Special Topics Courses
TERM I
AAAS 150S Black Feminist Interventions and Black Women Writers. See WOMENST 150S. Peay
AMES 195S The New Middle Class in China. From the oldest civilization on earth to the leader of global capitalism, China is on the rise. China’s exceptionally high and sustained rate of economic growth has not only contributed to the country’s rise as a global power, it has also profoundly influenced the trajectory of global economic development. Since the economic reforms in 1978, and with greater intensity after the acceleration of moves towards capitalism after 1992, an economically empowered middle class is pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in China, while simultaneously being “the” champions of fervent patriotism and the world's most voracious consumers of western-brand 'luxury' goods. Indeed, the middle class is setting the tone in life and pushing the boundaries of how life can be lived in the country. This course investigates the historical emergence of this new social subject in post-Mao Chinese history. We will study a variety of cultural texts to appreciate the complex interlocking of cultural influences and the needs of capital accumulation. Subjects in class discussions will include: political economy, consumerism, language, nationalism, class formations, feminism, gender, sexuality, fashion, cinema and documentary. Topics to be examined include: brand new China, language and nation-building, a critique of political economy, the emergence of new class formations and new social hierarchies in post-socialist China, gender and sexuality and love and intimacy in post-1992 urban China, how fashion styles and clothes relate to the larger structures of power, and how contemporary Chinese visual culture represents the new working class. Hui
ARTHIST 177C Minimalism and the American West. This seminar is designed for students interested in exploring the relationship between the cultural, social geography of a specific region – the American West – and the set of varied yet related aesthetic practices loosely defined as Minimalist, including painting, sculpture, land art and earth art. Students will develop art historical knowledge of art works and artists working in the West and will examine the social, political and economic contexts of art production in these spaces, considering critical responses, viewer experiences and impact on communities. No prior knowledge of art history is necessary for this course, although an understanding of the history of modern and contemporary art is helpful. Gonzalez
CULANTH 180S The Politics of Religion in the Twenty-first Century. Why has religion emerged in recent years as such a potent and, in the minds of many, dangerous force around the world? This course will serve as an introduction to anthropological engagements with religion – an engagement going back to the very beginnings of anthropology as an academic discipline – that will set the stage for class members to examine some of the most pressing issues concerning religion, religious movements and their interactions with political structures in the contemporary world. These movements emerge and develop in the context of shifting power and uneven globalization, under conditions characterized by the rapid movements of people, goods and ideas, and at a time when various forms of religious belonging often rest in an uneasy relationship to the dictates of the secular state and its public sphere, human rights and the law. For many intellectuals, the supposedly religiously inspired attacks of September 11 forced a fundamental rethinking of this relationship, and more recent phenomena such as the Danish cartoon affair, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the renewed vigor of evangelicalism in the United States have only reinforced this conviction. It is in this light that the course will not only attempt to unpack the assumptions that underlie the variety of critiques and endorsements of religion in the modern world – including assumptions about what constitutes “religion” or “true religion,” to begin with – but will also explore the commitments, ambitions and sensibilities of those for whom religion, in one way or another, comprises a central part of their identity. Goldstone
CULANTH 180S The New Middle Class in China. See AMES 195S. Hui
EDUC 170S Education through Film. Film has been an intricate part of our society since its inception. This course will focus on the documentation and portrayal of education in film from the 1950s to present day. In our six weeks we will examine twelve films that exemplify the changes that have occurred in education throughout this period. di Bona
EDUC 170S Teaching ESL. This course is a service learning seminar that introduces students to contexts and methods for teaching English to speakers of other languages. Class meetings and assignments provide opportunities for students to understand second language acquisition, master teaching strategies, examine and evaluate local and global practices in English language education, create instructional materials and consider the phenomenon of English as a global language. Students who successfully complete this course may apply to Duke Continuing Studies' ESL/EFL Teaching program. Once accepted, some course work may count toward partial fulfillment of that certification program. Through the required 20-hour service component, students will develop hands-on ESL teaching skills working with international students enrolled in a Duke workshop focused on English oral presentation and communication skills for non-native speakers. Haagen
