Reading & Composition - CANCELED

Reading & Composition

Marriages in myths and fairy tales are rarely without their trials; folklore is full of lost and monstrous husbands, women’s journeys to retrieve them, and their efforts to flee them. In this course we will read a core set of narratives about supernatural or otherwise strange relationships — such as Cupid and Psyche, Beauty and the Beast, and Bluebeard — and think about what these tales do, and what subsequent authors do to them.

Reading & Composition

In this course we focus on women artists, female roles, female-like creatures, virtual representations, and the disciplinary practices that mediate their rich and extreme performativity. What is it about wild, feral, reckless, irrational, powerful, and fantastic acts by women artists that galvanize our imaginations and drive our responses of deep empathy?

Reading & Composition

In this course, we will explore works depicting war and its aftermath in literature, film, poetry, and drama. Major texts are likely to include Japan’s medieval war epic The Tale of the HeikeHadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and Father Comes Home from The Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks. Through these and a selection of other short works, we will discuss topics including social upheaval, religion, warrior culture, cross-cultural encounters, trauma, memory, and slavery.

Reading & Composition

This course will explore the construction of gender and the occult, considering the witch from the perspectives of different races and genders, cultures, time periods, and languages.  How does the witch transgress boundaries and norms across different cultures?  Where is she in possession of power, and where is her agency precluded? How do transgressive readings of witches undermine simplistic moral dichotomies of good and evil?

Reading & Composition

This course explores the historical and theoretical intersections between aesthetic form and the empires of Europe, from the Spanish conquest of the Americas to twentieth-century decolonization. It considers how different genres—history, prose fiction and film—challenge (and sometimes promote) the establishment of empires in Europe, the Americas, and beyond.

Reading & Composition

In this course we pull out the guts of stories to try and understand how storytellers craft works that grip us. In the process we examine classic attempts to say what makes good storytelling and put to the test the idea that any story has certain “rules” that make it successful. With an emphasis on understanding the structures that underpin the TV drama, we will study shooting scripts of The Wire and Mad Men, learning to interpret screenplay conventions on our way to understanding the complex move from script to screen.

Reading & Composition

“To speak is to blunder,” confessed the Chinese American writer Yiyun Li. Nabokov put it more melodramatically: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom.”

Reading & Composition

Do poems take up truths? Can a novel be a way of thinking about something? What can you learn—about yourself, about others, about the world—from a film? This course considers the ways that literature, art, and film are not only a part of our creative imaginations but also central sources of insight into what is real and actual. How do fictional and imaginative works touch what is worldbound? How do they help us see, hear, and understand our world?

Reading & Composition

Work. If you need to earn money to live you’ll have to do it. And it’s mandatory if you want to earn an undergraduate degree. But why do we have to work so hard? Are there any alternatives? And who gets a say in the conditions we work in anyway? These are some of the jumping off points for a class rooted in two ideas: first, that work and the paltry compensation that often accompanies it is too central to our lives to not talk about, and, second, that fictions are a way to think through these questions.

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