First-Year Program
All courses in the First-Year Program are restricted to Gallatin first-year students only.
FYS: Imagining Identity and Difference
K10.0031 FYS, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Nina Cornyetz
Generally, people identify themselves as individuals, and yet also as belonging to a certain community. We will ask, how do we define and understand ourselves as individuals? What is a “subject”? How are communities constructed and imagined? What does it mean to “belong” to a nation, an ethnic group, or a culture? Conversely, how do we imagine outsiders, foreigners, outcasts, that is, the “Other”? We will combine philosophic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and historical treatments of subjectivity, race, community, and ethnicity, to address these questions. Readings will include: Anderson's Imagined Communities, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, Marx's “The Fetishism of the Commodity,” Said's Orientalism, and Jean-Paul Sartre's “The Look.”
FYS: The Social Construction of Reality
K10.0032 FYS, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Stephen Duncombe
How do we know what is real and what is illusion? From the philosophy of the ancient Greeks to contemporary movies such as The Matrix, this question has haunted humankind. This course begins with the premise that “the real” is something we construct. We create reality through the stories we tell and the stories told to us. Since the most powerful storytellers today are the commercial media, we will pay special attention to the role of entertainment, advertising, and public relations in constructing our reality. Texts for the course include works by Plato, Rene Descartes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Maxine Hong Kingston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herman Melville, Walter Lippmann, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and John Berger.
FYS: Family
K10.0035 FYS, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Patrick McCreery
The concept of “family” is contentious: politicians seek to define it, marketers struggle to reach it, media makers attempt to represent it, and many individuals hope to transcend it. This course offers both a critical examination of family and an introduction to the academic disciplines that study it. In the United States, legal, social, and personal definitions of family are constantly being established and abandoned, expanded and limited. This fluidity exists partly because historical processes such as slavery, immigration, and demands for gay rights can re-shape popular conceptualizations of family. Likewise, academic disciplines such as history, sociology, biology, law, literature, and literary theory routinely offer new and sometimes contradictory ways of understanding family. This course will use these disciplines to illuminate the complicated ideas and emotions that can surround what arguably are our closest relationships. Works we may study include J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were, Nelkin and Lindee’s DNA Mystique, and the photography of Sally Mann.
FYS: Science and Society
K10.0038 FYS, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Gene Cittadino
What role, or roles, does science play in our culture? How does science differ from other ways of knowing? How do social/cultural values shape scientific knowledge? What does an ordinary citizen need to know about the nature and practice of science? Do scientists have an obligation to pursue research that will benefit the general public? Are scientists responsible for the consequences of the knowledge they generate? This course explores these and related questions about the relationship between science and society by examining a variety of historical episodes and recent controversies through the writings of scientists, historians, philosophers, playwrights, and social theorists. Topics will range from sun-centered astronomy, the circulation of the blood, and the discovery of deep time, to current issues involving genomics, global warming, and the controversy over Darwinism and intelligent design. Readings will likely include C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius, James Watson’s The Double Helix, David Raup’s The Nemesis Affair, and Gordy Slack’s The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything.
FYS: Travel Fictions
K10.0043 FYS, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Steve Hutkins
The novelist John Gardner once said there were only two plots to all of the stories ever told: a stranger comes to town, and someone goes on a journey. There may be other plots, but the encounter between those who are settled and those who are on the move is one of the most intriguing and compelling of literary themes. Focusing on novels and short stories, this course asks what happens when travelers and tourists come into contact with the locals and native-born. It examines the way travelers preconceive and apprehend foreign places, the problematic search for the "authentic" and "essential," and the view of tourism as a form of neo-colonialism, involving issues of power and possession, race and class, exoticism and Otherness. Readings may include James’ Daisy Miller, Mann’s Death in Venice Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, and McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, as well as articles on the history, sociology, politics, and economics of travel and tourism.
