English 233:  Introduction to Western Humanities - "Baroque and Enlightenment"

Extra-credit Options:

purposes & procedures

Purpose.  This is an opportunity consolidate your grasp of various important themes with which we are concerned in this course and at the same time to see how appreciation of them helps make sense of certain features of our contemporary cultural landscape.  Keep this purpose in mind as you explore the options described below.

Grades.  In the course of the semester each student will have the option to do 1 extra-credit paper worth up to 10 points.  

These papers earn "extra-credit" in the sense that the score you achieve on them will be added to your total, but the points possible on them will not be added to the total of the divisor used to calculate your final course percentage.  

Scope and format.  In general you will be asked to construct a brief essay on a specific topic concerning the work on which you focus.  I will designate the topics from among which you may choose.  If another occurs to you that you might wish to pursue, be sure to check it out with me before proceeding further.  I need to make sure that it is well-formulated enough to be likely to be workable in practice and that it suits the purposes of the assignment.

• Shoot for about a page, single-spaced, standard (i.e., 1") margins, typed, 12-point font or 10 cpi.  Of course you can vary from this stipulation, which, stated so baldly, is ridiculously rigid.  But be mindful of the temptation to skimp:  it's unlikely that you will be able to engage the issues on a level of complexity that justifies investing your energies in the assignment if you are unable to come up with much less than this.

• Invest the time and energy to devise an appropriate organizational strategy for clarifying the relationships that, taken together, constitute the heart and soul of your analysis.  Strive to be specific in your reference to relevant details of the work you are treating.  If you are working with a written text, try to cast these references in your own words.  (An occasional well-chosen quotation is welcome, but beware the temptation to incorporate chunks of someone else's prose.) Take care to explain your interpretive inferences.

Some basic ground rules.

Students are encouraged to discuss course materials with each other.  This includes prep sheets for in-class examinations, topics for out-of-class essays, and extra-credit assignments.  In addition to arranging study sessions among classmates, students may also want to exploit the course listserv to communicate with the rest of the class via e-mail.  Especially useful will be the course message board, where students can initiate discussion on particular topics and contribute to those already under way.

However, all written work submitted for grade -- whether out-of-class or in-class -- must be composed entirely by the individual student.  Faculty Senate regulations require me to bring your attention the following statement:  "Plagiarism and cheating are serious offenses and may be punished by failure on the exam, paper or project; failure in the course; and/or expulsion from the university."  For more information, consult Appendix F of the Faculty Handbook, University Policy Regarding Academic Honesty and Plagiarism. and the Undergraduate Honor System Policy passed by the Faculty Senate on April 14, 1998.

The options.  Here is a brief glance at the subjects addressed under the options available so far.  To learn more about a given option, click on the highlighted phrase  (Additional options may be added in the course of the semester.   Suggestions are welcome.)

• St. Augustine's interpretation of the Genesis story of Original Sin had an immense impact upon the subsequent development of Western Christendom.  Yet early Christianity was not unanimous upon the subject, and many of Augustine's positions  ­­ on relations between the sexes, on the nature of God's will in respect of the political order, on sin and death, on the effect of sin upon the natural word - were vigorously disputed in his day.  What these disputes were, and how they came to be decided the way they did is a fascinating story that modern Biblical scholarship has done much to illuminate.  This assignment focuses on the issues connected with Augustine's thought about the nature of Nature - an aspect of traditional Christian thinking that came under sharp attack in the course of the European Enlightenment.  (Some of the topics under this option can be addressed only after you are acquainted with material we take up later in the course.  But some would be suitable to address after the third week of the course.)

• The film A Man for All Seasons focuses on Sir Thomas More (1477-1535), renowned humanist scholar and friend of Desiderius Erasmus, and Chancellor to King Henry VIII of England.   The writer G.K. Chesterton has described More as the single person who "may come to be counted the greatest Englishman, or at least the greatest historical character in English History."   When Henry VIII broke with Rome over the question of whether his marriage with Catharine of Aragon could be annulled, More was confronted with a conflict of loyalties between his sovereign and his Church.   As one of the foremost lawyers of the realm, More was confident that English law itself limited the circumstances in which the monarch could judicially proceed against his subjects.   At the same time he was under no illusions as to the pressures brought by the Spanish monarch upon the Pope (and the motives behind these pressures) to prevent the annulment from being granted.   More's analysis of his situation, and the process by which he reached the historical decision which he was eventually forced to confront, illuminate issues that enveloped countless individuals in more modest circumstances as the Reformation developed in 16^th-century Europe.   Robert Bolt's play (and subsequent screenplay for this film) powerfully engages the sympathy and intelligence of audiences today.  

• Behind every political settlement there is a history without which it cannot be understood.  A case in point is the "free exercise of religion" clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.  The issues discussed by Roland Bainton in chapter "The Struggle for Religious Liberty" of his classic The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century are essential history for citizens today who care about reconstructing the intentions of the Framers.  They also offer a helpful bridge for entering into the mentality of our cultural ancestors who were unable to imagine not resorting to the power of the state to repress heresy in religion.

• The film Black Robe owes part of its resonance with audiences to issues with which we have to contend today in connection with disputes over "multiculturalism":  how can people who operate within vastly different axiom systems even understand each other?  What has to take place before people coming to each other from such vastly different mental universes can construct for contemplation the premises from which the other is acting?  Can such conflicts as those between the point of view of the Jesuit missionaries in Québec and that of the Algonkian and Huron people they sacrificed themselves to save be resolved only by the obliteration and replacement of one outlook by the other?

• The film The Mission, for example, is designed as a parable for religious and political conflicts that are very much alive in today's "Third World" (e.g., in Chiapas Mexico, in Central and South America, in the Philippines).  These are places where the United States often finds itself defending a status quo that enshrines the wealth and power of a tiny elite and condemns the vast majority of the population to marginality and misery.  The production was in fact financed in part by the Society of Jesus, and includes among its advisors a well-known American activist priest, Father Daniel Berrigan, who first came into public prominence during the protest against the war in Vietnam.  The "threat of a good example" that the Jesuit missions in Paraguay posed for slave plantations in Brazil and what later became Argentina has its counterpart, in the opinion of the film-makers, in places like Grenada and Nicaragua and the "liberated areas" of El Salvador during the 80s.  And indeed church people have been prominent targets of the right-wing terror aimed at deterring people from organizing to force the state to respect the interests of the poor instead of remaining a instrument of their oppression on behalf of the rich.  Meanwhile, the political struggle has been inextricably bound up with a rift within the Christian communities between those who believe in "liberation theology" - the idea that Christians should adopt a "preferential option for the poor" - and those who believe legitimate religion looks for salvation in the other world, through cultivation of resignation, obedience to constituted authority, and non-resistance to oppression in this world.  This split, which has emerged within each of the "mainstream" Protestant denominations as well as within the Roman Catholic Church, is, among other things, a reflection of different interpretations of how Divine Providence expects human beings to act upon the stage of history.

• The film Chocolat, a parabolic tale set in 20th Century France, is a critique of traditional understandings of the source of moral evil as lying in concupiscence.

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  Suggestions, comments and questions are welcome.  Please send them to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 2001 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

      This page last updated 09 December 2001.