May 22, 2024  
Academic Catalog 2015-2016 
    
Academic Catalog 2015-2016 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Courses


 

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 literary masterpieces from the ancient world to the seventeenth 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 explores the art and composition of the graphic novel and examines its many sub-genres, from superhero tales to memoirs to manga. The textbook is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Other texts include Watchmen, Contract With God, Sandman, Maus, and Persepolis. For the final project, students create and make preliminary sketches for an original graphic novel.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    All College Elective
  
  • LALW210 Famous Writers & their Celebrated Illustrators 3 cr.


    Famous Writers and their Celebrated Illustrators combines literature and art. Discussed are great works of literature and the visual images they inspired. Writers include Dante and Cervantes. Pushkin, Gogol, Corneille, Swift, Defoe and Wilde, among others, are discussed. Illustrators include Botticelli, Dore, Delacroix, Beardsley, Picasso, Pasternak (the father), Favorsky, Baskin, and numerous contemporary illustrators.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    Culturally Diverse Content
    All College Elective
  
  • LALW214 History and Issues of Documentary Films 3cr


    Documentary, as defined by John Grierson, is the
    creative treatment of actuality. Grierson coined
    the term in his review of Robert Flahertys Moana
    (1926). Contemporary culture expands on classical
    rhetorical and observational forms to include
    docusoaps, agitprop, advocacy, animation, sensory
    ethnography, mockumentary, first-person, and more.
    In this course we will explore the origins of
    documentary, discuss the central issues of the
    field, examine historical and contemporary trends,
    and identify the aesthetic strategies and
    techniques used by documentary makers along with
    their rhetorical effects.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Undergraduate Elective
    Spring
  
  • LALW220 Creative Nonfiction 3cr


    Our strongest and deepest experiences cannot be paraphrased and that is why we need creative nonfiction. Nonfiction is an experimental art because meaning is discovered in the act of creating; playing with form is part of the process. Come try your hand at flash nonfiction. Make a collage or braided essay. Learn how memoir is blended with larger narrative stories using research. Today’s reader of creative nonfiction needs to be flexible, open, and exploratory. The same subject is treated in very different ways. Take food, for example. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, journalist Michael Pollan describes the process of preparing four meals and tracks down the origins of the ingredients. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver, novelist and essayist, tells a story of her family trying to raise or grow their own food for one year in southern Appalachia. Creative Nonfiction moves from narration to reflection to surprising insights in film, graphic memoirs, video essays, weblogs, and online essays. Join us for some new reading and writing experiences. No prior writing experience required.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Undergraduate Elective
    Fall
  
  • LALW221 Environmental Writing 3cr.


    Through readings and feature films, students study the tradition of nature writing. Students write two contemporary environmental essays that integrate storytelling, personal reflection, and philosophy or science. Primary readings exemplify writings by participants in today’s debate regarding human interaction with natural phenomena. Additional readings include works by premodern Native American writers.  Readings include Walden, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man Nature, Climate Change, Cadillac Desert, The Future of Nature, editor Barry Lopez, essays by William Cronon, Bill McKibben, Black Elk Speaks, A Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, Selected works of Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, and About a Mountain. The course teaches how contemporary environmental writers use personal voice, story telling, and philosophical thought to probe intersections of the human with the natural. It teaches students how they, too, may explore these issues in their own original writing.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Spring
  
  • LALW222 Fantasy Worlds 3cr


    Modern fantasy literature consists of fantastic
    stories set in imagined  worlds. It features
    characterscreated by the author rather than drawn
    directly from traditional myths and legends. The
    course examines the origins of the genre, which
    emerged during the nineteenth century, and which
    has taken both epic and satiric forms. Although
    some attention is given to the legends,
    folktales, and romances that provided models and
    inspiration to fantasy authors, the main focus is
    on the classic works of the genre.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Undergraduate Elective
    Spring
  
  • LALW223 American Literature Mid-20th Century Masterpieces 3cr


    A critical survey of American writings (novels and shorter works of fiction, essays, journalism, poetry) from WWII through the 1960s-a range including Baldwin, Bellow, Cheever, Ellison, Kerouac, Mailer, Nabokov, O’Connor, Salinger, Updike (and their critics)-amid other aesthetic ferment in the aural/visual arts during a quiet (increasingly noisy) crisis in America’s cultural history.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Undergraduate Elective
    Spring
  
  • 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
  
  • 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 round 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 studies the idea of monstrosity and the ways in which monsters represent the shadowy side of human nature: what people fear and what they desire. The syllabus includes Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Nabokov’s Lolita.

