Providing an intensive introduction to studying the humanities at Yale, this course is anchored by six trans-historical spatial models: the Capitol, the Library, the Ship, the Factory, the Museum, and the House. Covering a range of historical epochs and geographies as well as genres and media these six building “types” provide a foundation for questions about how societies and individuals organize value systems.

Through the lens of travel accounts to six regions: China, Egypt, the Holy Land, the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia, this course provides first-year students with an intensive introduction to studying the humanities at Yale. We also read works by contemporary travelers Emily O’Dell and Tim Mackintosh-Smith. All provide a foundation for us to explore the ways we think about ourselves and the “other,” home, the unfamiliar and wondrous—in short, the diversity of human experience. We will make extensive use of Yale’s rich manuscript archives, historical object collections, and art galleries.

We begin with a hypothesis: poetry offers a useful space for exploring the problem of how to relate universals to particulars. To test this, we will be reading six poems, each “pretty good” by the standards of their own traditions and, to one degree or another, among the most famous in their languages. In order to understand something about them we will read other works by our poets; historical accounts of their lives and times; secondary scholarship on the poems themselves; and important background works, running from The Analects of Confucius to Plato’s Symposium to medieval Kashmiri literary theory.

Through the prism of thinking about the self, this course provides first-year students with an intensive introduction to studying the humanities at Yale. The course is anchored around six trans-historical models of thinking about selfhood: the ideal self, the lover, the revolutionary, the convert, the solipsist, and the social climber.