FYS: Hamlet in the Afterlife: Characters, Conflict and Criticism
K10.0047 FYS, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Alycia Smith-Howard
Edward Vining (1881): “Hamlet is a woman.” William Hazlitt (1906): “It is we, who are Hamlet.” G. Wilson Knight (1930): “It is Hamlet, not Claudius, who is the villain of the piece.” Steven Berkoff (1989): “Hamlet is a quest for the most perfect we can make ourselves.” Throughout time scholars, theorists, directors, performers, and writers have wrestled with Shakespeare’s most famous and influential work. In this course we will follow in the footsteps of such thinkers as Goëthe, Freud, Eliot, and Laing to investigate the major interpretative puzzles posed by the play and its elusive principal characters. The central aim of this course is to introduce students to the methods and materials of bibliographic and archival research as they develop and support their own theoretic arguments about this pivotal work. Written assignments (papers, research journal and final project) will be generated from responses to Shakespeare’s text(s), critical theories, dramatic interpretations, individual literary analysis and secondary research. Course readings may also include such works as Aristotle's Poetics, Bacon's “On Revenge,” Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Updike's Gertrude and Claudius.
FYS: The Self and the Call of the Other
K10.0049 FYS, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Judith Greenberg
Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus from the Metamorphoses portrays the dangers of refusing to heed the call of the Other. Absorbed by his own image, Narcissus ignores the calls of the nymph Echo, who relies upon his words to speak. His solipsism leads to both of their deaths. This class takes Ovid’s story as a model for investigating how the Self is shaped in relation to the Other, a question considered by psychologists, writers, philosophers, filmmakers, and literary critics. We will read psychological discussions of object relations theory and the formative role of the mother as original Other (Sigmund Freud, D.W. Winnicott, Jessica Benjamin), literary portrayals of the Self as dependent upon or isolated from others (Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein), and philosophical essays on the ethics of the call of the Other (Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas). We will look at how extreme forms of suffering can be understood as a breakdown in the connection between the Self and the Other, reading essays by experts in trauma studies (Cathy Caruth and Susan Brison), and consider ways in which colonialism and empire shape conceptions of Self and Other, reading novels (E.M. Forster's A Passage To India) and theory (Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak). We will also ask what problems arise specifically when women speak—how Echo finds a voice—viewing films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.
FYS: The City and the Grassroots
K10.0050 FYS, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 René Francisco Poitevin
This course uses literature, social theory, and walking tours to explore the role of “urban space” in mediating social movements and everyday life. We’ll address the following questions: What makes a “city”? What does “urban” mean? Is “urban consciousness” a necessary condition for understanding how society works and who modern people are? How can we understand the city as an object of social conflict and social change, and yet also as a political community seeking to shape its own destiny? Readings will include Saskia Sassen’s The Global City, Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Manuel Castells’s The City and the Grassroots, Doreen Massey’s Space, Place, and Gender, Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution, and Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love.
FYS: The Thingliness of Things
K10.0051 FYS, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Eve Meltzer
This course engages a seemingly simple question: what is an object? Relatedly, what is a thing? As a means of illuminating these questions, we will consult everyday objects, theories of various object forms (from our very first loved objects, to commodities, fetishes, even lost things) and literary and artistic representations. One of our challenges will be to learn to read objects both by having them at hand, and by understanding how economic, psychic, and social values shape their visual and material properties. In this process, we will engage the popular view that objects tell us something, first and foremost, about the people who create and use them. We will also encounter the taboo proposition that objects may have an intentionality of their own, and that humans do not dictate the meaning of all things. Readings include Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”; Marx, “Commodities”; Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting; Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style; Baudrillard, “The Ideological Genesis of Need”; Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
FYS: Novel Freedoms
K10.0053 FYS, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Nicole Parisier
Novels create whole worlds, for characters and readers alike. This course will investigate the relationship between the frameworks that writers build and the freedoms that they imagine. Some novels record journeys, others focus on realized or unrequited love, still others are stories of individual growth. Whatever the subject, we will ask how the world within the novel is imagined in order to understand the freedoms at stake in particular narrative designs. What freedom does narrative uncertainty provide for a reader, and what freedom does a fictional narrator (omniscient, limited, or unreliable) suggest? Together we will consider how the elements of the novel—its structure, narrative style, and voice—imagine freedom, making the world inside and outside the novel new. Although the novel will provide our main focus, we will also examine other texts including film, Greek tragedy, and personal essays. Authors will include Sophocles, Plato, Edith Wharton, Marguerite Duras, Octavia Butler, Chang-Rae Lee, and David Sedaris.