ENGLISH 90AS Readings in Genre (The Short Story as a Literary Genre). Falling somewhere between the lyrical poem and the novel in scope, the short story took hold of the popular literary imagination through the rise of magazine culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its characteristically bite-sized and elliptical narratives, although rooted in folklore and oral storytelling traditions, proved especially adept at capturing the fragmentation and accelerated pace of late modernity, showcasing a kaleidoscopic diversity of voices from the margins of society (both “high” and “low”) that the larger narrative arc of the novel had generally overlooked. Beginning with a brief selection of works by some of the nineteenth century pioneers of short fiction (Kleist, Poe, Melville, Gilman and Chekhov), we will narrow our focus to those authors from the modernist era and beyond whose writings have redefined the genre for our time: James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, James Baldwin, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Cynthia Ozick, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Jamaica Kincaid, Tobias Wolf and Tim O’Brien, among others. Valentyn
ENGLISH 169S Cyberpunk and Technofiction. Anti-corporate hackers, rebellious gamers, flashy avatars, viral AIs: these are just some of the figures of the cybernetic age that we will encounter in this course. By analyzing twentieth-century American fiction, film and new media production – from Cold War speculative visions to science fiction films, hypertext fictions and multiplayer online worlds – we will work through the complex mergers between humans and machines that have influenced every aspect of our contemporary lives. For a significant portion of the course, we will focus on the cyberpunk science fiction texts of the last three decades. As the root "cyber" was derived from the Greek word for "governor" and comes to describe novel "systems of control," our analyses will be particularly attentive to the forms of distributed power that emerged in the postwar years and during the advent of globalization. Questions of gender, class and race will be at the forefront of our approach to these technological fictions. Texts and selections may include Norbert Wiener (The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950), William Burroughs (short fiction selection), Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1962), William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984), Donna Haraway ("A Manifesto for Cyborgs," 1985), Pat Cadigan (Synners, 1991), Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, 1992), Shelley Jackson (Patchwork Girl, 1995), and Alexander Galloway (Protocol, 2004). Films may include Strange Days (1995), The Matrix (1999), eXistenZ (1999), and Second Life (online game, 2003-Present). Jagoda
ENGLISH 179ES Black Feminist Interventions and Black Women Writers. See WOMENST 150S. Peay
HISTORY 195S Inquisition and Society in the Early Modern World. This course explores the history of inquisitions in early modern Europe and its colonies through the study of a constellation of outstanding case studies and an introduction to the legal manuals and trial records that scholars have used to reconstruct aspects of European history, both in Europe itself and in its colonies. Students will examine the inquisition in both its religious and political contexts, and they will evaluate the degree to which trial transcripts can be used to reconstruct aspects of social, cultural and religious history in the early modern world. Attention will be given primarily to the inquisitions in Italy and Iberia, with considerable attention given as well to Latin America. Readings will include such classics as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Italy); Gustav Henningsen’s The Witches’ Advocate (Iberia); and Laura Lewis’s The Hall of Mirrors (colonial Mexico). While this course meets the requirements for a research seminar for history majors, it would also be an ideal course for students in social and cultural anthropology and for students in religious studies. Martin
ICS 122CS The New Middle Class in China. See AMES 195S. Hui
LIT 131S Nostalgia for the 1950s. This course will explore how the use of nostalgia in media, aesthetics and politics potentially violates a particular ethics of representation. When sets of images that evoke feelings of desire for lost historical eras surface in the formation of contemporary identity, we find that these desires often empty the historical periods of their controversies and nuances. We will focus on how U.S. nostalgia for the 1950s—a decade marked by racism, sexism, homophobia, paranoia, anxiety, censorship and conformity—becomes a nationally longed for experience. We will study both the cultural productions of the actual decade as well as the imaginings and re-visions produced again and again in subsequent years. Material will include Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit(1956), Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the television programs “I Love Lucy,” “Father Knows Best,” and “Ozzie and Harriet,” nostalgic re-presentations in “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley,” and the films Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), The Blob (1958), American Graffiti (1973), and Back to the Future (1985). Commercials (TV, print and jingle), fashion, comics, music and architecture will also be examined. Klarr
