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Liberal Arts: Literature, Writing, and Film
	LALW100 Written Communication 3 cr. An introduction to essay writing. Six to eight writing assignments concentrate on the expository and critical essay and may include some subjective writing and a research paper. Students also read and discuss outstanding pieces of prose, poetry, and fiction. All college required. Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Required Fall/Spring
	LALW200 Literary Traditions 3 cr. An exploration of the sources of culture through a survey of some of the literary masterpieces, from the ancient world to the nineteenth century. Prerequisites: LALW100; FRSM100 (Freshman Seminar Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Required Fall/Spring
	LALW201 Men, Women, and the Myth of Masculinity 3 cr. The course examines the idea of masculinity and how it is portrayed in literature from ancient times to the twenty-first century. In addition to studying traditional views of manhood, we will also look at men’s attitudes towards women, since “masculinity” is usually defined in opposition to “femininity.” There will be many opportunities to discuss perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman, and to explore the elusive concept of gender identity. The syllabus will include works by Shakespeare, Ovid, Ibsen, and Hemingway, among others. We will also watch and listen to selected films and operas. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW203 Film Viewing and Criticism 3 cr. A critical study of the expressive elements of film. Class meetings consist of film viewing, evaluations, and discussions. Students frequently write critical papers. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW205 Children’s Literature 3 cr. What makes a children’s book a classic? We’ll find out as we read, analyze, and enjoy the best of the field–fantasies from “Peter Pan” to “Harry Potter,” realistic novels from “Anne of Green Gables” to “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” and stories falling somewhere in between, like “The Secret Garden.” Though our emphasis will be on longer books for older children, we’ll also consider fairy tales and picture books. Final project: writing a “classic” children’s book, illustrating one, or both! Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW206 Graphic Novels 3 cr. The course will explore the art and composition of the graphic novel, and will examine its many sub-genres, from superhero tales to memoirs to manga. The text book will be Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics.” Other texts will include “Watchmen,” “Contract With God,” “Sandman,” “Maus,” and “Persepolis.” For the final project, students will create and make preliminary sketches for an original graphic novel. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar All College Elective
	LALW207 Intro to African Literature 3 cr. This course intends to give an overview of African Literature from the pre-colonial period to its future perspectives. It covers material dealing with oral literature, its transition to written works, its main themes and evolution through time. It develops the main ideas covering African literature in English, French, and Portuguese and connects them to African Arabic Literature. It thus offers a full coverage of Africa including the West, the East, the Center, the South and partially the North. The course is divided in two main parts. The first concentrates on oral traditions and their important genres. It depicts the production environments, oral usages in community organizations and historical conservations throughout time. The second part deals with literary challenges and productions and will give a survey of the main trends in West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa and South Africa. Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ayi Kwei Armah, Peter Abrahams, Nadine Gordimer are among the writers whose texts offer the African survey. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW210 Famous Writers & their Celebrated Illustrators 3 cr. Famous Writers and their Celebrated Illustrators combines literature and art. Discussed will be great works of literature and the visual images they inspired. Writers, from Dante and Cervantes to Pushkin, Gogol, Corneille, Swift, Defoe and Wilde, among others, will be discussed. Illustrators will include Botticelli, Dore, Delacroix, Beardsley, Picasso, Pasternak (the father), Favorsky, Baskin, as well as numerous contemporary illustrators. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW232 Readings in Asian American Literature 3 cr. An introduction to literature by Asian-American writers (Americans of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Filipino heritage). The course includes writers who have written modern classics, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, as well as other known and less familiar writers of various literary genres, including David Henry Hwang, Chang-Rae Lee, Lawson Inada, and Bharati Mukherjee. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW290 African Art, Religion, Philosophy and Culture 3 cr. African Art, Religion, Philosophy and Culture: This course studies art productions in Africa as part of religious, philosophical and cultural systems. Emphases are on art objects that reflect and participate in historical evolution, community management and stand for philosophical and cultural expressions. Artists’ skills are presented from their sources to their different expressions and social implications through different diffusions and trends. The course also looks at different village communities in order to find out the artist and his artifacts as they participate in daily social life and in the construction of a world vision. The course presents art productions in different parts of Africa, but will concentrate much more on Central Africa. It discusses the understanding of symmetry versus asymmetry, the use of colors, wood, rocks, stones, iron, feathers, clothes and other media as they carry religious, philosophical and cultural lessons. The course suggests different interpretation procedures of art objects in order to understand how religion, philosophy and culture are reflected in art productions. Gender understanding, religion construction and power distribution in different communities are largely linked to artifacts motifs and icons. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW300 Playwriting 3 cr. A course that teaches the fundamentals of writing drama for the stage. Students study the craft of successful plays by Edward Albee, August Wilson, Paula Vogel, and others, applying what they learn to writing their own scenes and plays. The course culminates in a public developmental reading of some of the best one-act plays written by the students. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW301 Monster Madness 3 cr. We will be rounding up the usual suspects: the appalling and tragic monster and his equally tragic and appalling creator; the charismatic vampire and his bevy of vamps; the traveling salesman who finds himself transformed into a giant dung-beetle. More broadly, the course will study the idea of monstrosity, and in ways in which monsters represent the shadowy side of human nature: what people fear and what they desire. The syllabus will include Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Nabokov’s Lolita. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW302 History of the Book 3 cr. This course examines the relationship between how texts have been written and what they say during the millennia from the cuneiform tablet to the iPad. The course examines the relationship between spoken and written language, between libraries and scholarship, and between text for eyes and text for ears. It considers text-centric and image-centric book making as expressions and creators of human history. The course examines the possible future of books. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar All College Elective
