Courses tagged with "KIx" (159)

Students will question for themselves the meaning of human freedom, responsibility and identity by reading and responding to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. The Comedy, which is richly steeped in the medieval culture of the 14th century, still speaks vividly to modern readers struggling with the question, “who am I?” Dante, as a Florentine, a poet, a lover, and religious believer, struggled with the same question in each facet of his life before coming to a moment of vision that wholly transformed him as a person.

As a 21st century reader, you will encounter the poem in a novel online environment that integrates knowledge from the disciplines of literature, history, psychology, philosophy, and theology with modern technology. You will be guided through the poem by means of the "MyDante" Project, an online environment developed by Professor Ambrosio in collaboration with the Georgetown University Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), which will aid your own contemplative engagement with the poem. Alone and with the edX community, you will reflect on both Dante's interpretation of freedom and how it functions in the formation of personal identity, and the problem of finding appropriate metaphors to discuss these issues in our modern life.

You, the modern reader, will only understand the full implications of Dante's poetry if you participate with it in a way that is personal and is genuinely contemplative. You will discover that contemplative reading goes beyond the literal meaning, and even beyond the traditional allegorical and interpreted meaning, to apply every possible meaning contained in the text to your own life and identity. Through the MyDante platform, you will learn to know yourself in your own historical, personal, and spiritual contexts as you journey towards your understanding of your personal freedom and identity.

Now I shall sing the second kingdom,
there where the soul of man is cleansed,
made worthy to ascend to Heaven.
-Purgatorio, Canto I, lines 4-6

While Hell is “black, confined, stinking, noisy, and suffocating, the great Mountain of Purgatory rises in pure sunlit solitude out of the windswept southern sea.” (Sayers, Purgatorio; Introduction)  Dante has undergone a conversion which has, literally, turned his world upside down.

Sadly, the majority of Dante’s readers do not accompany him beyond his escape from the Inferno, in part, perhaps, because of an instinctive anticipation that when the excitement of adventure is over, then the hard work of maturation must begin. Indeed, there is work aplenty on Mount Purgatorio, but there is also so much more. There is day and night, labor and rest, waking and dreaming, all the rhythms of diurnal living; but above all, there is the delight of hope. All that the penitent souls suffer here, they undergo in the eagerness of passionate yearning to be healed of the wounds of sin inflicted on them as part of the universal heritage of humanity. Purgatory is a “school of contemplation,” where the healing of wounds coincides with learning to suffer the weight of responsibility for one’s own identity as a person. For those willing to undertake the steep ascent of Dante’s seven-story Mountain, nowhere in the legacy of human culture is the process of becoming a “whole person” more closely observed or rendered with deeper psychological and social insight than in the cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio.

For us as modern readers, Mount Purgatorio is a steep ascent indeed, and if fewer of us accept this challenging invitation than do for the careen through Hell, then it should come as no surprise for us to learn of the untold years, centuries perhaps, that the souls whom Dante meets there require to complete their climb. A realistic willingness to suffer consciously and voluntarily, motivated by authentic hope, is hardly recognized as a possibility by most of us today for whom security and prosperity are accepted as the unqualified goals of our striving. Even to consider an alternative of the sort which Dante offers us in the Purgatorio is already a notable achievement, but one which the imaginative power of Dante’s poetry here places within our reach. Do not let the opportunity pass you by.

In this course, you will be asked to participate in learning activities on both edX and on MyDante, an innovative platform for deep reading that emphasizes mindfulness and contemplative reading habits as key to deriving lasting meaning from poetic texts. We begin on September 28 with an optional reading week. If you have not previously worked with the MyDante platform and are not familiar with the Contemplative Reading approach to the text which it is meant to support, the week offers a chance for you to become acquainted with MyDante and the practice of contemplative reading before we begin the course in earnest on October 5. Equally important, if you have not already read Inferno, we strongly suggest you do so before beginning Purgatorio. It is possible to read, understand and enjoy Purgatorio without having read the Inferno, but it is also true that familiarity with the first part of the journey will increase both your understanding and your enjoyment of the second. Finally, if you were with us for the Inferno, then we urge you to read through the Purgatorio in the reading mode of MyDante, or even as much as you can, during this week. The basic premise of contemplative reading is that re-reading is the best way to read. Try it; we are very sure you will agree.

