Special Topics Courses 
Spring 2010

To find course descriptions, go to the online catalog on the Mills website, or simply click on the CRN for the course in the online schedule.  Course descriptions for the Special Topics (180/280) and Advanced Seminar (183/283/483), Theme and Genre Literature, New Directions courses, and COLL 060 courses pending approval or newly-approved, which are not in the catalog, are included here and in the Special Topics Course Descriptions section of the printed schedule.

ARTH 140: The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt

Currently the Bay Area is experiencing a flowering of interest in Ancient Egyptian Art. Several nearby museums have special or continuing exhibitions of ancient Egyptian art and archaeology collections (for example, the King Tutankhamen Exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the exhibits at the Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley, and the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose). With these resources we can take advantage of the wealth of material that these institutions house. This course will explore the history, society, and religion of ancient Egypt from the pre-dynastic era through the Graeco-Roman period (ca. 4000 BCE to 395CE), as revealed through its artistic, architectural and material remains. Attention will be given to how sculpture, painting, architecture, and other material remains provide a window into ancient Egyptian life and thought. Open to sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Meets the GE requirement: Creating and Critiquing Arts.

COLL 060B: Living the Story: The Bible Lives Today

Students in this course encounter modern people who experience a biblical story or character in their own personal lives or in the life of their community, people who "live the story" in the immediacy of every day--among them, African-Americans mapping their story of slavery and freedom onto the exodus from Egypt, Mary the mother of Jesus reappearing as La Virgen de Guadalupe, mystics revoicing the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs to express the sublimity of divine love. Disciplines: biblical studies, comparative literature, history, gender studies, religious studies, and cultural studies.

COLL 060GG Ancient Narratives and Modern Transformations

This course explores contemporary appropriations from the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament, exploring interdisciplinary relationships between ancient religious text and transformations in popular culture (literature, journalism, music, art). We will examine biblical appropriations--including God’s order that Abraham sacrifice his son; exodus/conquest; the Song of Songs; Mary, the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene; and the Book of Revelation--through different disciplinary perspectives, including biblical, religious, gender, and cultural studies; comparative literature; and history.

COLL 060HH: What & How Should We Eat?: From Hebrew Scriptures to The Omnivore’s Dilemma

“What and How Should We Eat?” is an interdisciplinary second year seminar designed to discuss contemporary issues about food from a variety of perspectives. The disciplines employed will be biblical studies, Jewish studies, philosophy and history. We will discuss biblical passages about food and eating from Genesis and Leviticus in the light of two principal texts: Leon Kass, M.D.’s, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature, and Mary Douglas’ Leviticus as Literature. Kass presents a religious and philosophical approach grounded in Jewish sources; Douglas adds her unique anthropological and literary perspective. Based on these sources we will look at Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a best selling statement of some contemporary issues about what and how we eat, which includes some history of the food sustainability movement in the United States. The goal of the course will be to articulate a well-reasoned approach to eating and contemporary issues about food.

COLL 060JJ: Growing California Cities: Environment and Urban Development in the West

This course is an interdisciplinary seminar that addresses the development of California’s two preeminent cities—San Francisco and Los Angeles—from an environmental perspective. We will consider the reasons for urbanization, the interaction of human activity and natural setting in shaping urban location and urban space, and the relationship between cities and the regions in which they are situated. Students will explore the process of urbanization in general, the ways it has been framed by scholars of the American West, and the specific features of urban growth in a California context.

COLL 060MM: Queer Kin: Literary and Cinematic Representations of Generations

We will study a series of novels and films concerned with “queer” family. Literary criticism, film and queer theory offer different analytical lens for studying time, narrativity and kinship. We will cover: nonlinear structure, textual and cinematic narrativity, queer time, queer kinship, the gaze, genre and gender, relationships between artistic medium, production and social circumstances. We will thematically trace representations of “queer” childhood, aging, gender identity, sexuality, parenting, coming of age, and memory.

ECON 180 ST: Dollars and Sense

This course is designed to let Mills students acquire the knowledge, tools and confidence necessary to become financially independent. Topics include managing credit, budgeting, making large purchases, buying and renting real estate, insurance, personal tax issues, investments and retirement planning. The legal and ethical considerations of each topic will be discussed. The course will also include an overview of the economy and how government institutions and policies can impact one’s financial well-being. Over the semester several financial professionals will visit the class to discuss their area of expertise and allow students to directly question the type of financial professionals they will encounter in the future. This course has no prerequisites. While it is open to all students, it is recommended for juniors and seniors.

ENG 180A/280A ST: Coming of Age Around the World: International Young Adult Literature

This one-time special topics course is inspired by Coming of Age Around the World, a multicultural anthology edited by the instructor that charts the global quest for identity, asking whether coming of age is a Western — or universal — concept. We will examine contemporary fiction and memoir that fall into the increasingly popular genre of literature categorized variously as YA, Bildungsroman, Adolescent, Juvenile, and Teen, at the same time exploring the distinction between books about youth and books for youth. As one of the goals of YA stories is to give the reader a better understanding of self and the world, we will consider the global events and social issues that shape the communities characters and readers inhabit. The texts will exhibit diversity both in origin (e.g., nation/geographic region, gender, race/ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, class/caste, language group) and in form (e.g., graphic novel/memoir, diary and epistolary, prose poem/flash fiction/lyric essay, and tales in pidgin and patois). Through presentations, students will be able to investigate an aspect of the genre or region of the world of personal interest; there will also be opportunities for those who want to do creative writing.