     

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    Culturally Diverse Content
    All College Elective
    Summer (PCE)
  
  • 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. The course examines 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 burst on to world stage suddenly and unexpectedly in the early nineteenth century and almost immediately gained tremendous worldwide 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. Reading and studying these works helps students to better understand the trials and tribulations of modern times.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    Culturally Diverse Content
    All College Elective
    Fall and Spring
  
  • 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 explore the unique conversation between word and image that occurred between approximately 1910 and 1945. How did 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- guide our investigation and analysis. Texts 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 emerged in the twentieth century. The course concentrates on late twentieth century figures and earlier modernist writers.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    Culturally Diverse Content
    All College Elective
  
  • LALW310 Religion and Literature 3 cr.


    The class treats 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 includes 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 poems of the Americas in the context of modernist innovations in the twentieth century. African-American, Asian American, and Native American poetry is covered, as is Beat poetry, confessional poetry, sound poetry, and other 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
  
  • LALW313 Caribbean Diaspora Literature: Beyond the ‘Tropical Paradise’ 3 cr.


    This course explores the concept of ‘border’ as a geographic and symbolic space by focusing on the work of contemporary writers from the Caribbean region, many of whom reside  in the USA and Europe. The course provides students with an overview of the histories, cultural identities, literary and creative expressions of the Caribbean archipelago. Students consider the role that Caribbean diaspora fiction, poetry, and critical theory play in contemporary North American and European societies.  Readings are in English or translated into English.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    Culturally Diverse Content
    All College Elective
  
  • LALW317 Literature from Immigrants in America 3 cr.


    This course focuses on literary texts and films that examine the experience of immigrants in the USA from the 1950s to today. Through the reading of excerpts of novels, short stories and critical essays, and the viewing of feature films and documentaries, the course treats issues that have affected successive generations of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Japanese, Indian and more recently Hispanic/Caribbean immigrants in the USA. The course devotes special attention to the experience of marginalization of the immigrants, changes in their family structure, the process of ‘becoming American,’ and the social and cultural impact these communities have had on US national identity. The course also considers ways in which immigrant writers both adopt and adapt the English language, while changing and often enriching it, and how they work against conventional cultural and visual representations of immigrants in US media. [Formerly Immigrants in America]

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    Culturally Diverse Content
    All College Elective
    Fall/Spring
  
  • LALW318 Word and Image in the 19th Century: The Romantic Tradition 3cr


    This course investigates the connections between poetry, painting, and the graphic arts in the nineteenth century. The course treats how writers and artists shared a series of similar concerns over revolution, nature, and the individual and how these concerns combined to shape the development of a specifically romantic tradition within the literary and visual arts. Writers and artists include Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Rossetti, Goya, Constable, Turner, Delacroix and the Pre-Raphaelites.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Undergraduate Elective
  
  • LALW320 Poetry Workshop 3 cr.


