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  • COMP 313: Gender, Race, Beauty, and Power in the Age of Transnational Media

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This lecture and discussion course focuses on the politics of personal style among U.S. women of color in an era of viral video clips, the 24-hour news cycle, and e-commerce sites dedicated to the dermatological concerns of "minority" females. With a comparative, transnational emphasis on the ways in which gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and class inform standards of beauty, we will examine a variety of materials ranging from documentary films, commercial websites, poetry and sociological case studies to feminist theory. Departing from the assumption that personal aesthetics are intimately tied to issues of power and privilege, we will engage the following questions: What are the everyday functions of personal style among women of color? Is it feasible to assert that an easily identifiable "African-American," "Latina," or "Asian-American" female aesthetic exists? What role do transnational media play in the development and circulation of popular aesthetic forms? How might the belief in personal style as a tactic of resistance challenge traditional understandings of what it means to be a "feminist" in the first place? Readings include works by Julie Bettie, Rosalinda Fregoso, Tiffany M. Gill, Margaret L. Hunter, Linda Leung, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Ramirez, Felicity Schaefer-Grabiel, and Sandra K. Soto, among others. Prerequisite:    LATS 105, AFR 200, AMST 201, WGSS 101 or permission of the instructor
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  • COMP 322: Comic Lives: Graphic Novels & Dangerous Histories of the African Diaspora

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course explores how the graphic novel has been an effective, provocative and at times controversial medium for representing racialized histories. Drawing on graphic novels such as Jeremy Love's Bayou and Ho Che Anderson's King: A Comic Biography, this course illustrates and critiques multiple ways the graphic novel commingles word and image to create more sensorial access into ethnic traumas, challenges and interventions in critical moments of resistance throughout history. Students will practice analyzing graphic novels and comic strips, with the help of critical essays, reviews and film; the chosen texts will center on Africana cultures, prompting students to consider how the graphic novel may act as a useful alternate history for marginalized peoples. During the course, students will keep a journal with images, themes and reflections and will use Comic Life software to create their own graphic short stories based on historical and/or autobiographical narratives. This course is part of the Gaudino Danger Initiative.
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  • COMP 326: Queer Temporalities

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    How do we experience and represent time, and what factors might account for both our experiences and our representations? What are some of the ways that people experience and ritually mark the passing of time? What are some of the different ways that people have made sense of time and themselves in time? Especially for individuals and peoples who have been denied certain self-representation and narratives of place, how do competing notions of time, history, space, and location get negotiated? In this course, drawing from within the broad corpus of queer theory (including theorists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Mu?oz) we will examine some non-linear, non-normative, and interruptive approaches to making sense of time, space-time, and self within time. On the one hand, we will consider theorists who specifically question and challenge what Jose Esteban Mu?oz dubs the "linearity of straight time," and we will turn to a set of issues with regard to family and sexuality, especially critiques of normative lifecycle events and rituals that have reconfigured experiences and representations of time and place. On the other hand, we will also work with queer theory as it explores alternatives to normative conceptualizations of time and place that have already existed in the past. Hence we will look not only to queer theory as it reads more contemporary negotiations of sexuality, identity, time, and space-time; we will also consider how some contemporary theorists have read previous historical examples.
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  • COMP 328: California: Myths, Peoples, Places

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    "Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in written texts or in human memory...I tell you that on the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise." As far as we know, the name "California" was first written in this passage by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, ca. 1510. Within a few decades, it came to be placed first on the peninsula of Baja California and then upon a region stretching up the Western coast of North America. What aspects of this vision are still drawn upon in how we imagine California today? How did certain narratives of California come to be, who has imagined California in certain ways, and why? What is the relationship between certain myths, the peoples who have imagined them, and the other peoples who have shared California dreams? In this course, we will examine some of the myths that surround California by looking at a few specific moments of interaction between the peoples who have come to make California home and the specific places in which they have interacted with each other. Of special interest will be imaginations of the Spanish missions, the Gold Rush, agricultural California, wilderness California, California as "sprawling multicultural dystopia," and California as "west of the west."
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  • COMP 329: Literary Theory and Ordinary Language

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Ludwig Wittgenstein is commonly cited as one of the central figures in twentieth-century philosophy, and the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell is often seen as one of the century's major philosophical movements. Yet the writing of all these figures remains relatively under-appreciated in literary studies. In this course we will address this shortcoming in two ways. First, we will examine some of the basic claims put forward in ordinary language philosophy, particularly as they compare and contrast with various contemporary literary-theoretical projects. Topics may include meaning and intention (Anscombe, Fish, Derrida, de Man, Michaels); experimental writing (R.M. Berry, Theodor Adorno); gender (Toril Moi, Judith Butler); emotion, affect, and expression (Deleuze, Terada, Leys, Altieri, Eldridge); and animals (Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe). Most of our time will be spent reading philosophy and theory, but we'll also look at a couple of works of literature (a Shakespeare play and a contemporary novel) and a couple of films. 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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  • COMP 333: Narrative Strategies

