Special Topics Courses Fall 2013

10579 ANTH 180: Queer Ethnography
M. Finkelstein
Since its inception, American anthropology has been shaped by its engagement with sexology and the study of human sexuality. This course will explore this dynamic history by presenting classic and contemporary ethnographic works that address cross-cultural variation and the construction of sexuality. Readings and course discussions will address questions of intersectionality and sexuality, including (but not limited to) race, ethnicity, gender, labor, religion, colonialism, and globalization.

10573/10574 ARTS 180/280: Situational Practice
Amy Franceschini
Growing out of a genealogy of site-specific artwork, situational practice includes place, locality, time, context and space rather than a fixed, physical notion of site. As stated by Terry Smith, “it prioritizes the moment over time and direct experience of multiplicitous complexity over the singular simplicity of distanced reflection”. This can play out as a network of artworks, performances, events, interventions, happenings or small gestures. Artists projects referenced in this class will range from the constructed situations of the Situationist International to Francis Alÿs’, When Faith Moves Mountains to Hehe’s, Kiss. Concept-driven, hands-on projects will invite students to be fearless creators open to a multitude of possible modes of creation; walking, urban interventions, cooking, temporary sculpture, mapping and dancing. This course will blur the boundaries between art, architecture and anthropology and provoke critical dialog about form, intention and meaning. Individual and group projects will emerge from readings, field trips and interaction with invited guests. A majority of the class will be sent off-site in a variety of situations that will enable students to engage with a set of conditions in time and place.

The class is open to students working in any medium.

DNC 180: Acting Fundamentals
Amy Potozkin
This is a process oriented class to begin to develop the basic craft of being an actor. Whether you have never been on a stage in your life or are considering a professional acting career you will have the opportunity to explore the acting process through exercises, scene work and play critique. Utilizing theatre games, improvization and text work you will gain presence, confidence and the power of your self expression. The skills you develop are useful for both performance and non-performance related career paths. We will be doing a variety of acting exercises and improvizations to free the voice, body, emotions and imagination during the first half of the semester and then move into scene work the second half. At the end of the semester the scenes will be performed for invited guests.

10142 ENG 061P: Public Speaking
Janet Holmgren
This course will cover the theory and the rhetorical techniques of public speaking in a wide variety of settings, ranging from formal presentations and readings to spontaneous contributions to public conversations. There will be opportunities to study and analyze the styles of a variety of prominent public speakers, including political and thought leaders, as well as artists who rely on spoken words. The course will require students to practice and master formal and informal public speaking skills.

10144/10145 ENG180A/280A: American Women Writers
Janet Holmgren
The seminar will concentrate on fiction (and some nonfiction memoirs) by and about women from the earliest and most widely read publications of the nineteenth century to current twenty first century works by contemporary authors. We will pay particular attention to the historical, cultural, and political aspects of the fiction, especially in terms of the impact of the work on political and social change. We will also study questions of perspective and voice, women's roles in society, and women's fiction in the critical canon.

Some likely authors and texts: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner; Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth; Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes were Watching God; Anzia Yerzierska, Bread Givers; Willa Cather, Song of the Lark; Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter; Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds.

10425/10426 ENG 183/283: Trans-Poetics
Rebekah Edwards
“Trans-: Transgender, transnational, transspeciaion, translation, transformation. Trans– as connection: shared space and time, transatlantic, trans-historical. Trans- as violation: transgression, transsection. Trans- as both assemblage and dissassemblage, as folded into structures of power as well as a movement of ‘becoming’…trans-as a way of seeing and thinking.” Editor’s note to the WSQ special issue on “Trans-“ 2008.

Recent critical work in transgender studies has called for an examination of the prefix “trans-“ as an analytical category in its own right, one that includes, exceeds and points to the rationality and slippages between the suffixes it is often attached to such as: –gender, -racial, -nationality, -Atlantic, -generational, -generic, -species. Working with an idea of poetics, as Roland Barthes formulated it, as the study of “how meaning is possible, at what cost and by what means” this course is interested in the poetics that “trans-“ mobilizes across and between various creative genres and critical disciplines.