	LALW303 The Family Drama in Literature 3 cr. An exploration of literature that portrays families, the complicated dynamics of family relationships, generational conflicts, and sibling rivalries. We will also examine the ways in which the microcosm of the family reflects its larger cultural and historical settings. The syllabus is culturally diverse and trans-historical, ranging from the story of David and Absalom in the Bible to Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with a variety of novels, plays and films along the way. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture All College Elective Spring
	LALW305 Russian Short Story 3 cr. Russian literature is a relatively new phenomenon. It burst on world stage suddenly and unexpectedly in the early nineteenth century and almost immediately gained tremendous world-wide influence. Everyone knows the names of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Pasternak, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. Great Russian literature is also uniquely connected to Russian philosophy and politics. Thus, reading and studying it will help students to better understand the trials and tribulations of the modern times. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW306 Modernist Word and Image 3 cr. Nearly 100 years on, the visual and verbal experiments of high Modernism still have the power to arrest our gaze and our attention. In this course, we will explore the unique conversation between word and image that occurs between approximately 1910 and 1945. How do visual artists respond to innovations in poetic form? What does literature look like when it aspires to be pictorial or visual? Do artists and writers actually practice the principles laid out in their manifestos? Questions like these-and many others-will guide our investigation and analysis. Texts will include seminal writings from Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism; avant-garde poetry by Apollinaire, Pound, Stein, Williams, and others; Wyndham Lewis’ periodical Blast; Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and other readings that complicate the boundaries between mediums, genres, and forms of expression. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective Fall/Spring
	LALW307 Modern Drama 3 cr. Readings of several modern playwrights, from Ibsen and Chekhov to the present. The course examines how these writers responded to cultural change, modified dramatic conventions, and explored shifting relations between comedy and tragedy, illusion and reality. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW308 Lyric Poetry 3 cr. Literary analysis and oral readings of lyric poems from several eras and cultures. Particular attention is given to subtle interactions between linguistic and structural elements such as rhythm, meter, stanza form, syntax, diction, and imagery. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW309 Twentieth Century American Literature 3 cr. A focus on major writers who have emerged in the twentieth century. The course concentrates on contemporary figures and earlier modernist writers. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW310 Religion and Literature 3 cr. The class studies a selection of texts addressing universal religious themes such as creation, sacrifice, love, death and the problem of evil. Several religious perspectives (including polytheistic ones) are represented. The class uses the texts as lenses through which to examine some of humankind’s deepest concerns and questions. More generally, the class examines the complicated and often strained relationship between art and ideology. Students are assigned three critical papers and a final examination. The syllabus will include texts from the Old and New Testaments, Sufi poems by Rumi, the Native American memoir Black Elk Speaks, Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Illych” and Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish.” Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW311 Contemporary Poetry and the Modernist Tradition 3 cr. An examination of recent poems of the Americas in the context of modernist innovations in the twentieth century. African-American, Asian-American, and Native American contemporary poetry is covered, as is Beat poetry, confessional poetry, sound poetry, and other current voices. Poetic styles and themes are examined in relation to the visual arts and to intellectual and social currents. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW312 Creative Writing: The Essay 3 cr. This course, conducted as a workshop with essays read aloud and critiqued in class, provides students with an opportunity to explore through their own writing the power and variety of the essay form. From memoir to observation, personal profile to political observation, this course encourages students to transmit interior reflection and external observation into essay form. Assigned reading of essays. Grade based on 25-page portfolio (usually five essays). Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW317 Immigrants in America 3 cr. This course focuses on a variety of literary texts and films that examine the experience of immigrants in the USA from the 1950s to nowadays. Through the reading of excerpts of novels, short stories and critical essays, and the viewing of movies and documentaries, we will discuss the issues that have affected the different generations of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Japanese, Indian and more recently Hispanic/Caribbean immigrants in the USA. We will devote special attention to the experience of marginalization of the immigrants, the changes in their family structure, the process of ‘becoming American’, and the social and cultural impact these communities have had to the US national identity so far. We also will look at the ways in which immigrant writers both adopt and adapt the English language, while changing and often enriching it, and how they work against the conventional cultural and visual representations of immigrants in the US media. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective Fall/Spring
	LALW320 Poetry Workshop 3 cr. A workshop in poetic form and structure. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW322 Shakespeare: On Film and In Print, Part 1 3 cr. A study of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and King Lear, using a genre approach. Emphasis is on reading and understanding Shakespeare. The films are studied as contemporary realizations and interpretations of the plays. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW324 Shakespeare: On Film and In Print, Part II 3 cr. A study of The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV: Part I, Julius Caesar, Othello, and Anthony and Cleopatra, using a genre approach. Emphasis is on reading and understanding Shakespeare. The films are studied as contemporary realizations and interpretations of the plays. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW327 Irish Literature: The Easter Rebellion 3 cr. Irish Literature: The Easter Rebellion, will study the literature and politically explosive speeches that reflected Irish-English tensions and inflamed Ireland’s desire for freedom. We will analyze Yeats, Joyce, Synge and others. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar All College Elective
