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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Decades ago, C.P. Snow confronted literary and science scholars with the theory that they have separated into "two cultures," a controversial thesis that concerns intellectual divisions both across and within academic disciplines. In this course, we will take up this challenge by examining how science and literature function as integral parts of culture. Key questions for the course include: what is the relationship between scientific creation and science fiction? How does evolutionary theory function as a globalizing narrative? What is the role of communal practices (paradigms) in shaping the directions of research? What are the local consequences of global scientific and literary achievements? How do societies write biology? Through this comparative approach, we will explore how literary representations influence and reflect developments in science. By examining the ways in which these different fields within shared historical contexts, we will gain a better understanding of science and literature as material practices.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the ways that individuals have used writing to engage with the issues of womanhood and women's health, as doctors, patients, theorists, and artists. Cultural ideals of gender often intersect with, and help to define, models of health and illness (and vice versa); as notions of health and womanhood are always culturally constructed and historically contingent, students will read course texts with an understanding of the cultures and individuals that produced them. The chosen writers engage, for example, with issues of the body and gender identity, sexuality, colonialism, race, childbirth, disease, and death. The syllabus will include writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gustave Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, May Sarton, Anais Nin, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Audre Lorde. As well as work by medical professionals. A significant component of the course will involve exploring the Maine Women Writers Collection.
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3.00 Credits
Context in legal studies: the Law and Economics movement and Cultural Studies. Question: Can literary and cultural texts productively inform an understanding of law? Can jurisprudence illuminate critical practices in the Humanities? Literary scenes of confession. Epistemological instability of the confessional mode. Questions about the legal system's emphasis upon confession. Structural parallel between the use of precedent in establishing legal standards and the practice in literary studies of identifying certain texts or authors as exemplary of specific genres or periods. Reading includes texts by Rousseau, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, Freud, Paul de Man, Martha Nussbaum, Wai Chee Dimock, Peter Brooks, and selected journal articles.
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3.00 Credits
No course description available.
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3.00 Credits
"Health" is a complex term, since it can be defined in relation not only to illness, but also to wellness. In this course, we will explore the ways that writers invoke health as a vehicle for enunciating identity, exploring ethical questions, establishing authority, and claiming self-determination. The exact focus of the course will vary, and might include themes such as the body as subject and object, medical ethics, women and health, medicine in film and the visual arts, nursing and doctoring, the healer- patient relationship, cross-cultural healing, madness in literature, and illness narratives. Fundamentally, we will become conscious of the ways that representations of health change over time, across cultures, and according to the perspective from which each story is told. Some versions of this course will have a component related to the Maine Women Writers Collection.
MADNESS IN LITERATURE:" Madness" has often functioned as a catch-all term encompassing a variety of ailments, from mild anxiety to psychosis. In this course we will consider texts and films that attempt to represent the experience of mental illness, focusing not so much on medical explanations as on the means by which the categories of "madness" or "mental illness" are constructed and inhabited in various cultural contexts. We will explore the ways that writers invoke mental illness toward a variety of ends, from direct engagement with medical theories or treatments to veiled commentary on the cultures in which they live. The course welcomes students with majors in the health sciences as well as those in the humanities. It will include texts such as William Shakespeare's King Lear, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper," Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Flora Schreiber's Sybil, and films such as The Madnessof King George and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
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3.00 Credits
Specific content to be determined for each offering. Examples of possible topics include Postcolonial Women Writers; British Women Writers; Women Writers of the African Diaspora; Bi-Cultural Women Writers; Women Writers of the Americas; Women in the Humanities; and Contemporary Women Writers.
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3.00 Credits
By looking at a whole range of American literature, ranging from the earliest colonial narratives to postmodern fiction and film, students will explore how the meaning of American has changed over time, and how being American meant different things to different people. American meant different things to different people. Settler accounts, native American accounts of the conquest, slave narratives, transcendentalist meditations,culture wars, and unsettled ethnic and race relations all testify that the very consensus around which America has forged its identity is, paradoxically, quite elusive and heavily contested. The selection of texts, periods, and genres will vary from class to class.
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine various forms of literature that shed light on the state of the world from the second half of the twentieth century to the present.
The Clash of Civilizations This course will examine various forms of literature that shed light on the state of the world from the second half of the twentieth century to the present.
Tolstoy & Dostoevsky An opportunity to study, in some depth, major works by two eminent figures in world literature. A look at earlier, shorter works, such as Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground will serve as preparation for the reading and discussion of two equally profound but vastly different novelistic depictions of the human condition: War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov. All readings will be in English, and no previous knowledge of Russian language or literature is required.
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3.00 Credits
Examples of possible topics include the Gothic novel;, the New Woman novel, the Edwardian period; the 19th-century novel; the literature of World War I; the Booker prize; the fiction of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and other major writers; the poetry of W. B. Yeats;, and the sonnet in England. A description of the topic offered will be posted prior to the registration period.
Prize Fiction: When is a novel worth thousands of dollars? When is a novelist a celebrity? When do books make it on prime-time TV, and when is betting on a novel almost like betting on the Superbowl? Answer: When it's the Booker Prize. This course will focus on one year in the life of Great Britain's top award for contemporary fiction. Discussions will include the concept of giving awards and what characterizes a winner.
James Joyce: This course will concentrate on the early prose of Ireland's most important fiction writer, James Joyce. Students should expect to review a brief history of Ireland for background, and then give a detailed reading of the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-biographical poetic novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In addition to frequent quizzes, each student will write two papers, one on each work.
Literatures of Travel: The pilgrim, the explorer, the imperial agent, the tourist and the satirist: all of these figures have produced narratives of travel, literature which recounts the shock and delight of encountering that which is strange or alien. Some of these writers recycle fantastic legends about foreign peoples and their cultural practices. Others deplore the corrupted state of European nations and look to realms beyond Christian Europe for inspiration. And throughout these narratives the reader is invited to witness fabulous beasts, natural marvels, and architectural wonders. This course will begin with early modern travel literature¿¿ Mandeville¿s Travels, The Travels of Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus¿s diaries, Mary Wortley Montague¿s letters, and Jonathan Swift¿s Gulliver¿s Travels¿¿before moving on to authors like Richard Burton and Mary Kingsley, who wrote during the height of British imperialism, and concluding with modern travel writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux.
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3.00 Credits
This course is an introduction to the goals, methods and tools of literary and cultural criticism. Students will learn to think like a literary critic by reading closely, raising analytical questions, working with primary and secondary sources, developing, implementing and presenting a focused research project. This course is required for English majors.
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