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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" wrote Shelley in his 1821 "Defence of Poetry," countering the widely held view of poetry's airy irrelevance to the material progress of humanity. His claims are echoed a century and a half later in Audre Lorde's "Poetry is Not a Luxury,"; in which she argues that poetry is a vital and essential part of her own political struggle as a Black lesbian feminist. But when W.B. Yeats--himself a very politically involved poet--writes in 1917 that "from the quarrel with others comes rhetoric; from the quarrel with ourselves comes poetry," he implies that poetry would suffer from too much involvement with the "quarrel with others" that is politics, becoming, perhaps, something more like advertising jingles for political dogma. And when W. H. Auden writes in 1939 that "poetry makes nothing happen" he appears to locate poetry's value precisely in its irrelevance to politics as such. This course will focus on the vexed relationship between poetry and political struggle, reading predominantly poetry and poetics (writings about poetry) of the last two centuries in an effort to answer the questions: what can poetry do for politics? what does politics do for (or to) poetry? Is poetry essential to political struggle, or do poetry and politics mix only to the detriment of both, producing, on the one hand, bad poetry, and on the other, mere distractions from the "real" work of politics? The primary goal of the course is to make students better readers of poetry, and better readers and writers of argumentative prose.
Prerequisite:
No prior experience with poetry (or politics!) is expected
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3.00 Credits
The general purpose of this course is to develop students' skills as interpreters of poetry and short fiction. Its particular focus is on how--and with what effects--poets create the voices of their poems, and fiction writers create their narrators. We'll consider the ways in which literary speakers inform and entice, persuade and sometimes deceive, their audiences. Readings will include texts from various historical periods, with particular emphasis on the twentieth century (including works by James Joyce, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Frost, Toni Cade Bambara, Raymond Carver, and Seamus Heaney).
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3.00 Credits
Can made up stories actually be bad for you? (Plato seems to have thought so.) Conversely, can they do you any good, even transform your vision of what it means to be good? Can reading fiction, that is, shape your moral character? Or is literature really just entertainment, however sophisticated and intellectually challenging? In this course, we will explore questions like these about the ethics of fiction, questions that have inspired some practitioners of the art to make claims such as: "Surely one of the novel's habitual aims is to articulate morality, to sharpen the reader's sense of vice and virtue" (John Updike); "You write in order to change the world...and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it" (James Baldwin); "...a writer [is] as an architect of the soul" (Doris Lessing); "Naturally you're aware that bad art can finally cripple a man" (Saul Bellow). If you are curious about the subject of ethics, enjoy reading narrative fictions, and are interested in thinking about the connection between the two, this may be the class for you. We will read a varied selection of fiction along with a fair amount of scholarship on the links between moral philosophy and narrative forms in order to refine the critical language we have at our disposal. Writers we will read include: Elizabeth Anscombe, J.M. Coetzee, Cora Diamond, Richard Eldridge, Kazuo Ishiguro, Henry James, Immanuel Kant, Toni Morrison, Iris Murdoch, Tim O'Brien, Robert Pippin, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
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3.00 Credits
This course has a clear purpose. If you had signed up for a course in biology, you would know that you were about to embark on the systematic study of living organisms. If you were registered for a course on the American Civil War, you would know that there had been an armed conflict between the northern and southern states in the 1860s. But if you decide you want to study "culture," what exactly is it that you are studying? The aim of this course is not to come up with handy and reassuring definitions for this word, but to show you why it is so hard to come up with such definitions. People fight about what the word "culture" means, and our main business will be to get an overview of that conceptual brawl. We will pay special attention to the conflict between those thinkers who see culture as a realm of freedom or equality or independence or critical thought and those thinkers who see culture as a special form of bondage, a prison without walls. The course will be organized around short theoretical readings by authors ranging from Matthew Arnold to Constance Penley, but we will also, in order to put our new ideas to the test, watch several films (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Silence of the Lambs, The Lord of the Rings) and listen to a lot of rock & roll. Why do you think culture matters? Once you stop to pose that question, there's no turning back.