	LALW328 Contemporary Italian Literature and Film: Myths, Identity and the “Mirage of America” 3cr This course introduces students to a selection of the most significant Italian literature of the second half of the 20th century. These novels and short-stories provide a variety of perspectives and insights into Italy as a country, with its complex history and rich culture, but also with its changing values (e.g. the presence of the Catholic Church vs. secular society, the recent immigration from Africa and Asia), and internal tensions (e.g. the North-South divide, recent debates on gender equality, the intersection of politics and the Mafia). Some of the novels are complemented by films that have put the talent of Italian directors and actors on the international ‘map’ since the 1960’s. Thanks to their visionary skills as well as poignant societal analysis, these authors, intellectuals and artists have also substantially informed the contemporary American literary and cultural scene. In this respect, some of the novels and films in this course reflect on the “mirage of America” in Italian culture, and the related representations of Italian-Americans. In class we will analyze these representations and compare them with the images of present-day Italy in American media, arts and popular culture. Prerequisites: LALW-200 Lecture Elective Fall and Spring
	LALW329 Literature & Culture of he Great War 3 cr The Great War (1914-1918) altered global politics, national cultures, language, consciousness, and aesthetics in ways that the world is still processing. Planned for the centenary of the beginning of Great War hostilities, this course will explore the culture into which the war exploded; the lived and written experience of soldiers and civilians alike; and hallmarks of the diverse body of literary and artistic output that responded to the horrors of mechanized trench warfare, shellshock, and massive loss. The reading list includes works by Robert Graves, David Jones, Guillaume Apollinaire, Virginia Woolf, Erich Maria Remarque, Wilfred Owen, and others. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture Elective Fall/Spring
	LALW335 Retelling Cambodia’s Killing Fields 3 cr. Under the Pol Pot Regime of 1975- 1979, Cambodia killing fields took the lives of 2,000,000 people. Using individual survivor narratives, we will seek to understand Pol Pot’s rise to power during the Vietnam War, and the near destruction of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar All College Elective
	LALW346 Camelot: Tales of King Arthur 3 cr. A study of the literary epics of the legends surrounding Camelot and King Arthur, their origins in the middle ages and subsequent variations. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW349 History of Film 3 cr. This course surveys film history from the 1890s to the present. Students use history of film textbook and general history readings to study works demonstrating the evolving development of motion picture art and the motion picture industry. Students produce written research treating trends and questions in motion picture history. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW353 Modern European Cinema 3 cr. We will study a number of trends in recent European cinema, discussing different themes and production values across genres and cultures, from western to Eastern Europe and including Scandinavia and Great Britain. Filmmakers studied will include Lars von Trier, Patrice Chereau, Fatih Akin, Hanif Kureishi, Catherine Breillat and others. This is a seminar course, with a lecture and discussion format, several essays and one mid-term. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar All College Elective
	LALW360 Third World Women: Literature and Culture 3 cr. The course will trace the journey of the Third World women writers in the USA starting with Bharati Mukherjee’s “Middle Men and Other Short Stories.” In the first phase we study women’s suffering and hardship as cyborgs, in the process of merging themselves with the First World coming from the Third World. In the next phase, we study the female novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s “Arranged Marriage,” which portrays Indian women’s dilemma in various marriage situations in the USA and informs us about Indian culture and how marriage is perceived from different angles. The theme of marriage and mother-daughter relation will be studied further through the Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid’s collection of short stories,” At the Bottom of the River” and the African writer Ama Ata Aidoo’s “No Sweetness Here” by delving into the specific cultural contexts. In the third phase, we study more recent writings by women authors like Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Namesake” looking at the evolution of cultural adjustment and assimilation. The other strain that we study in this phase is the concept of “magical realism” encountered in the Indian author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel “Mistress of Spices” and in the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s “An Apprenticeship or the Book of Delights” which harps on the notion of solution and hope. Another attraction of the course will be an interesting array of films by Third World female filmmakers like Mira Nair and Aparna Sen among others. Prerequisites: LALW100 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content All College Elective
	LALW362 Twenty-first Century Novel 3 cr. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar All College Elective
	LALW400 Directed Study 3 cr. An opportunity for seniors to read widely in some area of literature without the structure or time restrictions of class meetings. Individual meetings are arranged with an instructor. Prerequisites: LALW200 enrollment senior elective, and consent of the instructor. Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content
	LALW403 Writing an Artist’s Statement 3 cr. A workshop in which initial drafts and subsequent revisions of students’ writings are photocopied, distributed to all members of the class, and critiqued. The objective is to help students develop artist’s statements that: (a) are appropriate to the purposes for which they are written; (b) articulate what the student wants to say about their art; and (c) communicate clearly to the intended audiences. Open only to seniors. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar Culturally Diverse Content Senior Elective
	LALW410 Opera and the fusion of the Arts 3 cr. What is opera? German composer Richard Wagner described it as a “total art work,” combining music, drama, singing, and scenic design. The course encourages new ways of thinking about the relationships between different artistic disciplines and forms. The class will watch and discuss a selection of operas from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. No classical music background is required, and no one will be expected to sing! For the final project, which will combine artwork and critical writing, students will imagine and design a production for an opera of their choice. Prerequisites: LALW200 Lecture/Seminar All College Elective