Turn back if you would see your shores again.
Do not set forth upon the deep,
for, losing sight of me, you would be lost.
-Paradiso, Canto II, lines 4-6

Joy is the business of Paradiso, that much is clear; but could there be a more mysterious word in the whole realm of human imagination than “Joy?” “Joy” boggles the human imagination because it asks us to follow the vector of hope to its maximal extension and intention, until it arrives at that point which Dante locates “nel mezzo,” at the very center of everything, at that point where every centripetal and centrifugal force of both the physical universe of energy and the symbolic universe of creative imagination and meaning first arise and finally return.

From beginning to end, the Pilgrim’s progress through Paradiso is enabled and guided by his enactment of the role to which he consented in the climactic episode of the Purgatorio in the garden of the Earthly Paradise. Now leaving Earth behind and beneath, the Pilgrim is transformed into the disciple; specifically, the disciple of Beatrice. She now becomes his true path, la diritta via, along which he gradually discovers the Joy that Christianity identifies as the hope of Resurrection.

Dante’s Paradiso maps the physics of freedom, tracing a universal history of meaning. Just as there is a physics of matter and energy, there is a physics of freedom governing the evolutionary history of hope which directs the human search for meaning in every person’s life and in all human culture. In this universe, meaning functions as does light in the physical universe, acting as its absolute measure and enforcing its most basic law—the law of relational identity, where “all are responsible to all for all.” Like the principle of relativity in the physics of energy, relational identity means that each personal existence has historical reality only in relation to all other personal identities.

Almost everyone agrees that the poetry of the Paradiso is sublime. Sublimity, however, is a highly rarefied and strenuously acquired taste. This is why Dante himself warns us in the second canto of the Paradiso that unless we have become used to eat the “bread of Angels,” we should turn back and not attempt to follow him on this final leg of his journey, and we as modern-day readers might well be tempted here to turn back as the Pilgrim himself was tempted in the second canto of the Inferno. But to paraphrase Virgil’s response then, which both encouraged and challenged, “Why be so afraid to reach for what your heart most hopes for; where else do you have to turn?”

In this course, you will be asked to participate in learning activities on both edX and on MyDante, an innovative platform for deep reading that emphasizes mindfulness and contemplative reading habits as key to deriving lasting meaning from poetic texts. The pedagogical approach of the course goes beyond mere academic commentary on the poem as literature; it introduces the reader to a way of thinking about the meaning of the poem at a personal level. This module is the third of three modules that compose the full course. Part 1 (Vita Nuova and Inferno) and Part 2 (Purgatorio) of the course are available as archived versions on edX and MyDante. This course features Robert and Jean Hollander's contemporary translations of Dante Alighieri's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, permission courtesy of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. The print editions contain valuable notes and commentary which are highly recommended as companions to the course materials.

What is memory? What’s the utility in exploring it and risking the activation of painful memories? What remembrance do we owe people we have lost and how is that reflected in the monuments we create to memorialize them? Why do different groups of people interpret the same event differently—even when the facts are not disputed?

In The Ethics of Memory, we will discuss these questions and more by exploring personal memory, collective memory and memorial culture, and conflicts of memory.

We begin early in the 20th century—the century of critical engagement with memory—when personal memory was plumbed as the basis of psychoanalysis and as a theme in the poetry and prose of World War I. Then we look at the ways in which a people, collectively, choose to memorialize those lost to war, injustice, or tragedy. Finally, we explore memory as a site of struggle, where the way we see ourselves currently implicated by a memory may depend on our group identity, such as in the case for reparations for slavery in the United States.

Throughout, we will share our own perspectives on personal and collective memory and wrestle with questions of ethical responsibility for remembrance and ownership of the narrative of a memory.

In this course, we will:

• Discover in the writing of Freud how the exploration of memory gave birth to psychoanalysis, and in Proust how such exploration was elevated to an art form; 
• Examine poetry from WWI and the Harlem Renaissance that demonstrates the relevance of literature as a framework for understanding the ethics of memory;
• Reflect on examples of the many ways we collectively memorialize our losses; and
• Share examples of personal and public monuments to memory in order to reflect on the ethical responsibility that memorializing confers on us now.

This course concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, from the early silent period, classic Hollywood genres including musicals, thrillers and westerns, and European and Japanese art cinema. It explores the work of Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Capra, Hawks, Hitchcock, Altman, Renoir, DeSica, and Kurosawa. Through comparative reading of films from different eras and countries, students develop the skills to turn their in-depth analyses into interpretations and explore theoretical issues related to spectatorship.

In this class we will come to understand the vast changes in Spanish life that have taken place since Franco's death in 1975. We will focus on the new freedom from censorship, the re-emergence of movements for regional autonomy, the new cinema, reforms in education and changes in daily life: Sex roles, work, and family that have occurred in the last decade. In so doing, we will examine myths that are often considered commonplaces when describing Spain and its people.