FYS: "Character"
K10.0058 FYS, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Karen Hornick
This course will consider two seemingly simple questions: What is "character"? What is a "character"? First, character is a fundamental element of the primal human activity of storytelling: can we imagine a story without a character? A character without a story? Second, character can serve as a symbolic embodiment of the values and virtues of the culture that produced it: what can we learn from studying cultural heroes and archetypes? why does modernity favor stories of highly individuated characters over stories of idealized "types"? Third, the word "character" also means "personality": is character in that sense innate or "built," something genuine or a role we perform to meet social expectations external to our true and hidden self? We will consider these questions by observing and analyzing representations of self and others from cave drawings to Renaissance portraiture and photography, from epic poetry to tabloid magazine stars and Internet avatars. Possible readings include The Odyssey, Oedipus the King, The Poetics, Hamlet, Bartleby the Scrivener, Jane Eyre, "The Unconscious" (Freud), Black Boy; selections from Galen, Marcus Aurelius, Chaucer, and modern theorists of the self and representation.
FYS: Sports, Race and Politics
K10.0059 FYS, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Millery Polyné
Beyond spectacular touchdowns and walk-off grand slams, sport in the Americas remains a vital institution for analyzing the ideological/theoretical frameworks of nationalism, diplomacy, corruption, gender and race. From Joe Louis’s historic fight against Max Schmeling in June 1936 to the recent murder of Pakistan’s cricket coach in Jamaica during the World Cup, sport should be understood beyond masculine bravado, violence and the joy and agony of competition, but also as a serious vehicle for conceptualizing and analyzing the triumphs and limitations of our society and its complicated history. This course examines sports (baseball, boxing, soccer, basketball and cricket), primarily from a U.S. and Latin American context, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In what ways do these sports reify concepts of race and gender? How are they utilized as a tool of diplomatic relations? Through primary document analysis and secondary source readings such as Adrian Burgos’s Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line, Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian, and Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against the Enemy, this course will allow students to further assess the significance of sport in shaping culture and politics in our global society.
FYS: The Search for Community
K10.0060 FYS, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 David Moore
Some people see community in a romantic vision of the small town where everyone knows everyone else; some find it in a bustling urban neighborhood with its food coops and street fairs; yet others find virtual community online. This course will examine some of the literatures on the concept and experience of community—in sociology, anthropology, politics, history—and help students grapple with its meaning in their lives. It will ask: What is community? How has it changed historically? What are its benefits (to individual well-being, child development, or political solidarity) and dangers (to individual expression, economic development, or political democracy)? How has community been represented in literature and the other creative arts? We will explore the possibilities and challenges of mobilizing various kinds of communities, and may have conversations with community activists and organizers. Students will conduct and present case studies of different forms of community, and will produce various kinds of representation of community life. Readings may include: Delanty, Community; Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community; Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart; Jackson, Harlemworld; Davila, Barrio Dreams; Gregory, Black Corona; and Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.
WS I: Aesthetics on Trial
K10.0319 WSI, 4 CR TR 6:20-7:35 Christopher Trogan
While cultures often like to see themselves reflected in the arts, groundbreaking art is frequently accompanied by controversy. In literature, Nabokov was faced with charges of obscenity. In the visual arts, controversies surrounding “public art” have helped to determine what art can be and do from a social perspective. In photography, people such as Mapplethorpe have challenged the role of the visual arts as innocent representation. In film, Reifenstahl blurred the line between aesthetics and politics by directing for Hitler. Through critical writing we will investigate such questions as: How do we define art? What constitutes obscenity in the arts? Is art inherently political? Three shorter essays and a longer literary-critical paper are required. Texts may include selections from Danto, Lin, Nabokov, Plato, and Riefenstahl.
