The development of a mid-level undergraduate course for students in nursing, business, and the sciences to explore the value and role of art in human life.

The development of a mid-level undergraduate course for students in nursing, business, and the sciences to explore the value and role of art in human life. Three faculty members (in philosophy, literature, and history) develop a course on the question, Why does art matter? Anchoring the course in W. E. B. Du Bois' 1903 essay, "The Talented Tenth," they situate art within the liberal arts tradition and tie it to questions of value. The first of three units begins with a historical focus. Students read Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann, among others, to explore differences between intrinsic and instrumental value, and between aesthetics and taste. In the second unit students consider the value of the difficult in art. They first read Henry James' 1884 essay, "The Art of Fiction," which argues that "no good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind." They then read William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. In the final unit, students explore the value of the arts in American society. Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities prompts inquiry about the relationship between democracy and the arts. Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others prompts discussion about what it means to look at images of war. The course is intended to bridge the gap between liberal arts and professional programs and expand the nascent honors program, most of whose students have declared majors in nursing, business, and the sciences. To link the arts and professional domains further, students interview local, business, science, and medical professionals about their views on art. A workshop at the Corning Museum of Glass with arts and business leaders probes these views in depth. The faculty engage in interdisciplinary challenges as they meet weekly over the summer of 2014 to finalize the syllabus. They also collaborate after teaching the course by presenting their work at the Institute for Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts at Emory University and at a regional faculty development program.

Endowment for publication subventions and an award program in musicology as well as fund-raising costs.

The American Musicological Society seeks an NEH challenge grant of $240,000, which with a 4:1 match will yield $1,200,000. These funds will endow four publication-related initiatives of the Society. The bulk of the funds ($900,000) will create a new subvention supporting the publication of first books by young scholars, whose work often represents the cutting edge of scholarly research, but whose careers are often at their most fragile or challenging point. The remainder will go primarily to existing publication subvention programs, supporting musicological books more generally ($125,000) as well as a monograph series sponsored by the Society ($100,000). These subventions aim to optimize the quality of the best scholarly books on music while keeping their prices affordable. Finally, we propose a new award for books on music in American culture ($50,000), a vital area of musical research that appeals to the broadest literary and musical public.

Two major and two minor German-speaking poets of the first third of the 20th century examined against broad background of intellectual history to show that their traditional apolitical posture was suffused with outspoken right right-wing bias. R.M. Rilke lavished praise on Mussolini's repressive rule; Gottfried Ben became a spokesman for the Nazis during the first year of their dictatorship; Max Kommerall, a sensitive translator and theoretician of poetry, hailed Mein Kampf for its "right and sound instincts;" and Thomas Mann described Ernest Bertram as alienated by "his enthusiastic faith in the approaching 'Third Reich'." Aim to understand not only what attracted such refined artists to fascism but even more how these tendencies affected their work. Interdisciplinary approach--literature, social and political science--with a view of literature as part of the social fabric producing it.

This proposed book manuscript will examine the processes by which the work of the German modernist author Thomas Mann was translated, imitated, adapted and interpreted in the United States during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. During this period Mann reached the zenith of his popular acclaim in America, selling hundreds of thousands of books. I will argue that over the course of these decades, a time in which his works were largely unavailable in Germany because of a ban by the Nazis, Mann became the first author in the history of world literature to write books in the conscious knowledge that they would have their main impact in translation. In this, he anticipates contemporary authors such as Milan Kundera, Haruki Murakami, or Orhan Pamuk.

To undertake a program of intensive reading in the works of C.G. Jung and his interpreters, primarily Erich Neumann, Jane Harrison, Joseph Campbell, Esther Harding, and Irene de Castillejo. To apply the Jungian model to selected works of Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. To study the nature of creative imagination, to determine the aesthetic experience of the teacher, to find the place of poetry in human experience generally--using the psychoanalytic approach to these issues. To attempt to discover, through the reading of literary works by and about women, whether there is a specifically feminine sensibility or psychology, and, if there is, how it relates to human nature in general.

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To study Brandes' role as an historian of European Romanticism. This research will show how Brandes', vast readings permitted him to be one of the first literary critics to analyze Romanticism as a pan-European movement. Project will also demonstrate how Brandes' comprehensive perspective and lucid style served as a source for the encyclopedic novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann.

A six-week seminar for fifteen college and university faculty on the cultural experience and contributions of German artists, writers, and musicians who fled Nazi Germany to settle in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s.

This seminar for college teachers examines the complex cultural interactions that took place when German writers, artists and musicians who had fled Nazi Germany encountered American culture during the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, the seminar focuses on German intellectuals who gathered in the Los Angeles area, including the novelist Thomas Mann, the playwright Bertolt Brecht, film directors Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, the actress Marlene Dietrich, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, and the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Hanns Eisler. Their works display rich tensions between their European heritages and their encounters with American democracy, in particular the "mass culture" of the film industry. Grateful for the refuge they found, the exiles engaged in thoughtful reflections on the cultural distance between their background and the American they experienced, especially with regard to problems of art and politics, democracy, and modernism.

To research an aspect of Thomas Mann which has attracted scant attention: the reception and criticism of Mann in the Hispanic world.

No project description available