LIT 131S Fashion, Literature and the Avant-Garde. See VISUALST 189S. Braxton
LIT 151S Comics as Literature. Beginning with Batman and Superman, passing through R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Maus, and moving into the contemporary era of Persepolis and Dykes to Watch Out For, this course will survey the history and reception of graphic narrative as the genre moves from a predominantly American, predominantly male fixation on the superhero towards an increasingly popular international art movement that crosses gender, class and ethnic lines. Likely texts will include Siegel and Shuster’s Superman, Frank Miller’s Batman, Stan Lee’s Iron Man, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang, Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, as well as selected excerpts and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Canavan
LIT 151S Contemporary Detective Fiction: The Politics of Writing about “Crime.” This course will examine detective fiction from the late twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries in a number of national contexts. We will pay special attention to “hardboiled” and “noir” fiction, whose gritty representations of crime contain “heroes” who are often as unsavory as the criminals themselves. We will also explore the figure of the cop as an individual both inside and outside the bounds of legality—a figure who polices while problematizing the act of policing. This paradox will encourage us to study the politics of policing in relation to certain social questions, such as: immigration, race and racism, the policing of urban spaces, challenges to the boundaries of the nation-state and the preservation of “law and order.” We will consider texts from several countries, including France, the U.S., the United Kingdom and Ireland, Spain, South Africa and Italy. Authors to be read may include Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Ken Bruen, Jean-Claude Izzo, Didier Daeninckx, Deon Meyer, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Andrea Camilleri. Izzo
LIT 162ZS Imagined Islands. Islands have been imagined through a perplexing variety of registers. They have been monstrous formations; safe-havens of cannibals, sirens, and amazons; sites of utopian projects; places packed with hidden treasures; locations of exoticism and primitivism; and objects of desire for escape and polymorphous sexualities. Through an exploration of such images in, primarily, the Western world after 1492 (with a specific focus on the Caribbean), this course will explore issues related to the idea of the “island” and of “island-ness” beyond the condition of mere geological formations. Of particular interest will be inquiries into the relations between “islands” and questions of race, ethnicity, gender, colonialism and nationalism. Thus, the course seeks to address some of the ways in which the status of “insularity” has been represented primarily in literary texts, but also in historical, cartographical and touristic discourses that span from Columbus’ first voyages to our current situation. We will also be concerned with the status of insularity as it relates to concepts and theories of more recent invention, such as “diaspora” and “creolization.” Texts to be considered may include, but are not limited to: excerpts from Columbus’ Diaries; Shakespeare’s The Tempest; More’s Utopia; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Coetzee’s Foe; Stevenson’s Treasure Island; excerpts from Benítez Rojo’s The Repeating Island; Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Piñera’s “La isla en peso;” maps; tourist brochures and other publications; and recent Hollywood films such as Cast Away and Pirates of the Caribbean; among others. Llenin-Figueroa
LIT 162ZS The New Middle Class in China. See AMES 195S. Hui
PSY 170S Human Development in Literature. Literature is rich in human development theory and principles. This course will utilize current popular fiction and biographies to illustrate important theories in human development. Through this literature, the theories and principles will come to life and be more easily understood and remembered. In addition, students will gain the ability to assimilate theory into their everyday observations. Through the reading and discussing of these books, students will practice application and analysis, rather than memorization of theory and principles. For example, About a Boy deals with multigenerational individual development with realism and humor, while Tuesdays with Morrie explores the process of dying. Readings may include About a Boy, Ramona the Pest, Shiloh, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, Sign of the Beaver, It's Not About theBike, A Year by the Sea, Walk Two Moons and Hannah's Gift. Maxson
PSY 170S Mass Media and Mental Illness. The power of television and film to affect beliefs and the degree to which Americans are exposed to such representations combine to make mass media one of the most significant influences on individuals in American society. In order to understand public attitudes and beliefs regarding psychological disorders and their treatment, it is necessary to examine the manner in which these are portrayed within mass media. From the use of abnormal behavior as a catalyst for humor in television and film comedies to the stereotypical "homicidal maniac" in the seemingly endless proliferation of crime dramas, representations of mental illness and disordered behavior are extremely common in contemporary film and television programs. In this class we will examine specific examples of abnormal behavior and mental illness in film and television, as well as written media, and consider the risks of stigmatization and the possibilities for raising awareness that exist. We will also address the treatment of psychological virtues in film and the portrayal of aspects of positive psychology. This is a seminar class that will incorporate film and video screenings, group discussion, reading assignments and weekly writing assignments. Franzese