We will read a series of critical texts, largely drawn from translation theory, transnational feminist theory, and transgender studies that will shape a set of concepts and a common vocabulary for this course. While poetry will be a primary source for this course, we will use of a range of creative texts to challenge and extend our theoretical readings. This course is set up as a series of “case studies”. Each week we will put in conversation a set of texts, critical and creative, and explore what this combination might tell us about a particular kind of trans- poetics.

10478 ENG 280: Narrative Agonistes: Theory, Exile, War
Kara Wittman
“There is a sense,” writes Gregory Judansis in his 2010 Fiction Agonistes, “that art, in a headlock with history, is bound to fall to its knees.” Perhaps art—and specifically literature—faced with the specters of war, torture, terror, cannot suffice, cannot even represent. A contentious claim: one this class will come at from an angle. Rather than looking directly at art, we will look at theories of art—specifically theories of narrative, of storytelling, and of the novel that imagine these forms as perfect sites of conflict, of agon, not only for their contents, but also—and primarily—for their forms. We will ask why moments of great historical conflict in the twentieth century (the World Wars, civil rights movements, student revolutions) produced some of our most powerful theories of narrative and the novel.

This is first and foremost an introduction to narrative theory and novel theory (with some attention to poetic theory). You do not need to have any prior experience with theory of any kind. We’ll be examining the work of some of the most important prose theorists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Then we’ll go further and ask what their work has to do with the social and political conditions in which it was written. Lukács’ Theory of the Novel emerged on the eve of World War I. Barthes’ S/Z considers the student revolutions of 1968. Auerbach’s Mimesis was written in exile, from memory. Ian Watt was a prisoner of war. Gilbert and Gubar are major figures in second-wave feminism. Why, we will ask, would one write narrative theory, novel theory, poetic theory, in response to social and political struggle? And how do these theories change our sense of the politics of literary form, of the response of art to the enormity of history?

Authors may include: Lukács, Shklovsky, Propp, Genette, Jakobson, Foucault, Todorov, Winnett, Brooks, Moretti, Miller, Puckett, Woloch, Gilbert and Gubar, Gates, Barthes, Armstrong, McKeon, Auerbach, Bakhtin, Benjamin, selected novels, poems, short stories.

10540 PHIL 180: Feminist Philosophy
Elizabeth Potter
This course offers students an introduction to feminist philosophy. We will examine many problems, including contemporary ethical problems of concern to women and men such as commercial surrogacy and abortion; we will consider whether U.S. constitutional law is gender neutral in its approach to freedom of speech with particular attention to pornography and whether the state is gender-neutral in its approach to rape. We will reconsider from a feminist standpoint the aesthetic views of Aristotle and Brecht about what makes great art; and we will reconsider the liberal theory of personhood through a feminist and race-critical lens, asking whether all persons are essentially the same or whether race and gender make essential differences. Finally, we will take up the question of the impact upon western culture of "the Closet" and the loud silence around queer people.

Not open to first year students.

10621 REL 180: Judaism Through Film
This course will introduce students to the Jewish religion through the cinematiclens. We will consider Jewish historical, textual, linguistic, theological,liturgical, and ritual practices as we interrogate the limits and consequences of their onscreen representations. Screenings of American fiction film, documentaries, and television shows will pave the way for exploring some of Judaism’s key concepts. We will also ask how the imagery in these films erects boundaries for what qualifies as “Jewish.” The course will address broader questions in current scholarship: the limits of representation; the formation of stereotypical identities through visual media; and how the status of "otherness" helps shape a "national" and “religious” imagery. Reader responses, in-class presentations, research paper. Some films will have mandatory screenings on Wednesday nights at 6:45-9:15; most of the other films for the class are readily available for students to watch on their own.

10564 SPAN 180: Latin American Literature and Film
Mario Cavallari
Based on a selection of Latin American films and literary texts, this course will explore the intersections of visual and verbal forms as sources of narrative construction of meaning. Through close textual analysis and discussion, the focus of the course will be the formal and cultural relationships that frame various texts and films from Latin America and Latino/a USA since the 1960’s. We will look at different issues and topics pertaining to the reciprocal influences between the area’s literature and cinema. A basic theoretical framework will be developed as the grounding for the various approaches engaged in the course.