ENG 180/280 ST: Performing Memory and the Queer Embodiment of History

This course is interested in ways that performance, literary productions, and the body have functioned as “queer” sites of history and cultural memory. “History” and “memory” are terms have been contested, expanded and taken up by performance studies and queer studies. Both fields have acknowledged the political consequences of formulations which posit history as a verifiable narrative of “fact” and memory as subjective narrative of “experience.” Both fields note that “History” consolidates regimes of knowledge that produce national identities and legitimate some people while repressing, disenfranchising or criminalizing others and both have been interested in where and how the history of these “others” might be archived. Both performance studies and queer studies are interested in the relationship between dominant discourse and public performance; between historical narratives of “fact” and the historical “fiction” of novels, poetry, performances, music; between the historical/political formulation of bodies and identities and the ways in which bodies negotiate, perform and “remember” these formulations.

We will explore these concepts through the study of a series of texts and performances: two plays - Moraga’s “Giving up the Ghost” and Kaufman’s “The Laramie Project”; four films - Chou’s “Drifting Flowers”; Julien’s “Looking for Langston”; Riggs' “Tongues Untied”; Uekrongthan’s “Beautiful Boxer”; and three novels - Mootoo’s “Cereus Blooms at Night”, Kay’s “Trumpet”, Kwa’s “The Walking Boy.” We situate our readings of these texts by studying a few of theoretical texts and contexts of performance studies and queer studies that are concerned with cultural memory, and/or with the performance of queer publics. Some of the concepts we will cover will be: Roach’s concepts of circum-Atlantic performance; Taylor’s repertoire as archive; Munoz’s disidentification; Gopinath’s queer diaspora; Fusco’s reconquista of civil space; Cvetkovich’s archive of feelings; Brooks' ‘bodily insurgancey’; Shimizu’s hypersexaulity of race; Halberstam’s queer temporalities; Marriott’s haunted life; Johnson’s politics of authenticity; Hartman’s scenes of subjection.

ENG 180C/280C ST: Systemic Theories of Literature

When I began to think about this seminar, I began by thinking about what books published in the last five years have most changed my thinking about literary criticism. When I sat down and looked at my list, I realized that a number of books on it had something in common: all were attempting to think about literature less through close reading and/or aesthetics and more about how it functions in (world) culture. Many of these works were discussing literature as if from a great distance, were indulging in what has been called a sort of “sociological formalism.” On my list were Franco Moretti, who provocatively argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead; Pascale Casanova whose work charts out relationship between literary capital and the struggle of international power; James English who studies the ever expanding literary prize circuit; and Mark McGurl who looks at the defining impact that creative writing programs have had on US literature in the last fifty years. I have not yet finalized the reading list but I am fairly certain we will read from these… Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, and James English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. The first half of the semester will be spent reading in the criticism and discussing it. The second half will be spent on student presentations written under the sway of this sociological formalism. I’ve designed the course so that it is not genre or historical period specific. You should be able to bring your own areas of interest to the course (including the culture around the institution of creative writing). If you are thinking about applying to graduate programs in literary criticism, this might be a good opportunity to develop a writing sample. But at the same time, this course does not require previous knowledge in literary theory. We will be reading the criticism as slowly as we need to.

ENG 180D ST: Literature of the Vietnam War: Representing the Soldier, Enemy, Citizen, and Refugee

The Vietnam War is often remembered as an event that brought to a close the American frontier and changed the nation forever. While this narrative may be true in some respects, we can also question the implications behind it. In what ways do notions of gender, race, class, sexuality, etc. constitute the frontier narrative? What is the Vietnam War (as well as America’s defeat in it) supposed to mean for subjects who may not have been included in the nationalist frontier myth in the first place? By framing the Vietnam War as America’s first “postmodern” war, do we undercut any attempt to understand it in relation to wars before it and since? In this course, we will be examining issues of memory (personal and collective), citizenship (legal and cultural), and representation (“fictional” and “historical”) through literatures of the Vietnam War. We will analyze representation of the war from a range of perspectives, from the white American soldier to the Vietnamese refugee. The goals for this course are to think critically about the ways in which certain teleological frames inform how we interpret texts, to consider the conditions that allow for certain experiences to be represented more prominently than others, and to analyze the relationships between different narratives in constructing a historical memory. This course covers 20th Century American literature, Asian American studies, gender studies, and theories of postmodernism.

ENG 180E ST: Reading Group in Contemporary Writers

This is a pilot course. The idea behind this .25 credit course is to read the work of the writers who are visiting campus in the Contemporary Writers Series. The course is open to undergraduates and graduates and the hope is that it will encourage more conversation between the two programs. The class will meet 5 times this semester right before the writer reads. We will read a book by each visiting writer. The visiting writers for spring semester are Kyle Schlesinger, Lasana M. Sekou, Vendela Vida, Ammiel Alcalay, and Laila Lalami. See the CWS schedule for dates.

