AP/HUMA 4730 6.00
Topics in Arts and Ideas: The Frontier
A study of the sources, contexts, expressions, and inter-relationships of the idea of ‘Frontiers’ in ‘The West’. Social, literary, philosophical, and religious works and their interactions with the arts (painting, sculpture, music, architecture, film, and popular culture) are examined from a variety of critical perspectives.
What transformations occur when one cultural reproduction influences other mediums? This course explores the arts and ideas of ‘The Frontier’ in western culture. by identifying and de-constructing aesthetic and critical perceptions of the arts and the social and aesthetic ideas that inform them. This course will examine the many ways that physical, metaphysical, and symbolic frontiers are embodied and transformed with a particular emphasis on the crossing of borders of the mind, imagination, and the arts. First Term: Vietnam War films: The Green Berets, Rambo: First Blood, Part II, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July. Second Term: Architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry and others), the religious in painting, the film Black Panther, speculative fiction, and the series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Throughout the year, the course investigates the unifying and fracturing concepts of frontiers in all of their diversity.