WS I: Artists' Lives, Artists' Work
K10.0323 WSI, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Yevgeniya Traps
What is the relationship between art and life, between the luxury of creating and the necessity of surviving? In this writing seminar, we will explore the many ways artists' experiences and the circumstances of creation influence artists' work. How are artists shaped by the societies in which they live? How do family background, historical events, political movements, social disruptions, and celebrity influence our creations? How do artists, in turn, shape their societies' attitudes and values? Focusing on how art and writing reveal the effects of race, gender, sexuality, and politics in the second half of the 20th century, we will consider a number of works in their contexts. Using writing as a way of thinking critically, students will produce descriptive, analytical, and literary-critical essays. Readings may include works by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion.
WS I: Writing Twentieth-century Music and Culture
K10.0333 WSI, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Gregory Erickson
The twentieth century, in all its innovation and violence, produced forms of music that were equally radical and challenging. This course will study the ways that music reacted to, reflected, encouraged, resisted, and participated in dramatic cultural shifts, ruptures, and movements of the twentieth century. Our study of music will, in turn, spur topics for writing—in journals and critical essays. We will listen to, and read and write about, the noise machines of Luigi Russolo, the early jazz of New Orleans, the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg, the labor songs of the 1930s, the silence of John Cage, the rebellion of 1960’s rock and free jazz, and the anger of rap. Readings may include the writings of musicians like Milton Babbitt, Glenn Gould, and Miles Davis; critical writings of musicologists such as Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, and Robert Walser; essays by Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and Norman Mailer; and fiction and poetry by James Joyce, James Baldwin, Wallace Stevens, Amira Baraka, and others.
WS I: Writers on Writing
K10.0343 WSI, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 June Foley
George Orwell named four reasons for writing: “egoism,” “aesthetic enthusiasm,” “historical impulse,” and “political purpose.” Franz Kafka stressed the emotional power of writing in calling it “an ax for the frozen sea within us.” Mario Vargas Lhosa claimed the secret reason for the literary vocation is the questioning of real life. In this course, students write critical essays that are inspired by writing about writing. Our texts, exemplary works in several genres, include essays by Orwell, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, and Chang-Rae Lee; selections from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist; Lillian Ross’s New Yorker “profile” of Hemingway; short stories about the writing life by E.L. Doctorow, Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro, and James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Student writing will culminate in a literary-critical essay.
WS I: Forms of Love
K10.0345 WSI, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Susan Weisser
All you need is love, love makes the world go around, and love is a battlefield, so the songs tell us. What kinds of love are essential to our well-being, and why does love so often go wrong? This course will examine friendship, romance and marriage, and parenthood as forms of love that are very personal and yet have social rules of their own, sometimes unspoken. We will use a selection of philosophical, sociological and literary texts to see what they contribute to our understanding of these important relationships. We will read selections from Aristotle on friendship, Stephanie Koontz’s History of Marriage, Eric Fromm’s The Art of Loving, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex ; literary texts include drama by Eugene O’Neill, and Neil LaBute, memoir by Anne Lamott, fiction by Jamaica Kincaid and Ray Bradbury, and poetry by George Meredith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Carson. Discussing what we think and feel about these representations of love will serve as the springboard for developing students’ writing on the subject. Students will compose descriptive and critical essays.
WS I: Writing the Self
K10.0347 WSI, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Alycia Smith-Howard
Not all autobiographies begin at the beginning: a Roman would begin his Life when he first spoke in the forum; Jean-Paul Sartre ends his autobiography at age 11. In autobiography the lies one tells and the style one uses are just as revealing as the truth about what happened. How would you write about your life? Can you shape your own life as you wish or are you merely a product of your time and place? In this course, we consider how writers tell the story of themselves by selecting certain events and images, how writers use their writing to come to self-awareness and how writers cover up or omit important facts. Students will write and revise three to four essays, including a literary-critical essay. Readings may include selections from a cross-section of works by such authors as George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Anne Frank, Frank McCourt, Maya Angelou, Joan Didion, Eric Clapton and Barack Obama.