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Courses

LALW100 Written Communication 3 cr.

LALW200 Literary Traditions 3 cr.

LALW201 Men, Women, and the Myth of Masculinity 3 cr.

LALW203 Film Viewing and Criticism 3 cr.

LALW205 Children’s Literature 3 cr.

LALW206 Graphic Novels 3 cr.

LALW207 Intro to African Literature 3 cr.

LALW210 Famous Writers & their Celebrated Illustrators 3 cr.

LALW232 Readings in Asian American Literature 3 cr.

LALW290 African Art, Religion, Philosophy and Culture 3 cr.

LALW300 Playwriting 3 cr.

LALW301 Monster Madness 3 cr.

LALW302 History of the Book 3 cr.

LALW303 The Family Drama in Literature 3 cr.

LALW305 Russian Short Story 3 cr.

LALW306 Modernist Word and Image 3 cr.

LALW307 Modern Drama 3 cr.

LALW308 Lyric Poetry 3 cr.

LALW309 Twentieth Century American Literature 3 cr.

LALW310 Religion and Literature 3 cr.

LALW311 Contemporary Poetry and the Modernist Tradition 3 cr.

LALW312 Creative Writing: The Essay 3 cr.

LALW317 Immigrants in America 3 cr.

LALW320 Poetry Workshop 3 cr.

LALW322 Shakespeare: On Film and In Print, Part 1 3 cr.

LALW324 Shakespeare: On Film and In Print, Part II 3 cr.

LALW327 Irish Literature: The Easter Rebellion 3 cr.

LALW328 Contemporary Italian Literature and Film: Myths, Identity and the “Mirage of America” 3cr

LALW329 Literature & Culture of he Great War 3 cr

LALW335 Retelling Cambodia’s Killing Fields 3 cr.

LALW346 Camelot: Tales of King Arthur 3 cr.

LALW349 History of Film 3 cr.

LALW353 Modern European Cinema 3 cr.

LALW360 Third World Women: Literature and Culture 3 cr.

LALW362 Twenty-first Century Novel 3 cr.

LALW400 Directed Study 3 cr.

LALW403 Writing an Artist’s Statement 3 cr.

LALW410 Opera and the fusion of the Arts 3 cr.