ENG 283 ST: The Gothic

Jane Austen: "Northanger Abbey"; Charlotte Bronte, "Jane Eyre"; Emily Bronte: "Wuthering Heights"; Charles Brockden Brown: "Wieland"; William Faulkner: "Absalom, Absalom!"; Henry James: "The Turn of the Screw"; Toni Morrison: "Beloved"; Edgar Allan Poe: "Collected Stories"; Mary Shelley: "Frankenstein."

This course will explore a genre of literature which proudly intended, as Frankenstein author Mary Shelley put it, “to awaken thrilling horror…curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” As a genre, the gothic was both frequently written and voraciously read by women, and we will consider the gender politics of the gothic, paying particular consideration to its interest in the “dark” sides of sexuality, childbirth, and maternity. We will examine some familiar gothic tropes: unreliable, often menacing narrators; dark, collapsing houses closeting mysterious tenants; the grotesque; madwomen in attics; incest; bodies that won’t stay dead. These are not polite, feminine subjects, and the texts we will read express a self-conscious uneasiness with their shady content. In these novels, we will repeatedly encounter readers whose reading has pernicious effects on their imagination and their perception of “reality.” A subversive, skeptical response to the Age of Reason and its conviction that humans are innately rational and observant, these gothic texts question the reliability of sense perceptions, dramatizing how easily senses can be corrupted or misled. We will also explore how gothic fetishes adapt when transplanted to modern narrative forms. The ghosts who stalk characters become incarnations of a troubled history: a past that cannot be safely buried. The fact that the entities which haunt characters reveal themselves to be psychological hallucinations or embodiments of history does nothing to ease the intensity of their assault. We will see how the gothic shuttles between an urgent need to express –“it’s because she wants it told” (Absalom, Absalom!)–and to repress, to shut itself up: “this is not a story to pass on” (Beloved).

Before the first class, please read the following poems and bring copies of them to class: "This Living Hand" (Keats), "The Raven" (Poe), "One need not be a chamber-- to be haunted" (Dickinson), and "Porphyria's Lover" (Browning).

LET 180 ST: Film Theory

This course looks at film from several vantage points, engaging cinematography as both art and craft, visual/verbal language, and narrative technique. The main objective is an examination of the elements necessary to understand how films create and convey meaning, and more important, how to interpret the cinematic work of art. "Film Theory" is concretely grounded in the analysis and discussion of various cinematic texts within diverse frameworks of understanding and interpretation. It examines different forms of film language with a particular interest in the connections between cinema, aesthetics, and cultural study, and dealing with various film practices and public as well as private institutions of social life.

Readings include essays by various film directors, including Maya Deren, Andrey Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, María Luisa Bemberg, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and others. Class discussion and written work will deal with film text structure, analytical method, theoretical grounding, and expository strategies.

This course is taught in English and is open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

PPOL 180: ST Women and Politics

Students will explore the challenges and opportunities to women’s political participation in the U.S. We begin by looking at the history of women's participation as voters, candidates, and elected officials, then turn to the mechanics of electoral politics and how these interact with gender. Students will hear from women who have worked in politics in a variety of roles, from campaign consultants to elected officials. Students will develop both theoretical and practical knowledge.

WMST 180: ST: Women in Islam

Since medieval times, nothing about Islam has perplexed the West more than the role of women. This course examines translated Islamic texts on gender and historical evidence of women’s religious and social activities since the sixth century. These works include the Eve and Virgin Mary narratives in the Qur’an, legalist works on the ideal Muslim wife and mother, and biographies of women warriors, political leaders, religious scholars and Sufi mystics. Muslim apologists and feminists use such materials in varying ways. Attitudes toward the body--involving sexuality, purity, fertility and seclusion--will be examined in a comparative context. Finally, we will consider the current Western view of Muslim women as victims before analyzing how women’s economic power and their participation in modern revivalist movements are bringing about new identities for Muslim women worldwide.

WMST 180A: ST: Women in World Religions Gendered Experience and the Sacred in the Traditions of the West

Women in World Religions West takes a historical and comparative look at ways in which women have understood and experienced gender and leadership roles, meaning and self-understanding in Native American, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Traditional African religious traditions. Included will be a discussion of women’s traditional roles and status, the many ways in which women themselves have understood their identity in terms of cultural and religious participation, and recent feminist efforts to reevaluate and transform contemporary, yet culturally grounded, religious life. Attitudes toward the body—involving sexuality, purity, fertility and seclusion—will be examined in a comparative context as will the meaning of gender in religious symbolism, myth and ritual. As much as possible, we will be drawing on the words and images of women themselves. Readings will include scriptural writings, poetry, religious narratives, autobiography, critical theory, and musical texts in order to explore the question: What does the experience of religious women contribute to an awareness of the sacred, to the understanding of community, and, ultimately, to the meaning of being human?