THEATRST 149S Dramatic Improvisation. Improvisation is a vital tool for all careers and relationships. Through inquiry into the technique and freedom of working without a set script one develops the ability to read situations and other people. This course is ideal for business people and artists alike – anyone with the need to express himself or herself with honesty and assurance. No acting experience is necessary. O’Berski
VISUALST 189S Fashion, Literature and the Avant-Garde. This course features the work of Miuccia Prada, Karl Lagerfeld (Chanel), John Galliano (Dior), Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, Nicolas Ghesquiere (Balenciaga), Yves Saint Laurent, Riccardo Tisci (Givenchy), Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, Helmut Lang, Rodarte, Boudicca, Gareth Pugh, Rick Owens, Viktor&Rolf, Hussein Chalayan, Martin Margiela and others. The aim of this course is to develop a critical approach to fashion, directing us toward the field known formally as Critical Fashion Studies. Some of the most innovative fashion designers currently draw inspiration from and have collaborated with notable writers and philosophers (Baudrillard, Calvino, Boudicca), directors (Wim Wenders, Yohji Yamamoto) and architects (Prada and Rem Koolhaas) to produce not only thoughtful collections, but museum exhibitions and critical retrospectives that address social and political issues. Some of the topics examined in this course will include: the formation of an avant-garde collective that is taking issue with mass consumption and mass distribution under late capitalism; designers’ constant reevaluation of aesthetic terms under which they are expected to labor and produce; and fashion designers’ response to issues such as globalization, ecological concerns, the fate of the body with respect to technology and the global production of subjectivity. We will pay special attention to the history of aesthetic theory and the philosophy of art, small-scale production and the link between ethics and pleasure. We will also explore new technological developments and the emergence of “concept clothing.” Reading selections and reference material will derive from these sources: Kant, Sartre, Benjamin, Lyotard, Hegel, Levinas, Blanchot, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Marx, Bloch, Freud, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Dufrenne, Adorno, Foucault, Kristeva, Bachelard. Barthes, Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Cixous, Jameson, Vattimo, Debord, Simmel, Baudrillard, Calvino and Ballard. Popular writings will include editorials from magazines such as W, Purple Magazine, V Magazine, Acne Paper, Hint, Another, Flaunt, i-D, A Magazine, LÓfficiel, Vogue, Vogue Italia, Vogue Paris, Vogue Nippon and Visionaire. Braxton
WOMENST 150S Black Feminist Interventions and Black Women Writers. This course addresses the discursive intersection of African American Studies and Women’s Studies through the literary study of black women’s writing since the 1970s. Beginning with a few essays that historicize academic feminism and Women’s Studies and that speak of feminism as a democratic project, we will treat black women’s writing as the object of black feminist criticism and theory and consider the contribution of the black feminist critical tradition to Women’s Studies. As we proceed through readings in feminist criticism and theory, we will identify critical assumptions; define such terms as “identity,” “equality,” “politics” and “the political;” and determine the epistemic value of the body to apprehending the gendered subject. We will also view a couple of interviews with authors and read a few novels (Toni Morrison’s Sula, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Alice Walker’s Meridian) and short stories by black women writers to determine how the representation of black female subjectivity illustrates or departs from the assumptions of feminist criticism. Some of the questions that will frame the course are the following: what is the object of Women’s Studies and how has Black Women’s Studies complicated this question? How has black feminist criticism, as it was inaugurated in the late 1970s, informed the question of identity? What distinguishes “politics” from “the political,” and how do these terms inform our understanding of difference? What does understanding the material base of women’s oppression have to do with the discursive and political construction of “woman”? And most importantly, how have black women writers understood creative agency as political agency? Peay
