Reading & Composition

Why do we write about witches? What is it about the occult that both thrills and terrifies us? Many are familiar with the 1692 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, but fears about witchcraft have existed for centuries earlier. Witches often served as figures of social anxiety, villains to unite a culture in crisis. In this class, we’ll read texts and watch films that focus on a variety of cultural constructions of the witch from Classical Antiquity to the 21st century. We’ll ask how and why a fear of witches has had such lasting power in literature and film, and later in the semester we’ll explore more recent imaginings of the witch as a source of empowerment.

This course satisfies half of the University’s Reading & Composition sequence and is recommended for students who have completed R1A or have placed out of the R1A requirement. This course is designed to help students improve their skills in critical thinking, reading, and analytical writing. Students learn how to write with clarity, precision, and nuance through reflective engagement with all stages of the writing process, from brainstorming to proofreading. In addition to regular attendance, reading, and participation, assignments include an introductory paper and a series of essays—drafts and deep revisions—as well as bCourses posts and a creative project. Students will also develop skills for incorporating secondary sources into analytical writing, and the course will culminate in a research paper of 8-10 pages. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course.

Course Texts

❖ Medea (431 BCE) by Euripides
❖ Malleus Maleficarum (1487) by Heinrich Kramer (excerpts)
❖ “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
❖ The Crucible (1953) by Arthur Miller
❖ Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas (1977) dir. Juan López Moctezuma
❖ “Putting Her in Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire” by Anne Carson, chapter in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (1990) eds. David M.
Halperin and John J. Winkler
❖ I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986) by Maryse Condé, English translation (1992) trans.
Richard Philcox
❖ The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995) by Cherríe Moraga
❖ “Half-Hanged Mary” (1995) poem by Margaret Atwood
❖ The Craft (1996) dir. Andrew Fleming
❖ Caliban and the Witch (2004) by Silvia Federici (excerpts)
❖ The Witch (2015) dir. Robert Eggers