SHUM 4506 - European Temporal Imagination

Spring. 4 credits.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students.

K. Grotke.

This course offers an exploration of the European temporal imagination, or the ways that questions and concerns about time have been integral to both cultural self-understanding and philosophical reflection. Two main questions guide the course: what are the key patterns of argument related to time in the Western tradition? How did scientific knowledge, cross-cultural encounters and methodological disputes shape or change these patterns? The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a period of rapid temporal expansion in both extent and detail: geology shifted the scale of time, and chronological work propelled claims for a truly “universal” history. Departing from these developments, the course explores how temporal ideas have functioned within and shaped different disciplinary and institutional contexts.

For longer description and Fellows’ bios please visit www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/index.html.