WOMENST 150S Cultural Politics, Sexuality & U.S. Mass Media. This course will explore the political context in recent U.S. history in which lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) visibility and rights claims have been met with what appears to be a resounding backlash. Drawing from a variety of cases, it will also examine the role of mass media in shaping public opinion on homosexuality and the politics of gay rights activism. Some of the areas we will focus on include the historical, sociocultural and political economic factors that account for changing representational practices of “sexual others;” the different investments of pro-gay and anti-gay rights groups and media companies concerning gay visibility; the effects of journalistic norms and conventions on public opinion (as well as the ideological underpinnings of news practice); the role of advertising and marketing in normalizing homosexuality; and the implications of the “mainstreaming” strategy used by some gay rights groups to foster more positive images. The primary goals for the course are threefold: (1) to understand better how heterosexism informs media texts, cultural practices and social institutions; (2) to contextualize current events, issues and controversies within ongoing and historical patterns of the past forty years; and (3) to scrutinize the cultural narratives attending changes in representation of LGBT individuals in mass media in recent years. Kachgal
WOMENST 150S Postfeminism and the Media. Throughout the media we hear about feminism as a project that exploded in the 1970s and ended by the early 1980s. The vast number of “liberated” women on television and in films suggests that feminism succeeded so well, apparently, that it is no longer necessary. Are we the postfeminist generation – a generation of men and women who can lay claim to the successes of second wave feminists and rest-assured that the hard work is behind us because so-called gender equality has been achieved? In this course, we will figure out what we mean by “postfeminist” by examining contemporary visual media through the lens of feminist cultural studies. What insight into the postfeminist generation can we glean from shows and films such as Sex and the City, Alias, Going on 30, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Ally McBeal, Extreme Makeover and The L Word? We will examine the assumptions that support the concept of postfeminism, especially as these tell us more about the workings of power and ideologies of consumption, class, gender and race. We will think, reflect and write critically about popular culture and particularly television and film. This course will include readings by: Angela McRobbie, Jane Shattuc, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Joke Hermes, Elspeth Probyn, Amanda Lotz and Lynn Spigel and selections from film, television and popular print media. Warren
WOMENST 150S Fashion, Literature and the Avant-Garde. See VISUALST 189S. Braxton
TERM II
ENGLISH 63S Introduction to Creative Writing. In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the genres of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction while focusing on the issue of voice, how it is crafted, and how it affects both the writing and reading experience. We will complete several writing assignments in each genre for critical, but supportive peer review. Alongside our writings, we will also investigate the voice and speakers of several published works in order to ground our discussions as well as to enhance our writer's toolbox. One or more substantial revision will count as the course's final exam. Please note that attendance is essential for this workshop format to be fruitful. Curseen
ENGLISH 90AS Reading Spiritual Autobiography: St. Augustine & Wordsworth. We will spend the course studying two of the most accomplished instances of spiritual autobiography, St. Augustine’s Confessions and William Wordsworth’s Prelude. Though separated by more than 1,500 years, both narratives exhibit the persistence of a number of problems intrinsic to the genre of autobiography and felt in particularly acute ways during times of political and religious upheaval, such as St. Augustine and Wordsworth experienced it during the waning years of the Roman Empire and the French Revolutionary upheavals, respectively. Among the issues that we’ll focus on are the following: 1) what is the relation between narrative form and conversion? 2) How does the temporal divide between the self writing and the self written manifest itself, especially as regards the relationship between language and memory? 3) What is the goal of such autobiographical writing for its author, its audience, and its historical time? 4) Can a text whose source of “evidence” is preponderantly inward claim spiritual justification, authority, or even exemplarity for the self so conjured up? 5) How do St. Augustine’s and Wordsworth’s autobiographical narratives negotiate the ancient conflict between truth and rhetoric already embodied by Plato and the Sophists, Ciceronian and Stoic philosophy, respectively? 6) How do the two writers’ narratives differ, particularly as regards their outlook on notions of virtue and the status of the self? Pfau
ENGLISH 90BS The Historical Novel and the Frontier. In this class we will survey a range of Anglophone historical novels that claim to remember and reanimate the colonial frontier within the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and in parts of the British Empire. As we read these fantastic stories (it’s summer, so we might as well enjoy ourselves), we will also pursue some impressively large questions: what does it mean to write, and read, a fiction that claims to represent history? What formal and aesthetic techniques do historical novelists use to represent the dynamics of colonial contact and conquest? What ideological consequences arise from the use of those techniques? And what is at stake when the colonial past is represented at a particular moment to the inheritors of that past? We begin with two foundational examples of the genre from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Walter Scott’s version of a Scottish highlands uprising and James Fenimore Cooper’s New York state during the French and Indian War, before turning to Robert Louis Stevenson, the most direct descendant of Scott in late Victorian literature, who is also concerned with Scotland. Our twentieth century selections adopt widely different tactics in re-imagining the historical novel: Chinua Achebe presents the Nigerian frontier as a developing tragedy, Maurice Shadbolt views resistance to settlement in New Zealand as a heroic outlaw comedy and Cormac McCarthy portrays the expansion of the United States as devoid of any redemptive moral meaning. Steer
