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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course is an introduction to Visual Culture with a special focus on photography and its relationship to the construction of memory. Students will read western reflections on the practice and cultural impact of photography by critics such as Barthes, Baudelaire, Baudrillard, Bazin, Benjamin, Berger, Crimp, Derrida, Eco, Flusser, Greenberg, Hirsch, Kemp, Kracauer, Krauss, Metz, Mitchell, Moholy-Nagy, Solomon-Godeau, Sekula, Sontag, and Virilio. Students will supplement the theoretical and conceptual readings by examining photographs and collections of photography and their relationship to the construction of memory--from the personal album to museum collections and historical archives to the collected works of individual artists. Many class sessions will be held at the WCMA and local museums and libraries and students are encouraged to seek out and pursue projects that are meaningful to them.
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3.00 Credits
New York is a city that stands apart from the Old World just as it does from the rest of America. As Michel de Certeau put it, it is also a city that "has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts." And yet its air is thick with history, whose course has always been largely defined by its ever growing immigrant population. This seminar is a journey through more than a century of New York's immigrant culture. It is also a journey across various genres and creative media that have shaped New York's urban culture and myths. We will take as a case study the East European ways of navigating the city, but will also explore the "mappings" of the American metropolis across generations of writers of other ethno-linguistic and cultural backgrounds. We will delve into the gigantic repository of urban impressions that New York imposes upon new arrivals and, through a set of mythopoetic topoi that it generates, try to outline its place in the twentieth-century literary imagination. Topics of discussion will include, though will not be limited to, New York as the gate to the New World, an imagined space and a mental construct, the capitalist "jungle" and intersection of the consumerist and exquisite cultures, an "alternative" America and a version of the Jewish shtetl, a city "driven" by taxicabs and the subway, etc. A special session will be devoted to the artistic representations of 9/11 across immigrant cultures. Primary and secondary readings will be drawn from a variety of authors, including Jean Baudrillard, Michel de Certeau, Maxim Gorky, Federico Garcia Lorca, Franz Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, E.B. White, Paul Auster, Sergei Dovlatov, Junot Diaz and others; screenings will include films by Charlie Chaplin, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, Joan Micklin Silver, etc. Logistics permitting, we will take a field trip to Ellis Island and New York's Tenement Museum, as well as go on a tour of the city?s historic neighborhoods.
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3.00 Credits
Some of the greatest novels are really, really long--so long that they are too seldom read and taught. This course takes time to enjoy the special pleasures of novels of epic scope: the opportunity to immerse oneself in a wide and teeming fictional world; to focus sustained attention on the changeable fortunes of characters and societies over a long span of time; to appreciate the detailed grounding of lives in their social environment and historical moment; to experience the leisurely and urgent rhythms, with their elaborate patterning of build-ups and climaxes, that are possible in such works. We will read but two novels, both preoccupied with the disruption and evolution of lives and loves at moments of historic upheaval: War and Peace (1869), Leo Tolstoy's epic of the Napoleonic Wars, and Parade's End (1924-28), Ford Madox Ford's modernist masterpiece about World War I and its traumatic impact on English social life. Set a century apart, the novels are distinguished by vivid and scrupulous representation of their respective wars, by their shrewd accounts of political and social pressures informing the crises, and by their insight into the struggles of those whose lives are engulfed in global crisis. Tolstoy's and Ford's approaches to fictional representation, however, provide intriguing contrasts: one favors the lucidity of classic realism, the other the challenges of modernist innovation; one deploys a single multiplot novel, the other a tetralogy of shorter novels developing a single plot. We will discuss the differing strategies and effects of these two approaches, as well as the more general difficulties of reading and interpreting long fiction.
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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3.00 Credits
No course description available.
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3.00 Credits
Minority artists--writers and visual artists mainly and, to a lesser degree, musicians--face a difficult "double bind" when creating works of art: the expectation is that they, like their racially marked bodies, will exhibit their difference by means of concrete signifiers (details, tropes, narratives, themes) of racial difference. Thus, the work is judged primarily in terms of its embodied sociological content (material, empirical) and not by "abstract" standards of aesthetic subtlety, philosophical sophistication, and so on. At the same time, in the popular and academic imaginary, minority subjects and artists poets occupy a single abstract signifying category--homogeneous, undifferentiated, "other," marginalized, non-universal--while "unmarked" (white) artists occupy the position of being universal and individual at once. The irony, of course, is that, say, an African American poet's being read as an abstract signifier does not mean that the black subject or writer is seen as capable of engaging in abstract ideas. This course will ask questions about the problem of race and abstraction by looking at the work of various writers, visual artists and musicians--including Will Alexander, Cecil Taylor, David Hammons--as well as critics. We will pay particular attention to formally experimental works.
