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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
One of the more peculiar features of societies like ours is that we are drowning in what used to be called art. No-one has to make a point of seeking out stories or music or painterly images. They stream ceaselessly from out of glowing boxes. They are piped into public space. You couldn't hide from art if you tried. This raises some interesting questions: Are popular movies (and novels and tunes) different from the "artistic" kinds? Are they worse? Does anything about culture change when societies start producing it in bulk? Does popular culture faithfully recite the attitudes and ideas of dominant groups and powerful institutions? How wide a variety of views is possible within it? The course will be held inside the Berkshire county jail; enrollment will be divided equally between Williams students and residents of the jail. Permission to enroll will be granted on the basis of a questionnaire and face-to-face interview with the instructor. Williams students will be asked to consider what forms of culture they share with people who have not typically thought of themselves as college-bound and will get to trade ideas on the subject with incarcerated women. The jail setting is a way of bringing into the classroom the one group that college students almost never get to hear from: people who weren't made ready for college. One class meeting per week.
Prerequisite:
A 100 level English class or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
English independent study.
Prerequisite:
Unusually qualified and committed students who are working on a major writing or research project may confer with the English Department about possible arrangements for independent study
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3.00 Credits
English independent study.
Prerequisite:
Unusually qualified and committed students who are working on a major writing or research project may confer with the English Department about possible arrangements for independent study
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3.00 Credits
Edward Said (1935-2003), one of the major critics of the last century, is best known for his groundbreaking 1978 book Orientalism, which inaugurated the field of postcolonial studies, and for his activist work on behalf of the Palestinian peoples. But his intellectual interests were wide-ranging: from French literary theory to Vico to Middle East politics to Glenn Gould. A true public intellectual, Said was a rarity among university academics. Besides writing several important scholarly books, he also wrote for various non-academic publications, such as The Nation, Al-Ahram, and The London Review of Books; co-founded, with the musician Daniel Barenboim, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra; and, from 1977-1991, served as a member of the Palestinian National Council. In this course, we will focus on works that represent different, though interconnected, facets of Said's oeuvre: his more strictly literary critical work (Beginnings and The World, The Text, and the Critic), his work on society and culture (Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism), his writings on the Palestinian question and the Middle East (The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, From Oslo to Iraq), his writings on music (Parallels and Paradoxes co-authored with Daniel Barenboim), and his late work (On Late Style). We will also examine criticism of his work--Orientalism in particular.
Prerequisite:
Some literature background helpful
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3.00 Credits
Moments of political turmoil expose the contested and highly charged ways in which a culture structures itself around an imagined past, a process that some of the most interesting theorists of the past two hundred years have helped to illuminate. In this course, we will read their work along with literary and cinematic texts that invoke such moments of upheaval--the French and Russian Revolutions as well as those of 1848, the rise of fascism and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the battle for Algerian independence, the AIDS crisis--in order to lay bare the problems and contradictions that emerge in those fraught narratives of the past. We will consider such issues as the aesthetics of fascism and of democracy under pressure, fantasies of decolonization, and the uses of melancholy in representing historical loss. Readings will be drawn from literary works by Austen, Eliot, Kafka, Mann, Borges, Stoppard, and Kushner, and theoretical essays by Kant, Burke, Carlyle, Marx, Weber, Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, de Certeau, and Lefort. Films will include such works as Eisenstein's October, Reifenstahl's The Triumph of the Will, Wellman's Nothing Sacred and Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. This course is conceived for students who have already taken a criticism course, but those students who have yet to do so are welcome
Prerequisite:
A 300-level course or permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
As an epigraph to his novel, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison selects a quotation from Herman Melville's story, "Benito Cereno." In the prologue to Invisible Man, Ellison invokes a sermon that appears briefly in the opening chapter of Moby-Dick. In his essays on comedy and American culture, Ellison comments trenchantly on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Melville and Mark Twain were, in many obvious ways, as different as two writers can be. Nonetheless, they also have many surprising similarities, and it is not difficult to understand why both are so important to Ellison. This course will examine the novels, stories, and essays of these three writers, with particular attention to the themes that they have in common and to the traits that make each of them distinctive. Race, slavery, epistemology, and the nature of American democracy are among those themes.
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
This course is for students of any major who wish to continue studying critical, cultural, or literary theory. Students will give close attention to a single theorist or philosophical school or perhaps to a single question as taken up by several theorists. Topics will vary by semester. The topic of this year's course is the theorist, Slavoj Zizek. Zizek's writing is a ferment of psychoanalysis, science fiction, Marxism, crime thrillers, opera, and dirty jokes. He may be the only philosopher alive who is so entertaining that one sometimes forgets that he is also really smart. Our first task, accordingly, will be to figure out what Zizek's philosophical and political project has been, since he never really says. We will try, in other words, to identify what is most systematic in a body of writing that looks more off-handed than it actually is. And if we can't find the system, we should at least be able to name Zizek's preoccupations: What is the relationship between pleasure and political power? Does power operate differently now than it used to? Is obscenity--or rambunctious eroticism--one path towards liberation? What do most of us do with knowledge that is too terrible to bear? Is there an alternative to global capitalism and onrushing ecological collapse? Is there anything about Christianity worth saving? Or about communism? We will read widely in Zizek, splicing in as little Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Lacan as we can get away with.
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; prior coursework in critical theory or continental philosophy, no matter the department, is strongly recommended
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3.00 Credits
If you have taken English 360, you know how truly awesome James Joyce's Ulysses is and have a sense that it not only rewards but demands reconsideration. This advanced course is an opportunity to more fully master a masterpiece, and to pursue your own critical and theoretical analysis. For the first half of spring semester, we meet as a small band of zealous disciples, discussing the complexities of Ulysses. For the second half of the term, students meet independently with the instructor to plan, pursue, refine, and revise a substantial essay of about twenty pages. Your research and writing might be literary critical (close reading, formal analysis, exploration of verbal details), interdisciplinary, biographical and historical, political and ideological, feminist and gender-inflected, cultural studies, post-colonial, psychological and sociological, among many possibilities. The idea is to learn better how to develop a compelling interpretive analysis, as one might in a senior honors project or graduate school seminar paper.
Prerequisite:
English 360
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3.00 Credits
A colloquium for students pursuing critical theses and critical specializations. Students will present and critique their work in progress, and discuss issues particular to researching and structuring a long analytical thesis. We will also discuss the work of a variety of recent critics representing a range of methods of literary study. Satisfactory completion of the course will be required for students to continue on in the honors program.
Prerequisite:
Admission to the department Honors program
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3.00 Credits
English honors thesis. Required of all senior English majors pursuing critical theses and critical specialization.
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