ENGLISH 139BS Atheists, Libertines and Machiavels. This course tells a story about early modernity through some of its most colorful fictional characters. In reading drama, poetry and prose by Machiavelli, Marlowe, Nashe, Shakespeare, Dekker, Webster, Tourneur, Milton and others, we will explore the rise of early modern atheism and its connections to political and literary innovations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From Machiavelli's Prince to Milton's Satan we will consider why bad guys often get the best lines, what it means when they get their comeuppance, and what happens when they don't. We will also consider the following: why was popular theatre considered so dangerous in the period, and why was it, at the same time, such an important tool in the governing of countries? When the theaters were closed by outbreaks of plague, what kind of works did people write instead, and why is there such a strong symbolic connection between libertinism, theater and the plague? Tangney
ENGLISH 173S Black Cinema. In addition to careful consideration of some of the most important work done by Afro-diasporic filmmakers in the past century – a list that may include Oscar Michaux, Julie Dash, Djibril Diop Mambety, Cheryl Dunye, John Akomfrah, Raoul Peck, Flora M'bugu Schelling, Carl Franklin, Charles Burnett and Spike Lee among others – we will also ask if there is some special relation between blackness and 1) the mechanically reproduced image; 2) the moving image; and 3) the cinematic interplay of sound and image. These are issues concerning the relation between cinema, aesthetics and philosophies of life, and blackness. They will require investigating not only our contemporary moment but also an earlier historical period marked by the convergence of modernism, primitivism and the rise of modern social science. We will be interested, therefore, in understanding the links between various measures and mis-measures of man, certain understandings of the theory and history of the pose and of opposition and the presence and absence of black figures in relation to and as a part of the pre-cinematic, cinematic and post-cinematic apparatuses. Moten
HISTORY 104 United States’ History Since 1945. This course seeks to understand the changes, demographic shifts, cultural upheaval, political unrest and technological advancements that have impacted the lives of everyday citizens in the United States since the close of World War II. Students will read both scholarly works and historical documents about the domestic effects of the Cold War, the civil rights movement, controversy over the war in Vietnam, the rise of suburbanization, the “Reagan Revolution,” globalization’s impact on American labor and the United States’ relationship to the world after 9/11. The course takes full advantage of the personal nature of material that is within living memory. In their final projects, students will draw on a diverse set of sources to place their lives, or that of a family member, in the historical narrative created in the class. Students will also hone writing and interpretation skills through short response papers and a mid-term essay focusing on primary documents. Teal
LIT 120 BS Cinema of Eastern Europe. This class is a survey of Eastern European cinema. We will dedicate most of our time to the period from 1945 to the present. After a brief discussion of Russian (Soviet) cinema, we will focus on cinematographies of five Eastern European countries: Czechoslovakia (and its successor states), Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia (and its successor states). Throughout the course we will familiarize ourselves with the cultural, linguistic and religious context of Eastern Europe as well as with Eastern Europe’s historical development in the twentieth century. We will explore how this specific historical development – rapid industrialization, State socialism – helped shape Eastern European cinematic imagination and how Eastern European cinema negotiated difficult ethical and political questions in this context. We will also examine the relationship of Eastern European cinema to other (Western and non-Western) cinemas. Arsenjuk
LIT 151S Missing People: from Banned Books to Murdered Writers. The Parliament of Writers, whose first two presidents were Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka, was created in 1993, after more than a thousand writers had been persecuted, imprisoned or murdered in the first half of that year. “We have gone from the censorship of works to the persecution of authors, from censored texts to beheadings”; censorship “no longer targets political, religious or ideological opinions but instead the whole area of representation. A new crime haunts the night of orthodoxies: the crime of creating, of writing, of imagining. The crime of literature.”
