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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Arabs have been a part of the tapestry of the United States since the early 19th century. As immigrants to the new world, the identity of this community has largely been defined by changing American understandings of race, ethnicity, and religion. The in-betweenness of this minority group--not exactly white or black, claiming Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths--and the often contradictory nature of U.S. involvement in the region, has only further confounded Americans in their understanding of this diverse community. This course will use an interdisciplinary approach to explore the rich histories, representations, and cultural production of this American minority group. For the purposes of this survey, we will also consider the narratives of other Muslim minority groups (i.e., Iranians, Pakistanis, Indians, and African American Muslims) within the scope of the Arab American experience. We will look at poems and stories from Arab immigrants in the early to mid 20th century (e.g., the Mahjar poets) and consider, in the context of these writings, issues of xenophobia, assimilation, linguistic, and cultural difference, and Arab American identity in the context of other ethnic groups. Throughout this course we will continue to think about how changing U.S. geo-political interests in the region alter perceptions of Arabs and Muslims in our midst (considering, for example, the 1979 Revolution in Iran and the subsequent hostage crisis, the two Gulf Wars, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, 9/11, Afghanistan, the War on Terror, and Guantanamo). In addition, we will examine representations of this minority and Islam more generally in the media and popular culture (print and broadcast journalism, films, cartoons, popular songs, and videos), as well as Arab cultural forms that seek to self-narrate the Arab experience for an American viewer. At the heart of this course is a desire to not only shed light on what it means to be an Arab or a Muslim or an immigrant, but also to understand the multiple ways in which we conceptualize and seek to define what it means to be American.
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3.00 Credits
An introduction to film analysis, focusing on features produced by Hollywood studios from the 1930s to the present. Our emphasis will be on film genres, and on the formal properties of film as a medium for telling stories. We will also consider the industrial organization of film production and the intersection of economics and popular culture. Students will be required to attend screenings of one and sometimes two films weekly, by directors including Welles, Hitchcock, Coppola, and Jonze. Critical readings will be assigned.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the AP Exam in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate; not open to students who have taken English 203
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3.00 Credits
Why do the peoples and cultures of Latin America and the Middle East often elicit such passionate responses in the United States and Europe? Some feel threatened, while others are intrigued, but responses to these world regions are seldom neutral. Often seen as exotic and erotic, or as a danger to the way of life of Americans and Europeans, Islam, Arabs and Latin Americans are at the forefront of socio-political debates in the United States and Europe. The origins of this world-view are historical, but are also heavily influenced by contemporary immigration and international affairs. After characterizing Islam as the greatest contemporary threat to "Western" civilization in his infamous essay titled "The Clash of Civilizations," Samuel Huntington subsequently found it necessary to focus on Latinos as the most significant threat to American civilization. By examining literature and film from the Middle East and Latin America, and from these immigrant communities in the United States and Europe, we will go beyond superficial images and inflammatory rhetoric to explore the cultures behind the passions. Among other things, the texts of this course examine the ties between the Arab world and Latin America, and between these two regions and their neighbors to the north. At the heart of this course are the ideas of borders and margins. What does it mean to cross borders or to live on the margins of society? The borders we will discuss will be geographic borders, but also cultural borders that will permit the exploration of the territories between life and death, civilization and barbarism, wealth and poverty, war and peace and other dichotomies that some employ to classify the world but that rarely allow for human sensibilities and the subtle experiences of being. Our texts may include works by writers such as Alurista, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Gloria Anzaldua, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, Milton Hatoum, Taher Ben Jelloun, Mohamad Choukri, Mahmoud Darwish, Laila Lalami and Tayyib Saleh that treat the human condition at the borders/margins of society. Films may include El Norte, La Mision, Pixote,Midaq Alley, City of God,, Battle of Algiers, My Beautiful Launderette, Crash, Hate and Head On. There will also be a course reader that includes theoretical material on orientalism, tropicalism, nationalism and transnationalism. All readings are in English translation and films have English subtitles.
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3.00 Credits
Poetry was the dominant form of literature in China for most of the pre-modern period. It could be used to justify the overthrow of dynasties or to court a beloved; Chinese poets sang about communing with the gods and about brewing ale, sometimes in the same poem. In this course we will read and discuss poems from the first 2000 years of the Chinese literary tradition. Some of the issues we will explore include the ways in which poems present the world and make arguments about it; how Chinese poets construct different notions of the self through their poems; and how poetry can give voice to conflicts between aesthetics and morality, between the self and the community, and between the state and other sources of social capital. We will also look at Chinese theories of literature and poetry and compare them with dominant Western models. This is an EDI course and we will be concerned throughout with differences in the way Chinese and other cultures thought about and utilized poetry. We will examine the implicit biases inherent in the ways Western scholars in particular have analyzed and translated Chinese poetry. All readings in English translation.
Prerequisite:
No previous experience with poetry or Chinese required
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will study prominent texts and authors of the modern Arab world. The range of genres and themes of this literature is vast. In particular, we will analyze the debates around modernity and the importance given to social engagement in these texts. Our readings include works by authors that have received some notoriety outside of the Arab world such as Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988. We will also read the Iraqi poets Nazik al-Malaika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, the Palestinians Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish, and Tayyib Salih from the Sudan. Included in our readings are the famous autobiography by the Moroccan Muhammad Shukri as well as women's literature by Hanan al-Sheikh, Huda Barakat and Nawal Sadawi. All readings are in English. This literature course fulfils the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative (EDI), as it engages the Arab world from a humanistic perspective that aims to promote cultural awareness. A fundamental goal of the course is to engage the diversity of approaches to sexuality, religion, gender and politics that are so prominent in contemporary literature from the Arab world.