    In this course, students write, revise, and share poems as a community, experimenting with new subjects and new forms and responding attentively to poems written by other class members. Additionally, they consider published poetry to learn key elements of poetic craft. Students assemble their original poems into portfolios to demonstrate their command of imagery, diction, stanza, line, voice, form, prosody (sound and rhythm), and other aspects of richly dynamic poetry.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    Culturally Diverse Content
    All College Elective
  
  • LALW321 The Crisis of Modern Man 3cr


    This course revolves around the great themes of Existentialism.  Throughout our readings and discussions, we come face to face with “Modern Man.” We encounter a world in which “God is dead” where human beings are suddenly and absolutely confronted with the responsibility of creating meaning for themselves in an absurd world, a world where people must define good and evil on their own terms with no recourse to a “morality” to guide them.  We look at the uniquely human problems of alienation and despair, freedom and responsibility, the striving for authenticity in an inauthentic world, the power wielded by the objectifying other, and the confrontation with a society which dehumanizes us and would imprison us within a world of limits, with death being the most terrible limit of all. Authors include Kierkegaard, Sartre, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Camus, among others.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Undergraduate Elective
    Spring
  
  • 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
  
  • LALW323 Nationalism in Music & Literature 3cr


    This course focuses on the interplay of folk and sacred music and idioms, language and dialect, and regionalist and nationalist literature in the evolution of 19th-century musical regionalist and nationalist expression.   It treats the confluence of history and geography, the significance of minority-language rights and expression, and the development of human rights and religious freedoms as central to understanding artists’, composers’ and authors’ motivations.

    Prerequisites: LALW200
     

    Lecture
    Undergraduate Elective
    Spring
  
  • 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 Antony 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
  
  • LALW326 Asian Cinema: Postwar India, Japan & China 3cr


    This course looks at the development of Asian cinema through the lens of three of the most important national film industries: India, Japan, and China.  How do the films from these countries reflect diverse but interrelated cultural traditions?  How is the cinematic representation of these traditions shaped by a dialogue with Hollywood and European film?  How does the development of post-war Asian cinema reflect the shift from a national to a more global film market?  This course explores these and other related questions though a combination of weekly film screenings, lecture, and class discussion.  Directors include Satyajit Ray, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa, John Woo, and Wong Kar-Wai.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Undergraduate Elective
    Fall & Spring
  
  • LALW327 Irish Literature: The Easter Rebellion 3 cr.


    The course treats the literature and politically explosive speeches that reflected Irish-English tensions and inflamed Ireland’s desire for freedom. Readings include 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 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, rich culture, and changing values (e.g. the role of the Catholic Church in a secular society, recent immigration from Africa and Asia, North-South regional conflict, and recent national debates on gender equality, on politics, and on the Mafia).

    The course also treats significant post-1960 feature films by Italian directors and actors. These Italian authors, intellectuals and artists influence contemporary American literary and culture. In this respect, novels and films treated in this course reflect the “mirage of America” in Italian culture and also reveal contemporary Italian representations of Italian-Americans. Students analyze these representations of America in Italian culture 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 the 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. This course explores 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
  
  • LALW332 The End is Near! Envisioning the Apocalypse 3cr.


    The course introduces apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literary texts. Readings include eighteen and nineteen century end-of-days texts by Daniel Defoe, Anita Letita Barbauld, Edgar Allen Poe, and present-day manifestations of this idea (among others, Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Robert Kirkman & Tony Moore, The Walking Dead). The course treats the concept of “dystopia” as an expression of recurring and contemporary anxieties.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Spring
  
  • LALW333 Silent Film Miracles 3cr.


    This course introduces students to masterpieces
    of silent cinema, the now lost art form that
    predates the widespread adoption of sound-on-disc
    and sound-on-film recording technology in the
    late 1920s. Students undertake research on
    aspects of silent cinema. Readings include Silent
    Stars (Jeanine Basinger), Silent Players (Anthony
    Slide), Hollywood: The Pioneers (Kevin Brownlow &
    John Kobal), and others. The viewing list
    includes Battleship Potemkin, Beau Geste, Ben
    Hur, Broken Blossoms, Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari,
    City Lights, He Who Gets Slapped, Hell’s Angels,
    Hunchback of Notre Dame, It, Man With Movie
    Camera, Metropolis, My Best Girl, Passion of Joan
    of Arc, Peter Pan, Prix de Beauté, Rain, Seventh
    Heaven, Show People, Son of the Sheik, Speedy,
    Stella Dallas, The Big Parade, The Crowd, The
    Great White Silence, Thief of Bagdad, Trip to the
    Moon.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Spring
  
  • LALW336 Masters of Film 3cr


    An examination of the contributions that distinguished filmmakers, including directors, editors, and cinematographers, have made to the art of motion pictures.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Undergraduate Elective
    Fall
  
  • 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 a history of film textbook and general history readings to study films demonstrating the evolving development of motion picture art and the motion picture industry. Students undertake film making exercises and 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.