In this seminar we will investigate various forms of censorship and attempt to map the territories of “missing people” alluded to in the course title - from the banned characters in books, born from the imagination of writers and found scandalous, to those writers who have been condemned to prison or even death on political or religious grounds. We will begin with a few texts that raise the question of censorship and the status of literature in society (Plato, Milton, Marx, Foucault, Deleuze), then we’ll move on to discuss a few notorious cases of censorship and literary trials (D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch). The reading and analysis of some of these books will pave the way to our subsequent familiarization with the events leading to the creation of the Parliament of Writers, and to readings from (other) authors associated with it (Wole Soyinka, Bei Dao, Tahar Djaout, Yachar Kemal, and others). Koerner
LIT 151S The Extremes of Horror. In this course we will seek to understand the horror genre as one defined by excess and the violating of reasonable limits. Unlike most other forms of popular entertainment, this excess is not initially presented as pleasurable, suggesting instead negative emotions and sensations – fear, suffering, disgust and death. In the first half of the class, we will trace the emergence of the genre from such diverse sources as English and German Gothic novels, decadent literature of the fin de siècle, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and early Hollywood monster movies in order to study how producers and audiences of horror have conceived of its strange aims and fascinations. In the second half, we will look at the explosion of horror around the late 1960s and 1970s marked by a tendency to push the limits of representation with extremely graphic, disturbing and (sometimes) politically charged content, and how the development of this trend has come to redefine what horror means today. Along the way we will ask: what is the appeal of horror? What are the possibilities and limitations of the genre? What kinds of ethical and political issues are raised by entertainment so closely tied to the suffering of others? What is their relationship to (far more common) images and reports of actual suffering? The course will be split more or less evenly between literature and film. In addition to the above, readings and screenings may include John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the Comte de Lautréamont’s Songs of Maldoror, short stories by H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, and Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day. This material will be contextualized by important theoretical writings from Edmund Burke, Sigmund Freud, Elaine Scarry, Slavoj Žižek and others. Vu
PSY 170S Human Development in Literature. Literature is rich in human development theory and principles. This course will utilize current popular fiction and biographies to illustrate important theories in human development. Through this literature, the theories and principles will come to life and be more easily understood and remembered. In addition, students will gain the ability to assimilate theory into their everyday observations. Through the reading and discussing of these books, students will practice application and analysis, rather than memorization of theory and principles. For example, About a Boy deals with multigenerational individual development with realism and humor, while Tuesdays with Morrie explores the process of dying. Readings may include About a Boy, Ramona the Pest, Shiloh, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, Sign of the Beaver, It's Not About theBike, A Year by the Sea, Walk Two Moons and Hannah's Gift. Maxson
PSY 170S The Ghost in the Machine: Approaches to Self-Control. Daily life constantly demands that we control our thoughts, emotions and behavior, from holding our tongue during a heated conversation or avoiding that impulse buy, to forcing ourselves to make the weekly spin class. In this course we will focus on strategies for controlling behavior as well as examine what happens when self-control efforts fail. Regulating behavior can be extremely draining, and even successful self-control can sometimes come at a cost. We will investigate current research on self-control from several different perspectives including cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, clinical assessment and consumer behavior. Specifically, we will address a wide array of topics including: psychological and behavioral control disorders, habits and strategies that promote or interfere with achieving goals (healthy living, academic achievement, and financial responsibility), and implications for consumer behavior. Students will come away with an understanding of the latest research on the effects of both successful and failed self-control as well as practical knowledge of the impact these have on their daily experiences. Labrecque