This MOOC focuses on Spanish history between the Renaissance and Baroque periods—a time when the Spanish culture set the tone in the Western world.

The monarchy of this Spain created the first global empire of History. The greatest literary works of this period, including La Celestina, Lazarillo de Tormes, were immediately translated in the first European and American printing houses. Spanish fashion was the trendiest at the Courts of Early Modern Europe. Spanish military and political treaties set the standard for political machinations of the era.

In this period—between the 16th and 17th centuries—, Spain’s society achieved excellence in Arts and Literature. Exceptional and talented people such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Velázquez, were drawn to Madrid. Literary academies, theatre productions and celebrations flourished in other big cities of the Empire as Seville, Lisbon, Barcelona, Naples, Mexico, and Lima. A synthesis of nations united for the loyalty to the Crown and the Catholic faith. In our tour through the Spain of Don Quixote, we will discuss the relationship between fantastic to real geography. Society was polarized between the privileged—nobility and clergy—and the poor and rogues. Humanism was cultivated in universities. Family, food, housing, games, and celebrations played a part in everyday life.

In times of Don Quixote, the lights of Literature and Art geniuses shined upon the shadows of the Inquisition. Let’s travel to this sublime culture of Spanish Golden Age.

"Tragedy" is a name originally applied to a particular kind of dramatic art and subsequently to other literary forms; it has also been applied to particular events, often implying thereby a particular view of life. Throughout the history of Western literature it has sustained this double reference. Uniquely and insistently, the realm of the tragic encompasses both literature and life.

Through careful, critical reading of literary texts, this subject will examine three aspects of the tragic experience:    

1. the scapegoat
2. the tragic hero
3. the ethical crisis

These aspects of the tragic will be pursued in readings that range in the reference of their materials from the warfare of the ancient world to the experience of the modern extermination camps.

The subtitle of this course for the spring 2003 term is "American Television: A Cultural History." The class takes a cultural approach to television's evolution as a technology and system of representation, considering television as a system of storytelling and myth-making, and as a cultural practice, studied from anthropological, literary, and cinematic perspectives. The course focuses on prime-time commercial broadcasting, the medium's technological and economic history, and theoretical perspectives. There is much required viewing as well as readings in media theory and cultural interpretation.

The course covers British literature and culture during Queen Victoria's long reign, 1837-1901. This was the brilliant age of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson – and many others. It was also the age of urbanization, steam power, class conflict, Darwin, religious crisis, imperial expansion, information explosion, bureaucratization – and much more.

Alexander the Great conquered most of the world known to the ancient Greeks, fused the eastern and western peoples of his empire, and became a god – before his 33rd birthday. This course explores the life, leadership, and legacies of history’s warrior, and one of its most controversial leaders, an ambiguous genius whose story helps us to understand not only the history of warfare, but also different ideas about human sexuality, the history of relations between east and west, and the religious beliefs both of ancient polytheists and modern monotheists.

Before your course starts, try the new edX Demo where you can explore the fun, interactive learning environment and virtual labs. Learn more.

This semester, we will read writing about travel and place from Columbus's Diario through the present. Travel writing has some special features that will shape both the content and the work for this subject: reflecting the point of view, narrative choices, and style of individuals, it also responds to the pressures of a real world only marginally under their control. Whether the traveler is a curious tourist, the leader of a national expedition, or a starving, half-naked survivor, the encounter with place shapes what travel writing can be. Accordingly, we will pay attention not only to narrative texts but to maps, objects, archives, and facts of various kinds.

Our materials are organized around three regions: North America, Africa and the Atlantic world, the Arctic and Antarctic. The historical scope of these readings will allow us to know something not only about the experiences and writing strategies of individual travelers, but about the progressive integration of these regions into global economic, political, and knowledge systems. Whether we are looking at the production of an Inuit film for global audiences, or the mapping of a route across the North American continent by water, these materials do more than simply record or narrate experiences and territories: they also participate in shaping the world and what it means to us.

Authors will include Olaudah Equiano, Caryl Philips, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Jamaica Kincaid, William Least Heat Moon, Louise Erdrich, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.

Expeditions will include those of Lewis and Clark (North America), Henry Morton Stanley (Africa), Ernest Shackleton and Robert F. Scott (Antarctica).

