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Hum 110 Book Club Syllabus

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Each unit is expected to take approximately one month for each book club to cover. Individual schedules may vary by group.

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Year 1: Ancient Mediterranean 

Completed Summer 2025

Most book clubs launched this unit in September 2024 and completed these units in Summer 2025, but individuals are welcome to revisit these units:

Year One Syllabus

Year 2: Mexico

Books Needed

These specific editions are suggested, but not required, for alumni participants. Books may be purchased through the Reed Bookstore. Additional assigned texts are available on e-reserves accessible to participating alumni via links embedded in the syllabus below.

Unit I: Introduction to Tenochtitlan: Mexica Worldviews

How are worldviews expressed in myth, architecture, and practice? What aspects of precolonial society survive in these documents? To what extent can we recognize and understand those survivals in retrospect? Many assignments from this syllabus involve buildings or artworks. It is important that you spend time looking at these and thinking about their significant features and their larger meaning—actively looking, as if actively reading.

Assignment
Lectures
  1. Margot Minardi, “Mapping the Cosmos at the Templo Mayor.” (lecture handout)
  2. James Maffie (University of Maryland, guest lecturer) “Mexica (Aztec) Philosophy at the Time of the Conquest.”

Unit II: Origins and Survivals / Mexica Codices

How do different actors make use of the past to understand or interpret their own contemporary society, worldview, or culture? How are the past and the present shaped and narrated in order to justify contemporary social orders? What aspects of precolonial society survive in these documents? To what extent are precolonial survivals translated or effaced by the colonial context of their creation?

Assignments
Lectures
  1. Nathalia King, “We Walked a Long Time to Get Here; We Have Been Here Forever.” (lecture handout)
  2. David Garrett, “Reading Mexica Imperialism through the Codex Mendoza.” (lecture handout)

Unit III: Narrating New Spain / Accounts of New Spain and the New Spanish Order

How are the past and the present shaped and narrated in order to justify contemporary social orders? What aspects of precolonial society survive in these documents? To what extent are precolonial survivals translated or effaced by the colonial context of their creation? What is cultural hybridity?

Assignments
Lecture
  1. Nigel Nicholson, “Telling the Story of New Spain.” (lecture handout)

Unit IV: Narrating New Spain / Accounts of New Spain and the New Spanish Order

How are the past and the present shaped and narrated in order to justify contemporary social orders? What aspects of precolonial society survive in these documents? To what extent are precolonial survivals translated or effaced by the colonial context of their creation? What is cultural hybridity?

Assignments
Lecture
  1. Jenny Sakai, “‘She is Ours, All Ours’: The Virgin of Guadalupe as a Political Symbol.” (lecture handout)

Unit V: Colonial Hierarchies and Resistance / Sor Juana

How did New Spanish colonial society figure itself in relation to Europe and Central America? How do gender, class and race intersect in the self-fashioning of Sor Juana? What voice or voices does she adopt or project?

Assignments
  • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Reply to Sor Filotea,” “First I Dream,” Redondilla 92 (“A Philosophical Satire”), Decimas 130 and 132, Sonnet 161, and “Loa to Narcissus” in Poems, Protest, and a Dream,  in Poems, Protest, and a Dream, 1-75, 77-129, 148-51, 165, 179, 195-239. [Book]
Lectures
  1. Ann Delehanty, “Knowledge in the Reply to Sor Filotea” (lecture handout)
  2. Ariadna Garcia-Bryce, “Sor Juana’s ‘First Dream’ Baroque Poetics” (lecture handout)

Unit VI: Envisioning the Modern Nation / Constitutional Debates

What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is the Mexican past framed?

Assignments
Lectures
  1. Margot Minardi, “Turning Points: Mexico in the Nineteenth Century.” (lecture handout)
  2. David Garrett, “Modernity and the Mexican Revolution.” (lecture handout)

Unit VII: Envisioning the Modern Nation / The Mexican Muralists

What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is the Mexican past framed?

Assignments
Lecture
  1. Nigel Nicholson, “State-Sponsored Art.” (lecture handout)

Unit VIII: Envisioning the Modern Nation / Luis Buñuel

What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is Mexico City framed?

Assignments
  • Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned), a film directed by Luis Buñuel (1950) (available from Amazon and YouTube).
  • Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” Sight and Sound 2 (1953): 64-69.
Lecture
  1. John Sanders, “Dreams and Nightmares: Form and Context in Los Olvidados.” (lecture handout)

Unit IX: Envisioning the Modern Nation / José Emilio Pacheco

What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is Mexico City framed?

Assignment
  • José Emilio Pacheco, “Battles in the Desert,” Battles in the Desert and Other Stories, trans. Katherine Silver (New York: New Directions, 1987), 81-117. [Book]
Lecture

Unit X: Envisioning the Modern Nation / Elena Poniatowska

What is modernity? What is the nation? How do different agents represent the modern nation? Who speaks for the modern nation? Who is the national audience, and how can it be addressed? How is Mexico City framed?

Assignment
  • Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) [Book]
Lectures

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