Provost's
General Education Development Program
Proposal
April
5, 2004
Associate
Professor, Spanish
Department
of Modern and Classical Languages
Benjamin.Liu@uconn.edu
/ 486-3313 / U-1057
Until
June 28, 2004: tel +34 91 733 22 16
Course Title:
Christians, Muslims
and Jews in Medieval Spain
Course Format:
100-level
undergraduate lecture course. Designed for approximately 100 students, but
scalable upward to 200 or more students, depending on TA support for grading.
The 3-credit course will be taught in English, and will have optional 1-credit
INTD Linkage through Language sections taught in Spanish and possibly, depending
on student interest, Arabic, Latin and Hebrew.
Course Objective:
This course aims to
furnish students with critical perspectives on current interfaith and
intercultural relations by engaging--at chronological and cultural distance--the
contacts between the diverse cultures and traditions of medieval Spain:
Christian Hispania, Muslim al-Andalus, and Jewish Sefarad.
Relation to General Education Goals:
This course is
designed to address the Arts and Humanities content component (Group 1) of
General Education, with the Multiculturalism and Diversity component (Group 4)
built in as an integral part of the course’s approach. The course will
require no prior preparation in the subject matter and will seek to involve
students in the critical interpretation and evaluation of historical, literary
and other cultural texts (e.g., art and architecture). The emphasis will be on
connecting past and present in ways relevant to issues of contemporary concern,
especially to issues of interfaith and intercultural relations. The diversity
of medieval Spain’s communities will be presented from a variety of
perspectives--Christian, Muslim and Jewish--that resonate with contemporary
points of conflict or convergence.
Evaluation of course objectives:
Evaluation of
objectives will be conducted in two ways. Entry and exit surveys will provide a
measure of how overall student expectations and perceptions change, evolve or
stay the same at semester beginning and end. At the same time, an online, participatory
weblog (“blog”) discussion page will provide a more dynamic picture
and archive of student reactions to developments and events as they unfold both
in class and in the real world.
Course description and rationale:
Spain in the Middle
Ages was a site of intense intercultural contacts that ranged from peaceful
coexistence to open conflict. It has been variously described as one the most
tolerant places on Earth and as a principal chapter in the universal history of
infamy. This course will examine the three religious and cultural traditions of
this shared and contested space, known as Hispania or España to
Christians, al-Andalus to Muslims and Sefarad to Jews. In an age of increased
globalism and of a potential
“clash of civilizations,” the disputed case of medieval and early
modern Spain remains relevant: to some it represents a legacy of crusade,
inquisition and counter-Reformation; to others it is a melting-pot of cultures,
beliefs and intellectual traditions. Both Al-Qaeda and the Spanish troops
stationed in Iraq have invoked “al-Andalus” in their respective
causes; and Sefarad remains a crucial locus of Jewish traditions, letters and
thought before and after the expulsion of 1492.
This course will navigate
a route that is scholarly and calmly balanced, yet not completely sheltered
from the winds and storms of opinion and current affairs. To provide access to
diverse perspectives from medieval Spain, the main readers for the course will
include a variety of sources translated from Spanish, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew
(O.R. Constable, ed., Medieval Iberia:
Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources [Philadelphia: U of
Pennsylvania P, 1997]; selections from C. Smith, ed., Christians and Moors in Spain (Warminster: Aris & Phillips,
1988-89]). Contemporary perspectives on medieval Spain will include films such
as Anthony Mann’s cold-war epic El
Cid (US, 1961); Youssef Chahine’s cinematic portrait of Averroes, Destiny (Egypt, 1997); and Jose Luis Cuerda’s
fifth-centennial critique of the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, La marrana (Spain, 1992). Since one of
the goals is that students learn to connect past and present, and academic and
real-world concerns, the course will feature an online component that will
integrate materials presented in class with web-based resources for study and
consultation outside of class. The main technical and pedagogical innovation to
be introduced in this course will be a dynamic, participatory weblog archive
that will allow running discussion of course-related matters as well as
relevant current events and issues. (Websites I have designed and implemented
for previous courses may be consulted at
http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~bliu/index.htm [username: student; password:student].)
This course is
directly related to my scholarly research on the literatures and cultures of
medieval Spain and more specifically on questions of interfaith interactions.
In a sense, I have been designing this course since my job interview at Uconn
in 1996 in response to a question on my “ideal course.” Since then
I have had the opportunity to put some of these ideas into practice in teaching
earlier avatars of this course at more specialized levels: a senior seminar in
Spanish in 1998 and a graduate seminar in Comparative Literature in 2001.
Having since then also taught 100-level lecture courses on Spanish literature
in translation, I am convinced that this will be a timely and successful
offering that advances the goals of the General Education curriculum. Please
find attached a statement from David Herzberger, Head of the Modern &
Classical Languages department, endorsing the current proposal.