    The course treats trends in recent European cinema, discussing themes and production values across genres and cultures from western to eastern Europe, including Scandinavia and Great Britain. Filmmakers include Lars von Trier, Patrice Chéreau, 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
  
  • LALW362 Twenty-first Century Novel 3 cr.


    This course examines developing trends and standards for English-language novels in the twenty first century. It treats nine geographically and stylistically varied permutations of this long-fiction art form (including literary prize-winners and bestsellers) while attempting to place them in the web of literary tradition. Touchstone text and beginning book is the acclaimed 20th century novel Howard’s End, in which author E.M Forster famously exhorts his readers to “only connect.” In this spirit, the course seeks to connect the best of what authors are writing now with traditions of literary practice, always looking ahead to probable evolutions in the twenty first century.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    All College Elective
  
  • LALW365 Women’s literature in Global Perspective’ 3cr.


    This course surveys twentieth and twenty-first century literature by women authors working from transnational perspectives. It introduces authors from Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and West Africa who, collectively, expand and enrich existing narratives of women’s experience. These authors, from formerly colonized parts of the world and now residing and writing in Europe or the USA, engage with colonial histories and their lingering effect on today’s gender roles and expectations, on myths of masculinity, and on exoticization of non-western women’s bodies. The writings cross borders of literary genres, languages, fields of knowledge and media. In the course we investigate how global women’s narratives can respond to existing gender, racial, and colonial hierarchies, and how globalization influences the production and reception of women’s literature across cultures. [Formerly Women’s Literature in International Perspective]

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Culturally Diverse
    Fall & Spring
  
  • LALW400 Directed Study 3 cr.


    A Liberal Arts directed study is a research project selected by a student in a Liberal Arts discipline. Typically, the study results in a research paper of thirty plus pages or the equivalent, as agreed upon by the faculty member supervising the project. Because of its advanced nature, a Liberal Arts LALW directed study is open only to seniors and is limited to one per semester. No more than two Liberal Arts directed studies may be counted toward Liberal Arts degree requirements. Students seeking to register for a LALW directed study must execute a directed study proposal form that describes the proposed project, includes a bibliography, and describes the final project. Liberal Arts directed studies proposals require the approval of the Liberal Arts Department chair.

     

    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.

     

    Prerequisites: Seniors Only

    Lecture/Seminar
    Culturally Diverse Content
    Senior Elective
  
  • LALW404 Translations: Literature, Language and Psychology 3cr


    What drives humans to use artistic means to communicate? Why do we manifest our thoughts and feeling as images, as texts, on the screen and on a canvas? This course considers these questions through a study of the concept of translation broadly defined. Students translate from one language to another, paraphrase within a single language, interpret signs, translate from one artistic medium to another, and translate inner thoughts to the outside world. Course materials include film adaptations of literary texts, poems based on plays, paintings based on poems or novels, adaptations of TV series for foreign audiences, and theories about the possibility of communicating one’s inner world to the outside. Readings by Borges, Freud, Pirandello, Jhumpa Lahiri, E.T.A. Hoffman, André Breton, Kafka, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and Ovid.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture
    Undergraduate Elective
    Spring
  
  • 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. This course encourages new ways of thinking about the relationships between different artistic disciplines and forms. Students view and discuss a selection of operas from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. No classical music background is required, and no one is expected to sing. In a final project combining artwork and critical writing, students imagine and design a production for an opera of their choice.

    Prerequisites: LALW200

    Lecture/Seminar
    All College Elective