WS I: The Faith Between Us
K10.0353 WSI, 4 CR MW 8:00-9:15 Scott Korb
Look at the headlines, flip through a magazine, or click the link to your favorite blog, and increasingly you’ll find that whether faith comes between us, separating one believer from another, or lives between us, forming the glue that holds communities together, is a question we all must face. Through a consideration of a variety of contemporary religion writing—mostly from newspapers, popular magazines, journals, and websites—this course will ask students to take their own excursions into faith and faithlessness, and through a process of writing, workshopping, and the all-important rewriting, create the stories that, in Joan Didion’s words, “we tell ourselves in order to live.” Readings will include pairings of essays by writers including Reza Aslan and Karen Armstrong, Paul Elie and Marilynne Robinson, Peter Manseau and Darcey Steinke, Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges, Sam Harris, and Irshad Manji.
WS I: Writing the City
K10.0355 WSI, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Jennifer Lemberg
“New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well.” Describing his protagonist’s relationship to New York in his novel City of Glass, Paul Auster articulates the way in which the city has frequently been the location of a search for the self. From the great wave of immigration in the early twentieth century all the way through the end of the millennium, New York has beckoned as a site where people come to lose or rediscover themselves, the life unfolding within its “inexhaustible space” reflecting not only intense personal upheavals but also larger historical shifts. In this class, we will use our own writing to explore 20th and 21st century narratives about New York, and to consider how individual experiences of the city intersect with broader historical conditions. Through regular informal writing as well as a series of finished essays, we will examine stories of how New York has inspired euphoria and dejection, contentment and restlessness, exhilarating feelings of belonging or unrelenting isolation. Authors we will read may include James, Wharton, Singer, Hurston, Baldwin, Kazin, Ellison, Didion, Auster, Alexander, and others.
WS I: Narratives and the Law
K10.0356 WSI, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Catherine Siemann
We shape our understanding of the world by telling ourselves stories. In this writing seminar, we will examine the way our perceptions of legal issues are created through narrative, both in literature and in the courtroom. We will see how our understanding of justice is framed and interpreted in various works of fiction, and literature’s influence on our notions of guilt and innocence. We will also consider storytelling in the courtroom, through legal cases, literary depictions of trials, and critical commentary on both. Texts may include Sophocles’ Antigone, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law,” Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers,” and William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. Legal cases we may consider include “Brown v. Board of Education” (civil rights), “Baby M” (maternal surrogacy), and “Rasul v. Bush” (Guantanamo Bay detentions).
WS I: Wilderness and Civilization
K10.0357 WSI, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Andrew Libby
The ruin of the environment begins with agriculture. With this assertion Paul Shepard sharpens a modern tradition of radical environmental thinking that ranges from Rousseau to Elizabeth Kolbert. In this course, we will consider some of the basic issues behind our urges to protect, and squander, the environment. If the environment includes wilderness, how does such wildness relate to our own sense of who we are? How wild, how civilized, are we? Is homo sapiens hard-wired for violence? To what extent do our current forms of economic and social organization allow or prohibit us from accommodating ourselves to the world around us? In this seminar, we will write about these issues and imagine realistic alternative futures. Authors may include Matsuo Bashō, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, Black Elk, Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Abbey, Paul Shepard, Elizabeth Kolbert, Alice Walker, and Cormac McCarthy.
WS I: The Cultural Impacts of World War II
K10.0358 WSI, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Kimberly Lewis
More than any other war, World War II represented a breakdown and a turning point in our concept of Western civilization; thus, representations of the war have abounded in our literature, TV, film, newspapers. What about this particular war led artists to question not just the nature of violence, but also our notions of progress, rational thought, human-ity, and even language, literature, and representation? How has this war been represented through the years, beginning with journalistic reports from the front? Why do so many films and books continue to re-evaluate and re-write it? Finally, what tropes, clichés, and assumptions about this war continue to influence our ways of thinking and speaking about it? Readings may include works by Martha Gellhorn, Hannah Arendt, Kurt Vonne-gut, Marguerite Duras, J.D. Salinger, Primo Levi, Imre Kértesz, George Orwell, Italo Calvino, W.E. Sebald, Jonathan Littel, and selected films and artwork.
