In teaching writing we are tacitly teaching a version of reality and the students' place and mode of operation in it." James A. Berlin~1996, 557! Khristina Haddad is assistant professor, department of political science, Moravian College. She teaches a writing-intensive course on visionary political writing and is affiliated with German Studies and Women's Studies. Her research interests include politics of time and temporality, Hannah Arendt, political action, fear, feminist theory, women's studies, and, in particular, the politics of women's health. PSOnline www.apsanet.org
This multidisciplinary pedagogy offers eight allegorical images in support of a visually contextual reading of The Prince. Responding to the pedagogical problem of students treating the text as an ahistorical manual for action addressed to them, our approach resituates The Prince in its visual cultural context. This allows us to specify Machiavelli’s innovations as a theorist in terms of the importance of plurality and particularity in regard to political action. An online supplemental appendix provides access to databases and additional resources. Exploring Machiavelli’s politicized moral concepts of prudence, parsimony, liberality, fortune, and impetuosity using these images, we show his masterful invocation and redeployment of the cultural codes of his time. In presenting a visual history of concepts, we hope to move students beyond common contemporary ideological biases and literal readings and to alert them to the complex stories and relationships evident in the visual history of civic humanism.
Teaching political theory promises better thinkers, better community members, and better democratic citizens. Teaching political theory in a community of learning is often especially rewarding as the lived community experience of the campus becomes food for thought and a site of action. As an assistant professor beginning my first job, my challenge was to design an introductory course that would be compelling to students highly interested in contemporary politics and activism and less excited about theoretical inquiry and ultimate questions. I needed to develop a political theory course for a theory-shy audience. This is the story of a political theory course thematically centered on action. In a world impatient with thought and much more appreciative of the virtues of action, or at least activity, it is possible to invite students into the study of thought by focusing on the question of action. ______________________________________________________________________________ The Invitation he guiding question of this class is What should we do? This question effectively serves as an invitation to the student to enter into a semester-long discussion with the readings, other students, and me. This guiding question presupposes three questions that are fundamental to the study of the humanities:
A traveler to Florence is all eyes. This city at the center of Machiavelli’s political thinking is a world of architecture, sculpture, and painting. There is no choice but to embrace the visual. The student who encounters The Prince may not have walked through the streets of Florence, yet teachers of political theory can direct students to the visual aspects of his text. As a literary scholar interested in visual culture and a political theorist respectively, we propose an integration of iconographical and close textual readings. We model this multidisciplinary approach for the concepts of prudence, parsimony, liberality, and fortune by showing how the meaning of politicized concepts becomes intelligible through the study of allegorical images. We offer teachers a terminology for interpreting the text through its images. An embedded link offers access to a store of images relevant to the study of The Prince.
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