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  • ENGL 215: Race

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Althea Gibson to the Williams Sisters. Julius (Dr. J) Irving to Michael Jordan. Jesse Owens to Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Throughout the 20th century, black athletes have broken through Jim Crow restraints, challenged racial stereotypes, and taken their sports to new heights of achievement. In this course, students will explore a range of black athletes in the 20th century, paying particular attention to the attitudes, stereotypes and experiences they endured. In addition, this course will prompt students to analyze the representation, perception, and commodification of black athletes in popular media forms. Students will trace trends, shifts and themes in representations of blackness across different sports and historical periods. Topics under study may include resistance against and affirmation of athletes as role models, racial slurs in sports broadcasting, common themes in commercialized images of the black male athlete, and distinctions in media coverage based on race and gender. Texts will include everything from critical essays and sociological studies to commercials and documentary films. In their final projects, students may put their newfound knowledge to the test by exploring their campus or hometown to investigate the role that race plays on their own playing field. This EDI course explores the experiences and expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which representations of black athleticism are manipulated to increase financial strength and institutional power, reaffirm dominant U.S. and/or European hierarchies of race, gender and class, and signal inequality in order to combat it. Prerequisite:    Open to all
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  • ENGL 216: Introduction to the Novel

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    A team-taught lecture course on the development of the novel as a literary form. Texts are likely to include: Henry Fielding's Tom Jones; Jane Austen's Emma; Charles Dickens' Great Expectations; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby; Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita; and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Occasional sessions will be scheduled during the term for informal discussions and questions. 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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  • ENGL 218: Forms of Violence

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    "It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is almost as keen as the desire for ones that show bodies naked." When Susan Sontag made this claim she was referring to photographs. She could just as well have been talking about poetry or film. In this course we will consider stories, plays and movies that take up, in one way or another, the problem of aestheticized cruelty. We will ask how art might help us to understand various forms of violence--domestic, random, state-sponsored--and how violence may help us to understand art. Works to be studied will include: Oedipus, The Bacchae, Othello, Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil, and David Russell's Three Kings. We will also read stories and novels by Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, and J.M. Coetzee. 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
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  • ENGL 220: Introduction to African American Writing

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Toni Morrison has described her writing as guided by a musician's imperative always to hold something in reserve, to leave her audience wanting something more. It's a simple idea, but a strange one--that a reader's desire might be fulfilled only by its increase, that its satisfaction requires that it is never enough. African American writing, in all its richness and variety, moves between never enough and something more; this course will introduce just a few of the historical experiences, intellectual currents, cultural resources, thematic preoccupations, and formal strategies encountered in this writing, and consider how and to what ends African American literary tradition(s) have been organized, in critical and polemical ways, by individual writers and scholars, and by artistic and political movements. We'll forego the perspective of a grand overview, diving right in instead, and we won't necessarily always reach for the best-known titles by the most famous authors. In any case, by the end of the course, you should be prepared to have more left to read than you did at the beginning. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course
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  • ENGL 222: Lyric Poetry

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    What do poems do? How do poems work and play? How do poems challenge and reward attentive scrutiny? What does close, sustained reading enable us to think, feel, and say about a poem? This course considers short poems by Frost, Yeats, Keats, Bishop, Tennyson, Donne, Milton, Shakespeare and others. This Gateway course is writing intensive, requiring four analytic papers of four pages each. Students will also memorize passages and read aloud, to hear as well as see what is happening. The goals are to encourage subtler, richer responses to poetry, to expand appreciation and enjoyment, and to develop analytic and interpretive capacity. 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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  • ENGL 223: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Jazz

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Taking its title from the Wallace Stevens poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which interprets the blackbird in different ways, this course similarly explores a more complex, multi-layered perspective on jazz, from jazz and American democracy to jazz in visual art. Accordingly, the course introduces students to several genres, including historical documents, cultural criticism, music, literature, film, photography and art. The course does not draw on a musicological method but rather a socio-cultural analysis of the concept, music and its effect--so students are not required to have any prior musical knowledge or ability. In this writing intensive course, students will write short close analyses of multiple types of media, ultimately building up to an argumentative essay. This EDI course explores the musical expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which representations of jazz signify on institutional power, reaffirm dominant U.S. and/or European hierarchies of race, gender and class, and signal inequality in order to contest it.
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  • ENGL 225: Romanticism and Modernism

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literature written in English participated in two international aesthetic movements, Romanticism and Modernism, respectively. While Modernism is often thought to mark a decisive break with Romanticism--in part because both movements presented themselves as "new," a radical departure from what had gone before--there are important continuities and affinities as well as breaches between the two movements. This course will investigate the nature of Romanticism and Modernism, and the relation between them. We will study major works from each period, including polemics, poetry, novels, and short stories. Our Romantic writers will be primarily British, and will include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley; Modernist writers will include a more international cast of characters: Wilde, the French Symbolist poets, along with Pound, Stein, Williams, and several Harlem Renaissance writers. We will explore each movement's engagement with a range of topics and issues: for example, the subjective experience of time and memory; the nature of symbolization and the role of "feeling" in art; the relation of the individual mind to social life; the conflicted appeal for the artist of "common" language and experience, on the one hand, and avant-garde forms of expression, on the other. Our broader aim will be to invite potential English majors to think critically about the principles that underlie the ordering of literary history into aesthetic movements and "periods." 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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  • ENGL 227: A Science Fiction and Fantasy-Writing Seminar

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In this class the students will attempt to produce a genre short-story, or else a chunk of a longer narrative, every two weeks. It will be writing-intensive rather than reading-intensive, though from time to time we might look at the odd piece of professional work, by way of example or inspiration, or as a source of stolen goods. Mostly, though, we will be discussing our own stuff--original stories, or sketches for stories, or the occasional plot, character, or setting exercise. Passing the course will require finishing at least three ten- to twenty-page stories, as well as numerous shorter assignments. A fair amount of work, in other words, although to save time I'm hoping we can keep any analysis or interpretation to a strict minimum. 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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  • ENGL 229: Elegies

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This tutorial--intended primarily for sophomores--explores elegies as a literary genre. In their most familiar form, elegies honor and memorialize the dead. More broadly conceived, the genre includes works lamenting other kinds of loss as well: the loss of a lover, place, country, or cherished version of one's past. We'll consider the special challenges and opportunities of the elegiac voice: how it manages to give public expression to private grief; negotiates problems of tone and perspective; worries about and celebrates the capacity of language to generate hope and consolation; and seeks a kind of solace in the literary effort to evoke, preserve, or rewrite a lost life or an absent past. This course focuses primarily on poetry, English and American, across a broad historical range. We'll first read poems from 1600-1900--including works by Jonson, Milton, Donne, Dryden, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson, and Whitman, and then turn to some of the twentieth-century's great poetic elegists--Owen, Yeats, Auden, Lowell, and Heaney. Finally, we'll consider how the elegiac voice works in fiction, especially in stories by Joyce ("The Dead") and Nabokov ("Spring in Fialta"). 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
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  • ENGL 230: Introduction to Literary Theory

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In this course we will debate the nature of literary meaning and explore the engagement of literature, theory, and culture. In thefirst half of the course we will explore such questions as, What determines the meaning of a text? Can an interpretation of a literary work be deemed true or false? In the second half of the course, we will read works by such authors as Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butlerand as we investigate therole of art in the construction and transformation of political subjectivities. The emphasis will be on exploring anddefending arguments on the issues in productive discussion and frequent short papers. 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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