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In this tutorial, we will examine the use of narrative in a range of fine art practices, which could include painting, drawing, video, sculpture, installation, public art, and sound art. Students who are interested in telling or referencing stories in their work in some way will be given the opportunity to develop their ideas and skills in a challenging studio class. In addition to intensive projects, we will look at and discuss the work of artists such as Huma Bhabha, Kara Walker, Joe Sacco, Lydia Davis, Matthew Barney, Raymond Pettibon, Todd Solondz, Sophie Calle, Jenny Holzer, and Jessica Stockholder among others. One of the aims of this course is to challenge traditional notions and expectations of narrative. For instance, what could minimally constitute a narrative piece? How do different mediums allow for time to unfold in unexpected ways? How does omission play a powerful role in a narrative? How might the role of the narrator (often so powerful and present in novels and short stories) change in a visual arts context? Prerequisite:    Students are required to have taken at least two Studio Art 200-level classes in any medium (or by permission of the instructor)
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  • COMP 335: Manners, Modernity, and the Novel

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    The realist novel has a thing for good form: preoccupied with figuring an entire social world in its pages, it also turns a granular-level lens upon the nicer aspects of social life and etiquette. Some literary historians even have pegged the novel's rise to the civilizing process itself. Not just a good read, the novel taught us not to kill each other at the dinner table, and not to use a fish fork to eat our salad. Manners, it turns out, figure some of the most pressing concerns of modernity: the nature of social authority amidst increasingly fluid notions of class, the role of taste in the discourse of aesthetics, and the relation of civilization to its discontents. This course will think about the novel's interest in good form, both within fictional worlds and in the novel's sense of itself as becoming something more refined than mass culture as it enters the 20th century. We will read novels alongside work on style and taste, ranging from etiquette books to philosophical writing on aesthetics, as well as sociological theories of taste as an engine of social distinction. How does something as quaint as good manners becomes a means of registering, and contending with, the vicissitudes of modernity in fiction, from the perfection of social form in Oscar Wilde to the tactful reticence of Henry James? While focused on the 19th century, we also will take up one contemporary heir to the novel of manners, American Psycho, in which the desire to keep up appearances becomes a gothic compulsion. Likely novelists include Jane Austen, William Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Bret Easton Ellis. Theorists will include Pierre Bourdieu, Theodor Adorno, and Erving Goffman, among others. 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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  • COMP 338: Latina/o Musical Cultures and the Dynamics of the Everyday

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In this class we will investigate the primary approaches to the study of popular expression and identity, with particular emphasis on Latina/o popular music as it relates to questions of gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and the nation. We will focus on the following questions, among others: How is Latina/o identity expressed through the "popular" or the everyday? In which ways does the study of Latina/o popular music and culture in general illuminate our understanding of the diverse Latina/o communities? How are we to interpret marketing phenomenon such as the Latin music "boom"? Employing a broad range of current Cultural Studies theories, methods, and core concepts, students will conduct an original semester-long research project and complete various ethnographic exercises in our analysis of the historical, socio-political, and artistic uses of popular music and culture among Latinas/os.
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  • COMP 342: Psychoanalysis,Gender&Sexuality

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Psychoanalytic thought offers one of the most subtle and startling accounts we have of the nature of gender and sexuality, one that suggests how inextricably sexuality is bound to language, to the limits of culture, and to the problem of identity as such. We'll be interested in these issues in their own right; we'll be equally interested in the surprising ways psychoanalytic thought opens up literary, cinematic and visual works--psychoanalysis is, in the end, a form of reading. The course will weave together theoretical texts and fictions from As You Like It to Some Like it Hot. We'll explore Antigone, "chick flicks" and "buddy" films, courtly love lyrics and novels (Balzac, Woolf, Duras) in the light of thinkers such as Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. 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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  • COMP 345: Museums, Memorials, and Monuments: The Representation and Politics of Memory

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In the past 25 years, we have seen an extraordinary boom in museum, memorial and monument building around the world. In this class, we will explore what this growth means to cultural practices of memory and global politics. We will explore questions posed by leading scholars in museum and cultural studies such as: Why is there a "global rush to commemorate atrocities" (Paul Williams)? Why do we live in a "voracious museal culture" and how does this impact our ability to imagine the future (Andreas Huyssen)? We look at museum history and recent museum controversies. We will analyze debates surrounding memorials and monuments. In addition to our work on institutions, we will also read a number of novels that claim to do the work of museums (Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence) and that interrupt processes of memorialization (Amy Waldman's The Submission).
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