Students, scholars, bloggers, reviewers, fans, and book-group members write about literature, but so do authors themselves. Through the ways they engage with their own texts and those of other artists, sampling, remixing, and rethinking texts and genres, writers reflect on and inspire questions about the creative process. We will examine Mary Shelley's reshaping of Milton's Paradise Lost, German fairy tales, tales of scientific discovery, and her husband's poems to make Frankenstein (1818, 1831); Melville's redesign of a travel narrative into a Gothic novella in Benito Cereno (1856); and Alison Bechdel's rewriting of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in her graphic novel Fun Home (2006). Showings of film versions of some of these works will allow us to project forward in the remixing process as well.

This course focuses on the period between roughly 1550-1850. American ideas of race had taken on a certain shape by the middle of the nineteenth century, consolidated by legislation, economics, and the institution of chattel slavery. But both race and identity meant very different things three hundred years earlier, both in their dictionary definitions and in their social consequences. How did people constitute their identities in early America, and how did they speak about these identities? Texts will include travel writing, captivity narratives, orations, letters, and poems, by Native American, English, Anglo-American, African, and Afro-American writers.

William Shakespeare didn't go to college. If he time-traveled like Dr. Who, he would be stunned to find his words on a university syllabus. However, he would not be surprised at the way we will be using those words in this class, because the study of rhetoric was essential to all education in his day. At Oxford, William Gager argued that drama allowed undergraduates "to try their voices and confirm their memories, and to frame their speech and conform it to convenient action": in other words, drama was useful. Shakespeare's fellow playwright Thomas Heywood similarly recalled:

In the time of my residence in Cambridge, I have seen Tragedies, Comedies, Histories, Pastorals and Shows, publicly acted…: this is held necessary for the emboldening of their Junior scholars, to arm them with audacity, against they come to be employed in any public exercise, as in the reading of Dialectic, Rhetoric, Ethic, Mathematic, the Physic, or Metaphysic Lectures.

Such practice made a student able to "frame a sufficient argument to prove his questions, or defend any axioma, to distinguish of any Dilemma and be able to moderate in any Argumentation whatsoever" (Apology for Actors, 1612). In this class, we will use Shakespeare's own words to arm you "with audacity" and a similar ability to make logical, compelling arguments, in speech and in writing.

Shakespeare used his ears and eyes to learn the craft of telling stories to the public in the popular form of theater. He also published two long narrative poems, which he dedicated to an aristocrat, and wrote sonnets to share "among his private friends" (so wrote Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598). Varying his style to suit different audiences and occasions, and borrowing copiously from what he read, Shakespeare nevertheless found a voice all his own–so much so that his words are now, as his fellow playwright Ben Jonson foretold, "not of an age, but for all time." Reading, listening, analyzing, appreciating, criticizing, remembering: we will engage with these words in many ways, and will see how words can become ideas, habits of thought, indicators of emotion, and a means to transform the world.

William Shakespeare didn't go to college. If he time-traveled like Dr. Who, he would be stunned to find his words on a university syllabus. However, he would not be surprised at the way we will be using those words in this class, because the study of rhetoric was essential to all education in his day. At Oxford, William Gager argued that drama allowed undergraduates "to try their voices and confirm their memories, and to frame their speech and conform it to convenient action": in other words, drama was useful. Shakespeare's fellow playwright Thomas Heywood similarly recalled:

In the time of my residence in Cambridge, I have seen Tragedies, Comedies, Histories, Pastorals and Shows, publicly acted…: this is held necessary for the emboldening of their Junior scholars, to arm them with audacity, against they come to be employed in any public exercise, as in the reading of Dialectic, Rhetoric, Ethic, Mathematic, the Physic, or Metaphysic Lectures.

Such practice made a student able to "frame a sufficient argument to prove his questions, or defend any axioma, to distinguish of any Dilemma and be able to moderate in any Argumentation whatsoever" (Apology for Actors, 1612). In this class, we will use Shakespeare's own words to arm you "with audacity" and a similar ability to make logical, compelling arguments, in speech and in writing.

Shakespeare used his ears and eyes to learn the craft of telling stories to the public in the popular form of theater. He also published two long narrative poems, which he dedicated to an aristocrat, and wrote sonnets to share "among his private friends" (so wrote Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598). Varying his style to suit different audiences and occasions, and borrowing copiously from what he read, Shakespeare nevertheless found a voice all his own–so much so that his words are now, as his fellow playwright Ben Jonson foretold, "not of an age, but for all time." Reading, listening, analyzing, appreciating, criticizing, remembering: we will engage with these words in many ways, and will see how words can become ideas, habits of thought, indicators of emotion, and a means to transform the world.

This course is presented in Mandarin.