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3.00 Credits
In this course, we will read first-rate fiction by first-rate writers from a wide variety of traditions and eras in an effort to understand the meaning of narrative. How does narrative technique shape our understanding of a given text? In what ways and for what purposes do authors create different narrators to present a story? Why do we often read and write similar kinds of tales, and what does this repetition do for us? Our readings will include works by Maupassant, Dinesen, Tanizaki, Tolstoy, Premchand, and Cortazar. We will also consider some pertinent theoretical pieces. All readings in English.
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3.00 Credits
From Langston Hughes to contemporary poets such as Amiri Baraka and Angela Jackson, African American poets have been preoccupied with the relations of poetry to other traditions. Vernacular speech, English poetry, jazz and other musical forms, folk humor and African mythology have all been seen as essential sources for black poetry. This course will survey major poets such as Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Baraka, Jackson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, reading their poems and their essays and interviews about poetic craft. We will ask how black poetry has been defined and whether there is a single black poetic tradition or several.
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3.00 Credits
In this class we will read or otherwise experience a range of poetry being produced right now in the U.S. Some of this poetry doesn't immediately seem to "fit" in the classroom: it's too new, too weird, too raw, too cerebral, too multi-media, too performance-oriented, somehow "unteachable." The premise of the course is that by engaging with these diverse voices we will come up with ways of talking about them, and that in the process we will have to take up some big and interesting questions: What is poetry? Can it be defined? How does poetry aim to affect us? Does one need "expertise" to appreciate it? And: is poetry important? Does it matter--socially, politically, culturally? The course is aimed at lovers of poetry, those who dislike poetry, those who are intimidated by the idea of it, and those who can't see why we should bother. Readings will be structured around the work of the poets coming to Williams to read, and may also include some "old poetry" (for purposes of comparison), critical articles, and manifestos; we will also watch documentaries or listen to CDs of more performance-oriented work (e.g., slam, spoken word).
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3.00 Credits
For almost three thousand years revenge has been a central preoccupation of European literature. Revenge is inviting to literary and dramatic treatment partly because of its impulse towards structure: it traces a simple arc of injury and retaliation. A injures B, and B retaliates against A. But retaliation is never easy or equivalent, and there is always a volatile emotive mixture of loss and grievance that stirs up ethical ambiguities that are seldom resolved. Vengeance also fascinates because it is so paradoxical. The avenger, though isolated and vulnerable, can nevertheless achieve heroic grandeur by coming to personify nemesis. And yet the hero is always contaminated by trying to make a right out of two wrongs--and he usually has to die for it. Driven by past events, cut off from the present, and wrapped up in stratagems for future reprisals, the avenger's actions are almost always compromised by impotence or excess. At best, revenge is "a kinde of Wilde Justice"--a justice that kills its heroes as well as its villains. We will look at as many stories of vengeance, across as wide a range of cultures and media, as possible.
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine ways in which literary works reflect on their status as texts. We'll look at the formal pleasures and puzzles generated by techniques including frame narratives, recursion, and self-reference, in novels, films, and stories by Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Kelly Link, Michel Gondry, Paul Park, and others. Ultimately, we will use the study of metafiction to focus a larger inquiry into the socializing force of language and self-consciousness in human development. Note that students will be required to use, as well as interpret, metafictional techniques in much of their assigned writing.
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3.00 Credits
The film industry has always appreciated the visual and dramatic possibilities of catastrophe, but perhaps unsurprisingly, given the state of our world, the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic sensibility seems to be everywhere in our mass culture these days. In fact, being plugged into the zeitgeist might necessarily entail a familiarity with the emerging tropes and assumptions of this subgenre. This course will consider the ways in which such films help us negotiate our suspicion that, as Hegel noted, we glimpse history only in those moments when our expectations and/or actions collide with the devastating and unforeseeable realities of our physical world and political situation. How do we measure loss when loss occurs at the upper end of the human scale? How do we consider collectively the issue of our own complicity in-if not responsibility for-disaster? Films to be studied will include W.S. Van Dyke's San Francisco, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Carl Schultz's The Seventh Sign, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, Bruce McDonald's Pontypool, and Steven Soderbergh's Contagion.
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