Prerequisite:
At least one previous literature or art or music class would be helpful
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3.00 Credits
In her essay "Peter's Pans: Eating in the Diaspora," literary critic Hortense Spillers argues that "[b]lack writers, whatever their location and by whatever projects and allegiances they are compelled, must retool the language(s) that they inherit" in order to express their experience of blackness. This course considers how this "retool[ing]" of language occurs in African Diasporic literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, and how new "language(s)" of literary form and genre impact black writers' representations of gender and sexuality. We will focus on writers and filmmakers such as Bessie Head, Zora Neale Hurston, Mariama Ba, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cheryl Dunye, Gwendolyn Brooks, Isaac Julien, Michelle Cliff, Sapphire, Lewis Nkosi, Junot Diaz, and others whose works destabilize conventions of genre, blurring the lines between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. We will examine these texts alongside theories of genre, gender and sexuality offered by Spillers, Michelle Wright, Cheryl Clarke, Judith Butler, Evie Shockley, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others. Through these texts, we will consider how Afrodiasporic writers address questions of gender and sexual identity that arise at various moments in modern African diaspora history, and how "retool[ed]" languages of literature complicate global ideas about black gender and sexuality. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it increases students' knowledge of the experiences of people disempowered on the bases of race, gender, and sexuality in a multinational context, and allows them to understand creative expression as a means of interrogating disempowering social structures and ideologies.
Prerequisite:
Some coursework in WGSS, AFR, ENGL or COMP
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the life and works of Fyodor Dostoevsky in the context of Western intellectual history. Readings include Dostoevsky's highly influential novella Notes from Underground, his first major novel Crime and Punishment, and his masterpiece The Brother Karamazov. Over the course of the semester, we will discuss Dostoevsky's age and society, examining the larger trends and problems reflected in his works: the slums of St. Petersburg with their prostitutes, beggars, and moneylenders; widespread demands for social and political reform; psychological, philosophical, and religious debate. All readings will be in English.
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3.00 Credits
A study of the origins of the Arthurian story in Welsh history and folklore and a survey of its development and transformations in the romance literature of England and the Continent, from Chretien de Troyes to Thomas Malory, circa 1100-1500. We will pay special attention to the ways in which British/English nationalism, Celtic magic, French courtly love and chivalry, and Christian morality combine and recombine to produce ever new meaning in familiar elements of the plot: Arthur's birth and establishment as king, the fellowship and adventures of his followers, the adulterous love triangle, the Quest for the Holy Grail, and, finally, Arthur's death.
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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3.00 Credits
To bring the all too familiar everyday to our attention, artists and writers have made it strange. What happens when we view everyday life from elsewhere? While everyday culture has often been experienced as repressive and alienating in modern Western societies, a new importance assigned to everyday life made it liberating in Japan during the twenties and in contemporary China. The contours of the everyday are delightfully vague, and it always exceeds theorizing. For instance, is its privileged place the street or the home? Is it lived largely in institutions that regulate our daily lives, or is it lived between and outside them? Everyday objects and commodities like the potato, the postcard, the car, clothes, housing, etc., will be analyzed. Fiction by Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Georges Perec, Manil Suri, Ha Jin, and Banana Yoshimoto. Films by Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodovar, Benoit Jaquot, and Pierre Jeunet. Art projects that transform the everyday will also be discussed, including those of Sophie Calle, Mary Kelley, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Christine Hill. Short theoretical excerpts from Freud, Kracauer, Goffman, Lefebvre, de Beauvoir, Friedan, Debord, Foucault, and Bourdieu. All works not originally in English will be read in English translation.
Prerequisite:
One 200-level literature course
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3.00 Credits
In terms of vocabulary and metaphor, the Jewish experience of exile pervades modern, western discourse on the experience of being alienated, severed, and separated from one's national and natural homeland. Thus in this course we will take the Jewish experience of exile (galut) as our point of departure for a broader discussion of these themes as they relate to other diasporic communities. As a consequence of increased mobility, political instabilities, economic insecurity and the proliferation of means of communication, the state of Diaspora increasingly characterizes populations across the globe, from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. While we will not focus specifically on these communities, one of our tasks will be to discover how the Jewish experience shapes the discourse on exile and Diaspora that pervades modern discussions of displacement and emigration. We must further consider what is at stake politically and philosophically in privileging the Jewish experience, especially given the post-1948 community of Palestinian refugees. To illuminate this discussion we will draw on the literature of the Jewish tradition from the Hebrew Bible and rabbis to Twentieth Century accounts and reflections of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as materials that reflect the voices of other refugee communities. We will then move to examine the relationship of the notion of the homeland to that of the promised land. We will consider the ambivalence in the nineteenth and twentieth century concerning discourse of blood and soil, and the consequent possibility that exile and rootlessness could signal positively.
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