Fall 2016

Instructors: Stephen Greenblatt (English), Louis Menand (English), David Carrasco (Anthropology), Jay Harris (Religion), Jill Lepore (History), Deidre Lynch (English)

Seminar Leader: Deidre Lynch

In Hum 10, you will study and discuss important works of literature, philosophy, and the arts. You will receive intensive training in writing critical papers. And you will have the opportunity to experience current cultural events at Harvard and in the Boston area. Hum 10 is a two-part series: Hum 10a includes works from the ancient world to the present, chronologically. Hum 10b begins with a work of literary modernism and moves backward in time to the ancient world. Professors run both lectures and seminars. The course is designed for students interested in concentrating in a Humanities discipline, but all freshmen are welcome.

The guiding idea behind this course is threefold:

• You will work directly with professors, who are teaching works that they love, that are difficult to understand on one’s own, and that benefit from study in the scholarly community of the Humanities.
• You will work closely with professors and specially trained Teaching Fellows on your writing. Writing workshops are integrated into the course as are one-on-one meetings with your Teaching Fellow. The course may be taken for Expos credit if (a) you were recommended for Expos 20 and (b) you take the full year of Hum 10.
• You will explore the cultural opportunities of your new home, Cambridge and Boston. Events include museum visits, plays, musical events, a walk on Boston’s Freedom Trail, and visits to Harvard’s rare books library and map collection.

This course is a first step into the world of the Humanities. As such, it inevitably covers both too much and too little. Too much: the course goes rapidly through (almost) one work per week. Each work deserves more time. Each work will repay many revisits. But working at a fast pace through many works provides a difference perspective: you see things that you don’t see when you work intensively on any one of them. One of the adventures of Hum 10 is discovering what emerges when we study a great many works together. Too little: although the Hum 10 reading list is long, it represents only a tiny fraction of the many and varied works to be discovered in the Humanities. The course will give you a taste of the Humanities, but the menu of options available is much larger. We encourage you to talk with us about directions to pursue after Hum 10.

The skills you will develop in Hum 10 are skills you will use throughout your life, in whatever profession you choose. These include:

• Skills in reading a text closely and critically: What’s going on between the lines? How is the form affecting the content? How did the historical context affect what we find on the page?
• Skills in writing clearly and in constructing a well-defended argument: How do I communicate my point clearly and succinctly? How do I marshal evidence for my claim? What counts as counter-evidence and how do I address it? How do I draw the reader in? How do I do academic research? How do I give credit where credit is due?
• Skills in productive group discussion: What does it mean to be a good participant in a discussion? How do I express both respect and disagreement? How do I advance the discussion? How do I get clarification when I need it?
• Skills in navigating your own cultural community: What’s going on in my community? How do I get to the MFA? What do you talk about after you see a play? What should I ask of the art I look at in a museum?

Taught through the Harvard College General Education Program, Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding & Culture and Belief Divisions. Taken for a full year, this course also fulfills the College's requirement for Expository Writing.