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3.00 Credits
This course will introduce students to the history, literature, and artistic culture of premodern Japan, from the time of the first recorded histories in the 800s through the abolition of the samurai class in the late 1800s. We will focus on the politics and aesthetic culture of the ruling elites in each period, from the heyday of the imperial court through the rise and eventual decline of the samurai warrior and the growth of Edo (Tokyo), with its new mode of early modern government and new forms of literature, theater, and art. Team taught by faculty from History and Comparative Literature, the course will examine historical texts alongside works drawn from literature, visual culture, and performing arts, and will ask students to consider how these different kinds of texts can shed light on one another. What is the difference between reading history and reading literature, or is it even meaningful to distinguish the two? By critically engaging in various kinds of textual analysis, this EDI course not only considers the relationship between politics, culture, and society in premodern Japan but also explores how we can attempt to know and understand different times and places. Primary texts will include court diaries, war tales, and fiction; laws and edicts; essays and autobiographies; noh, kabuki, and puppet theater; and tea ceremony, visual art, and architecture. Students should register under the prefix specific to the Division in which they want to receive credit.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
In one definition, postmodernism in art and literature is what you get when you combine modernism's radical experimentation with pop culture's easy appeal. This term has been used to describe works from Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans and Jean Baudrillard's critical essays on Disneyland to Thomas Pynchon's paranoid novel about postal conspiracy, The Crying of Lot 49. Theorists of the postmodern have argued that it represents not only a radical change in aesthetic sensibilities, but a fundamentally new relationship between art, language, and society. In this tutorial, we will read some of the most important theoretical essays defining the postmodern (essays which themselves often embrace this playful and sometimes ironic style), and we will pair them with artistic texts that are said to illustrate the features of postmodernism. The latter will be mainly novels and short stories from various countries, but one feature of this theory is a flattening of the distinction between high and low culture as well as between the written and the visual, so we will also examine examples from architecture, visual art, and/or broader pop culture. Along the way will ask whether global theoretical paradigms like postmodernism can help us understand other cultures better (by locating them within a single universal system), or whether this approach conceals important cultural differences. Texts will include essays by Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and others; novels and short stories by writers like Don DeLillo, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Murakami Haruki; painting and sculpture associated with Pop Art and Superflat; the architecture of Williamstown area museums; etc. Writing assignments will focus on reading the theoretical texts critically and applying their ideas to the artistic texts in creative and interesting ways. Open to sophomores as well as advanced students. Emphasis will be on understanding and engaging the criticism that we read, and comparing the critical and fictional texts creatively in a way that sheds light on both.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level literature course (Comparative Literature, English, etc.) and sophomore standing or higher, or permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will examine the rich, complex and diverse texts of Classical Arabic Literature. The readings include works that have achieved notoriety outside of the Arab world (such as the Quran and One Thousand and One Nights) as well as works by authors largely unknown outside of the Arab world but canonical in Arabic-language culture such as Imru al-Qays, al-Jahiz, al-Ma'arri, Abu Nuwas, al-Hallaj, al-Ghazali and al-Mutannabi. Women's literature in this course includes works by al-Khansa', known for her elegies, and by Wallada bint al-Mustakfi of Cordoba, who contributed to the courtly love poetry of both Europe and the Arab world. Topics for discussion include theological and philosophical queries, erotica, wine, bibliomania and avarice. Our primary texts represent such varied regions as the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Abbasid Baghdad, North Africa and Islamic Spain. Chronologically, the texts range from the sixth century CE to the fourteenth century. All readings are in English.
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3.00 Credits
For as long as modern Russian literature has existed, incarceration has consistently been one of its central themes. In the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky described the prison world he got to know first-hand as "a world apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own dress, its own manners and customs" (The House of the Dead). However, it was not until the October Revolution and Stalin's purges of the 1930-1950s that political imprisonment became so firmly engraved onto these dark pages of Russian history that it formed a separate genre: Gulag memoirs. This course explores the representations of prison and hard-labor camp experience in Russian literature and culture across different artistic forms and media (folklore and songs, poetry, fiction, memoirs, diaries, personal correspondence, film, drawings, craftwork, and criminal tattoos). By looking at different aspects of life in the Soviet Gulag through the lens of a variety of first-hand accounts, students will be encouraged to compare the Gulag's legacy to other historical and geographical contexts from around the world (for example, to Holocaust memoirs or Latin American narratives of the "disappeared") and to think more broadly about prison as a semiotic space, and about imprisonment --as an existential experience. Throughout the seminar, we will address the function of art as a means of survival and analyze what permutations our life's key concepts and dichotomies undergo in a world behind bars. All readings and discussions will be in English.
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3.00 Credits
The celebration of "courtly love" by medieval and Renaissance writers institutionalized the notion of the desiring male subject and the desired female object that continues to reverberate in contemporary culture. But early writers do not always, or even usually, endorse these positions uncritically, and even works that celebrate heterosexual love devote surprisingly large spaces to other kinds of desire. The Lover in the Romance of the Rose seeks to win the Rose, but it is the male God of Love he kisses on the mouth. Shakespeare's As You Like It and Twelfth Night end in multiple marriages, but the plots revolve around cross-dressing and gender confusion. We will supplement literary readings with both medieval and contemporary theoretical texts. The aim of the course is to sharpen critical reading and writing skills across a broad range of literary forms and historical, cultural and aesthetic values. As part of the Exploring Diversity Initiative, this course focuses on varieties of sexual desire in major pre- and early-modern works, and the challenges they offer to our own contemporary values and assumptions.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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