SOCIOL 195S Religion and Conflict in America. In this course we will examine religion and conflict in America. We will focus upon contemporary social and political conflicts involving religion to help us understand the relationship between religion and conflict at individual, organizational and institutional levels. Some of the questions we will ponder include the following: under what social conditions does religion mediate or exacerbate conflict between people, organizations and institutions? How does religion influence conflict between people, organizations and institutions? Can conflict shape individuals' religious beliefs and religious institutions, and if so, how? Anderson
THEATRST 149S Dramatic Improvisation. Improvisation is a vital tool for all careers and relationships. Through inquiry into the technique and freedom of working without a set script one develops the ability to read situations and other people. This course is ideal for business people and artists alike – anyone with the need to express himself or herself with honesty and assurance. No acting experience is necessary. O’Berski
WOMENST 150S Migrant Women. In an unprecedented way, female migrants make up close to one-half of the world’s migrant population today. In our course we will examine how definitions of gender and sexuality are shaped, negotiated and deployed in the context of transnational migration flows and forced displacements. We will study the gender dimensions of contemporary migration through fiction, film, ethnography and theories of transnational feminism. We will explore the following set of questions: what is the place of migrant women workers in the global division of labor? What are the challenges and forms of oppression they have to face? How do they reshape the social landscape of both sending and receiving countries? How do they navigate through the power structure embedded in migration and trafficking routes? What are the specific cultural and linguistic barriers in regard to migrant women's access to work, health, asylum, law, citizenship and social networks? In this course we will ultimately emphasize that our age of migration cannot be assessed adequately without taking its genderedness into account. Oruc
WOMENST 150S Women and the Culture of Poverty. In 1959 anthropologist Oscar Lewis laid claim to an undiscovered culture that he named the “culture of poverty” – a globally-dispersed “third world” whose members could as easily be found in the projects of Chicago as the villages of Mexico. In the United States the “membership base” of this ever-thriving culture appears to consist primarily of lower-class women— urban women of color, rural “white trash” women, single mothers—and their dependent, often “illegitimate” children. But how did a social condition like poverty—a phenomenon that could be addressed by examining the economic stratification on which global-capitalist profit accumulation depends – become tethered to a gendered and racialized idea of culture defined largely in terms of personal deficiency (moral, intellectual, behavioral and otherwise)? What sort of values, attitudes, desires and ways of knowing do poor women claim and mobilize in their everyday lives—and why have such characteristics come to be viewed as personal and cultural pathologies rather than sources of strength, or means of survival? What might happen if we began to view poor women in terms of what they have, rather than what they “have not”? How might our assumptions concerning a number of core American values – like independence, “hard work” and private property ownership – be challenged were we to shift our perspective in this way? Keeping the material and conceptual history of concepts like “dependence,” “welfare” and “generational poverty” at the forefront of our critical thinking, this course will help us examine such questions through readings of a number of theoretical, literary, ethnographic and visual texts. Paying special attention to the intersectional politics of race, class, gender and sexuality, this class will help us rethink the “culture of poverty” from the perspective of those who continually live, re-map and contest the meaning of this cultural terrain: poor women themselves. We will examine Marge Piercy’s science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976); the films Gone Baby Gone (2007) and Frozen River (2008); Jaime Hernandez’ serialized graphic novel Locas (1980-present); video and song lyrics by Reba McIntyre and Tupac Shakur; and Carol Stack’s inner-city ethnography All Our Kin (1970). Appel