Who am I? How do I relate to others around me – family, peer groups, society or culture? Am I free to act as I see fit, or is my life determined by God, nature, social norms and expectations? How do we connect to our past through memory, heritage and tradition? What prompts us to work together, or fight each other? These are some of the fundamental questions that human beings have been asking, and which our societies attempt to address through human cultural creativity, imagination and thought – in our music, film, photography, and other visual arts, literature, philosophy, but also in our everyday interactions with each other. These sorts of questions stand, therefore, at the very heart of the humanities.

This course provides a broad introduction to the humanities by examining what we often take for granted as - the idea of culture as a repository of values, as aesthetic and literary traditions, as the product of human creativity, as a means through which we relate to our social and natural surroundings. The course traces the ways culture has been understood in the past and present by exploring diverse accounts: from Pericles’s funeral oration in Ancient Athens, to Karl Marx’s German Ideology, from Marshall Berman’s analysis of modernity to the poetry of Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, and Spike Lee’s bitter-sweet account of a day in a Brooklyn neighborhood in his movie Do the Right Thing. Readings, artworks, video clips and films will span across different cultural traditions, genres, and historical ages—from antiquity to the contemporary world, and from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to the world of Canada’s indigenous communities.

• Thucydides: The History of the Peloponnesian War (edited by P. J. Rhodes and transl. by Martin Hammond). Oxford University Press, 2009. 

• Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Sonny Assu, et al.  This Place: 150 Years Retold [graphic novel] Portage & Main Press, 2019 

• Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Penguin, 1988.  

Additional readings provided through Canvas.  

Your personalized Course Material list, including digital and physical textbooks, are available through the SFU Bookstore website by simply entering your Computing ID at: shop.sfu.ca/course-materials/my-personalized-course-materials.

Search for a new outline