar 2: "The Peopling of New York" in Macaulay Honors College. Books include Self and Community in the City (1982), Ethnicity and Machine Politics (1992), Race and Ethnicity in New York City (2005), Italian American Politics: Local, Global/Cultural, Personal (2005), and Ethnic Landscapes in an Urban World (2006).

jkrase@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Soc 25H | 1230 | Offered by Brooklyn College