WS I: Utopias and Dystopias
K10.0359 WSI, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Beata Potocki
In this writing seminar, students write essays that examine utopias and dystopias. Philosophers, political theorists, and fiction writers have imagined ideal societies located in distant places and times, and their writings have inspired numerous efforts to create idyllic communities. Yet in our modern world, we are also surrounded by tales of undesirable societies—dystopias. Through writing a series of essays, we will consider such questions as: What do utopias and dystopias tell us about individual and collective fantasies and fears? How do they engage in and try to solve concrete socio-political problems? How do they deal with desire and difference in their search for equality, justice, or happiness? Texts may include selections from Plato, Thomas More, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Charles Fourier, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Ursula le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, and Frederic Jameson.
WS I: The Experience of History
K10.0360 WSI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 D. Hoffman-Schwartz
Individuals certainly have histories, but can one experience History? What does History “feel like”? Can one see (touch, taste, smell) History? Do we even still believe in History with a capital H? Or only in the proliferation of histories, individual or otherwise? Where does memory end and history begin? How do narration and metaphor work to construct and deconstruct history? In this class, we write essays and a literary-critical paper that explore these questions and others, paying special attention to literary texts that represent social and political history through personal history. Texts may include a novel by J.M. Coetzee, Dana Spiotta, or Nuruddin Farah; poetry by William Wordsworth, Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath; short theoretical texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Joan Scott. We will also view (outside class) films by Gillo Pontecorvo and Jean-Luc Godard.
WS I: Collage: From Art to Life and Back
K10.0361 WSI, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Eugene Vydrin
This writing seminar will explore the implications of making the new from the ready-made, of constructing one’s own from what was—and remains—somebody else’s. By definition, collage aims at reintegrating art and life, so we will also examine how collage-work models a new society, an alternative system of human relations, and demands that our current life be remade. We will work with examples of both visual and verbal collage, discuss some classic works of theory, and explore instances of collage in contemporary urban life. Readings may include essays by Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss, and Marjorie Perloff. Our canon of literary collage will include works by Tristan Tzara, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe. We will examine visual collage in the work of Picasso, Rauschenberg, Cornell, and Godard.
WS I: Visual Media and Contemporary Literature
K10.0362 WSI, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Lauren Walsh
Literary critic Mark Anderson has described the late twentieth century as the “age of the photograph and the cinema.” This course explores the role of visual media—such as photography, film, television, and the Internet—in today's culture and in recent literature. We investigate how these media have informed our concepts of self and other, the documentation of history, and both the form and content of contemporary cultural narratives. Students will write descriptive and analytical essays, including a literary-critical essay, as we consider critical responses to media as well as the growing impact of visual culture on textual form and verbal representation. Readings may include work by authors Jorge Luis Borges, Stephanie Strickland, bell hooks and W.G. Sebald, and media critics John Berger, Walter Benjamin and Mark Poster, in addition to various other cultural scholars and a film screening (outside class) of The Matrix.
WS I: What is the Avant-Garde?
K10.0363 WSI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Jenelle Troxell
Perhaps the most famous piece of avant-garde art is Marcel Duchamp's urinal, which was just a regular urinal displayed as art. This intentional transgression of the "normal" boundaries of art, literature, and film is at the heart of the avant-garde. But what exactly are these boundaries, how do they get established and what does it mean to transgress them? In analytical essays and a literary-critical essay, we will explore the avant-garde aesthetic in literature and film, with a focus on the avant-garde's rhetoric of shock. Course materials may include manifestos and other work by Karl Marx, Filippo Tommasso Marinetti, Mina Loy, Tristan Tzara, and André Breton, theory by Peter Burger and Clement Greenberg, as well as films by Germaine Dulac, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Maya Deren, and other media.
WS II: Myths and Fables in Popular Culture
K10.0639 WSII, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Patricia Lennox
Myths, fables, folk tales, and fairy tales are universal, as old as storytelling and as new as the latest award-winning films. In this class we will consider how and why certain stories continue to be revised and retold. Our research will focus on old and new versions of the tales, as well as the critical discourse surrounding them. It will serve as the springboard for a series of writing assignments that culminate in a final research paper. Sources will include, but not be limited to, selections from works by: J.R.R. Tolkien, Disney, Ovid, Apuleius, Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Angela Carter, Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, and Jack Zipes.