Spring Term, 2003

Final Paper Assignment

Due Wednesday, May 14 Before 5 PM

Requirements:

Length: A typed paper of 2000 words (6-8 typed pages).

Source Material: Course material studied this semester as contained on the course syllabus and web page (http://www.tc.umn.edu/~jbshank/WestCiv.html). You may consult other sources as well if you desire, but consultation of sources not on the syllabus is not required. If you do use outside sources be sure to document them in footnotes and a bibliography.

Due: Wednesday, May 14 Before 5 PM.

This final writing assignment is designed to provide you an opportunity to respond critically and personally to your semester in History 1032. It therefore differs in substantial ways from your earlier writing assignments. For this assignment, you may write a critical textual analysis like the previous essays you have written, but you need not do so. Instead, you may opt to write a creative paper, or develop a critical response which employs other conventions of writing beyond those of the analytical essay. Below are a set of suggested topics which you may find useful in preparing your paper. These suggestions end, however, with an invitation to you to develop your own critical and creative final response to the history of “Western Civilization.” The possibilities for imaginative final papers are enormous, and we encourage you to pursue them. Whatever path you take, however, be sure to consult with your seminar instructor to make sure that your paper ideas are appropriate to this assignment.

While a variety of different successful papers are imaginable, all must have the following: 1.) They must adhere to the length, style, and documentation requirements described above, and to those specified by your individual seminar instructor; 2.) They must be turned in on time. No extensions will be offered except in the case of serious medical difficulties; and 3.) They must directly engage with the course material by integrating a discussion of at least three (and no more than four) of the course texts into the paper. You may choose any three texts to include, but you are restricted by the following guidelines in making your choice: a.) At least one of the texts must be Heart of Darkness, The Wretched of the Earth, Survival in Auschwitz, or Beloved; b.) At least one of the texts must be something other than Heart of Darkness, The Wretched of the Earth, Survival in Auschwitz, or Beloved. What this means is that your paper must address one text from the final third of the course, one from the previous two-thirds of the course, and a third of your own choosing from anywhere on the course syllabus. Papers that do not meet this requirement will be considered unacceptable.

Whatever type of paper you choose to write, your grade will depend entirely on the sophistication of your engagement with the lectures and course texts; the subtlety, accuracy, and intelligence of your use of these materials; and the quality of your intellectual exposition and writing. In other words, the value of your creativity or the character of your personal opinions will not be judged, only the quality of your intellectual work.

Suggested Topics:

1.) As part of our effort to critically scrutinize “the West,” we have returned on numerous occasions to the claim often made by “Westerners” that there exists “one transcendent truth that is supreme above all others.” The claim of the Catholic church to be the one and only church of the one and only God is one example of such a transcendent claim, but even more influential in the contemporary world has been the claim of science to represent the one and only truthful account of the one and only universal nature. Beginning with Descartes’ “rational thinking individual” and Bacon’s collectivist approach to empirical inquiry and then intensified through the Enlightenment application of these methods to all facets of human life, science has come to occupy a central position within the “Western” mental map. Connected in deep ways to the transcendent claims of Christianity that preceded it, science has also become a “Western” religion of sorts whose claims to universal, transcendent truth often pass as unquestionable articles of faith. What are the effects of such a powerful belief in science? When are its claims to transcendent truth justified and when are they masking more complex realities? If science is but one way among many to see the world, how is its claim to universal objectivity secured and how are other ways of seeing the world “particularized” as a result? What are the consequences of this prioritization? For this question, make sure that you consider science broadly to include not only “natural science” as described by Descartes, Bacon, and others, but also the work of “social scientists” such as Marx, Smith, and Rousseau. What happens when a rationalist, scientific worldview is applied to the “real world” of nature, including human nature?

2.) In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes “Decolonisation is the veritable creation of new men.” Men must be remade, Fanon contends, because the system of imperialism has produced the subjectivities of the “colonizer” and the “colonized” such that remaking these subjectivities is essential for removing the system of imperialism. Viewed from one perspective, Fanon’s insight can be seen as a description of the process of “Western Civilization” as a whole. Beginning with Luther’s individual Christian believer and Descartes’s thinking “I,” the “West” has been rooted in claims about the nature and authority of individual human subjects. Making “the West” has thus meant making certain kinds of people, and the history of the “West” can be viewed in terms of the history and influence of certain, contested notions of subjectivity. Explore these issues by connecting the “I” which defines you to the “I” that is at the center of the “Western” mental map. Are you a “Westerner?” If so, are you conflicted about your identity? What role does class, religion, race, geography, gender, family, history, or other defining factors of subjectivity play in your negotiation with the “Western” mental map? How is your perspective on the history of “the West” shaped by your own subjectivity?

3.) In the course of our study it has become apparent that there is not so much one idea of “the West” as there are a collection of “Western” ideas. Furthermore, the crises of today have prompted new conceptualizations of “the West” that make use of both familiar concepts found in the readings we have investigated and concepts foreign to “the West” as we have come to understand it. To pursue these themes in an essay, choose a contemporary document related to the Iraq war which you believe contains a significant engagement with the ideas of “the West.” “The National Security Strategy of the United States” (a.k.a the “Bush Doctrine”) would be a good choice, but others are possible (eg. an outline of “coalition” military policy; the Said article distributed by email; or any other well-formulated text). To make sure that your document is appropriate, be sure to clear it in advance with your seminar instructor. To what degree does this document exemplify “Western” ideas of rationality, freedom, racism, colonialism, democracy, identity-taking, identity-giving, empiricism, science, fairness, despotism etc.? How does your chosen document relate to the arguments found in the texts on the course syllabus? Using the required discussion of the three course texts explained above as a basis for comparison, how does your document continue, expand, restrict, or otherwise modify the notion of “the West” as you have come to understand it? You will find that your three comparative texts both support and subvert the document that you are considering. What is the nature of these contradictions? Can they be resolved? How are they indicative of the dilemmas at the center of “the West?”

