Firstbridge courses are offered to degree seeking freshmen and registration is done via webform in pre-arrival checklist.
Professor(s)
Notes
In 1898, the famous French painter Paul Gauguin finished a large canvas entitled Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?. Influenced by Polynesian culture, to the point that he settled in Tahiti and the Marquise Islands for the last decade of his life, Gauguin was preoccupied with finding a visual equivalent to some fundamental questions: what are the origins of humanity, what is the goal of our existence, what is our place in the universe, what happens to us after we die, what will remain behind us? In his attempt to answer these questions, the artist confronted diverse religious references, from Adam and Eve to pagan totems and Buddha, as well as diverse artistic traditions, from his native Western to Polynesian and Japanese. Gauguin’s work was not an exception; at the end of the 19th century, with the progressive recognition of prehistoric art and non-Western art and cultures, artists embraced essential ethic, scientific, philosophical interrogations revising their own beliefs and stereotypes.
This course will explore how important questions such as what makes us human and why we are here are reflected in or expressed through visual representation. We will go back to prehistoric art and what it tells us about our ancestors, the first men and women; we’ll look at representations of the creation of the world and of humans in different cultures (Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Christian medieval in Western Europe, Polynesian); we’ll see how artworks reveal social attitudes towards the “other,” people of different cultures and color, from the Renaissance to Gauguin; finally, we’ll look at how art was used by the Nazis to answer these big questions through simplified images of the purity of the race suggesting the possible rebirth of a pure race and eventually justifying genocide.
Learning Outcomes
- Students will enhance their information literacy, acquiring an understanding of how information is produced, and discovering how to evaluate, create and use it effectively and ethically. Students will develop an awareness of the conversational nature of scholarship and be able to identify appropriate secondary sources to conduct effective research
- Students will develop public speaking and presentation skills in order to participate effectively and appropriately in academic discussion and as community leaders, in a professional and engaging manner that can convey complex information
- Students will be able to appreciate place as a site of knowledge, to interrogate the multiple meanings of place and develop a more informed and sensitive understanding of interactions between people and their physical environment
- Students will learn to formulate questions that can lead to greater learning and productive individual and group research projects
- Students will strengthen the concrete skills and aptitudes to be successful at AUP and beyond, such as study skills and time management, the mindsets that lead to lifelong learning, and desired classroom behaviors and interpersonal skills
- Local and Global Perspectives: Students will enhance their intercultural understanding of languages, cultures, and histories of local societies and the global issues to which these relate (CCI LO1)
- Aesthetic Inquiry and Creative Expression: Students will engage with artistic or creative objects (e.g., visual art, theatrical works, film) in different media and from a range of cultural traditions (CCI LO2)
- Exploring and Engaging Difference: Students will think critically about cultural and social difference; they will identify and understand power structures that determine hierarchies and inequalities that can relate to race, ethnicity, gender, nationhood, religion, or class (CCI LO3)
- Information Literacy: Students will comprehend how information is produced and valued in order to discover, evaluate, use, and create information and knowledge effectively and ethically. In FirstBridge, students will demonstrate the conversational nature of scholarship, and recognize their potential role and responsibilities as contributors to that conversation. For each discipline taught in FirstBridge, students will identify reference works, journals, databases and/or major works in history, in order to start effective research in the field.
- Life at University: Students will acquire the study skills, time management, and interpersonal skills needed to meet the demands of university-level academic work at a Liberal Arts College individually or as a team. Students will value the multiple meanings of place through experiential learning at AUP and beyond in the Parisian or global context.
Syllabus
Schedule
Day | Start Time | End Time | Room |
---|---|---|---|
Friday | 15:20 | 16:40 | VISIT-1 |
Tuesday | 13:45 | 15:05 | C-101 |
Friday | 13:45 | 15:05 | C-101 |