If you are having difficulty viewing this video in mainland China, you can also find it here.
课程介绍视频也可以访问中国网站

点击上方绿色按钮报名。

通 过此课程，学生将对民俗学有一个初步的认识，对民俗的起源、产生和发展，民俗的基本分类，民俗与文化，民俗与生活，民俗与国民性等诸多问题，以及民俗在文 化保持和传承中的重要作用有一个较为全面的了解。 此课程不需要先修课程，对民俗与文化感兴趣的学生均可选修此课程。 课程学习时间为11周。学生选修此课程需要按要求观看课程视频，阅读指定参考资料。为全面掌握课程讲述内容，学生需要花费4小时左右阅读教师布置的阅读作 业。 课程期末考核包括两部分内容，一是学生需按要求完成民俗采风的作业，二是期末参加在线考试，分别占最后成绩的50% 此课程的教材为《民俗学概论》（第二版），王娟著，北京大学出版社，2011年。

This eleven-week course will provide students with the basic knowledge of folklore, including its history, classification, function, and value. Coursework will include videos, readings, and an assignment of collecting 20 items of folklore. There will also be a final exam.

The course is one of the PKU-DeTao MOOCs, which is a joint effort by Peking University and DeTao Masters Academy. 该课程是“北大-德稻网络开放课程”中的一门，由北京大学与德稻教育联合提供。"

This course is presented in Mandarin.

If you are having difficulty viewing this video in mainland China, you can also find it here.

课程介绍视频也可以访问中国网站。

点击上方绿色按钮报名。

本课程适用于翻译硕士专业研究生、外语专业高年级本科生、翻译工作者以及外语爱好者等。

现代语言服务行业要求从业人员必须具有利用计算机及网络来使用各类技术辅助工具帮助其工作的能力，而不是仅仅学会几款狭义的计算机辅助翻译软件。

本课程主要讲授计算机辅助翻译技术的基础概念，学习多种计算机辅助翻译工具的使用方法，锻炼学生在技术环境下从事翻译工作等各类语言服务工作的能力，帮助学生理解信息化时代的语言服务工作。

课 程完整涵盖现代语言服务的基本情况介绍、翻译技术基本概念、语言服务项目执行过程的信息环境与信息技术、如何利用电子辞典、网络资源及语料库工具辅助翻译 工作、狭义和广义的计算机辅助翻译工具原理及实战演练、翻译内容质量评定、多人协同翻译项目、翻译管理等多方面的内容。作为翻译类专业学生的必修课程，本 课程适合语言类专业学生学习。通过课程的学习，有助于学习者了解现代语言服务行业，增强各类计算机辅助翻译工具的使用技能，提高包括翻译工作在内的各类语 言服务工作的效率。

该课程是“北大-德稻网络公开课程”中的一门，由北京大学与德稻教育联合提供。

This course is suitable for postgraduate students who major in Translation and Interpreting, undergraduate students majoring in foreign language, translators and language enthusiasts.

Those who work in modern language service industry are required to be capable of using computers and Internet to aid their translation job by adapting a variety of efficient tools, rather than just using word processor tools and several basic computer-aided translation software.

This course teaches the basic concepts of computer-aided translation technology, helps students learn to use a variety of computer-assisted translation tools, enhances their ability to engage in various kinds of language service in such a technical environment, and helps them understand what the modern language service industry looks like.

This course covers introduction to modern language services industry, basic principles and concepts of translation technology, information technology used in the process of language translation, how to use electronic dictionaries, Internet resources and corpus tools, practice of different computer-aided translation tools, translation quality assessment, basic concepts of machine translation, globalization, localization and so on. As a compulsory course for students majoring in Translation and Interpreting, this course is also suitable for students with or without language major background. By learning this course, students can better understand modern language service industry and their work efficiency will be improved for them to better deliver translation service.

The course is one of the PKU-DeTao MOOCs, which is a joint effort by Peking University and DeTao Masters Academy.

Are there any reference books for this course?

Students are recommended to read at least the following books.

1. Lynne Bowker, Computer Aided Translation, University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa,2002
2. Frank Austermühl, Electronics Tools for Translators, St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester,2001

Will this course provide an English course video?

Will this course provide an English course video?

本课程是否有参考教材？

为了能够更好得了解本课程所涉及的内容，学生可以阅读下面的资料：

1. Lynne Bowker, Computer Aided Translation, University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa, 2002
2. Frank Austermühl Electronics Tools for Translators, St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester, 2001(外研社曾翻印过，2006/07)
3. 史宗玲，计算机辅助翻译：MT＆TM，书林出版有限公司，台北，2004
4. C.K. Quah, Translation and Technology, 上海外语教育出版社,2008