4.) From the beginning this class has been built around the claim that “’the West’ is best understood as … a set of assumptions, beliefs, and claims about oneself and the world which have no precise geographical boundaries.” In critically studying this “mental map,” we have frequently made links between it and “civilization” in the present day. This question is an opportunity for you to employ your critical imaginative powers toward making those connections more explicit. For each of the three course texts that you have chosen, select three different contemporary items (newspaper or magazine article, book, movie, advertisement or commercial, TV show, etc.) that reflect an idea or theme of “Western Civilization” as seen in each of three course texts. Analyze each contemporary item in terms of its author, tone, audience, argument, and content, and show how it reproduces and/or criticizes the mental map of “the West” as represented in the course texts. You may organize your paper around a common theme, such as the pernicious binary of civilized vs. savage, or you may choose to explore separate ideas (e.g. freedom, human nature, knowledge, etc.). Whatever you decide, make sure that your paper is cohesive and makes a clear argument. Be creative in your selection of contemporary items, but keep in mind that you must turn in a copy of them with your final paper. For example, if you select a movie, print out a movie review; if you choose a TV ad, then provide a written summary of the commercial. To make sure that your paper is on the right track, be sure to clear your ideas in advance with your seminar instructor.

5.) The history of “Western Civilization” is inseparably connected to a set of exceptionally horrific episodes in the history of human violence. The violent conquest of the Americas by the Spanish conquistadors; the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation economy of the Caribbean; the violence of the French “Reign of Terror” and the Napoleonic occupation of Spain; the bloody destruction of the native populations of North America by the United States government; European imperialism in the Congo and Africa as a whole; the military holocaust of World War I and the nuclear annihilation of the civilian populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; the attempted genocides of the European Jews, the Turkish Armenians, and more recently the non-Serbian Bosnian Muslims—tragically the list goes on and on. As people living in the present with a connection to the history of “the West,” how should we relate to these traumatic horrors of the past? In what ways is this violence at the center of “the West” and how does “the West” constitute itself by careful and creative strategies of remembering and forgetting? As a citizen of the contemporary world who must deal with the history of “the West” and its legacies, what is it that we must learn from the historical study of these horrific events? What kind of relationship to the traumas of the past is most appropriate for conducting one’s life in the present? Choose three texts that engage directly with the violence at the center of “Western Civilization” and think through your reaction to these events. Also consider the way that these writers portray these horrors and their strategies for seeing and not seeing them, for remembering and forgetting them. What do these horrors mean to you? How does your answer help you to consider your relationship to the history of “the West?” What models for dealing with this history do these texts offer? Are they satisfactory for you? Why or why not?

6.) This course has operated under two basic assumptions. The first is that “’the West’ is best understood as an idea, or a state of mind,” (Course Pack I, p. 11) and second that the term “Western Civilization” does not refer to “a real thing extant in the world” but instead to a classification which human beings effect whereby “one subset of the diverse beliefs, practices, and cultural habits of humankind is collected together and isolated in a manner suitable for making a general inquiry into the nature of human historical development.” (Course Pack I, p. 13) Building from these two key ideas, the texts that we read over the course of this semester have engaged with many of the foundational concepts of this “Western mental map.” While we began this class broadly with the explicit question of “What/Where is the West” and the implicit question of “what is history,” we have continued to explore the ways in which the answers to each of the questions tells a particular and exclusive story. Moreover, it is a story that often leads to overly simplified binaries which distort the complex reality of the historical and contemporary world. Though there are many identities and many histories in the world, the account that “gets told” serves a specific set of interests and a specific people. The history of “the West” is no exception. To pursue these themes in an essay, imagine you are teaching your own Western Civilization class and you must create your own mission statement. Revisiting Professor Shank’s “Statement of Course Goals” (Course Pack I, pp. 11-15), draw upon your experiences from this semester in order to respond to the issues raised in his piece. You will want to address questions such as: What are the central characteristics of “the West?” Who or what processes have created this mental map? Why? For whose benefit? At whose expense? And perhaps most importantly: where do we go from here? This assignment is meant to give you an opportunity to think through the issues that we have discussed this semester and to apply them in a useful and meaningful way. Use the discussion of the three course texts to situate your own thinking in relation to the course and to discuss how and why your understanding of history in general and of “the West” in particular has changed over the course of this semester.

7.) Have you been thinking a lot about something else that is not captured by one of these questions? Would you rather develop a paper, including a creative paper, that explores your own idea? If so, then develop a paper project of your own and write a paper that realizes your ambitions. To be acceptable, your essay must explicitly treat three of the texts we have read this semester as described in the guidelines above. The topic, genre, and approach of your paper, however, can be your own creation. If you choose this option, be sure to discuss your paper project in advance with your seminar instructor to make sure it is appropriate.