Bryn Mawr College

Section 1: The Journey: Act and Metaphor
Instructor: J. C. Todd
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
A journey can be seen as a manifestation of freedom, of resistance, of oppression, of intellectual engagement. Our aim is to develop critical insights into the journey and its structure as an act and as a metaphor. We will use a variety of sources: literature, history, cultural studies, science, and our own travels, beginning our investigation as the first humans began their travels—on foot, examining the history of walking and its relationship to consciousness. We will explore spaces where travelers might rest and reassess: Bryn Mawr’s cloister and labyrinth, a Renaissance memory palace, a spit of sand along the Amazon River, Parisian arcades, and the public squares and walkways of Philadelphia.

Our core text is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust; other readings include classics such as the Sumerian myth of “The Descent of Inanna,” and more contemporary scientific, literary, and historical essays, fiction, and poetry by writers such as Charles Dickens, Paula Fox, Jane Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Whitaker, and Virginia Woolf, as well as film, Bjork’s You-Tube video Wanderlust, and visual art. Engagement with these written and visual texts will lead to discussion, fieldwork, journaling, and analytical writing and revising toward mid-semester and final portfolios.

Each student’s writing in this course will become a map of the journey of her critical engagement with the idea of journey. In addition to conferencing with the instructor, students will form a community of readers, commenting supportively on the writing of their peers. One Saturday afternoon field trip is mandatory; date TBA.

Section 2: Thinking Through Animals
Instructor: Allison Hayes-Conroy
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
The topic of nonhuman animals proves to be a novel tool for interpreting society and understanding our own humanity. Despite enduring efforts to separate out human phenomena from all other natural phenomena, many authors, scholars, and social theorists highlight multiple connections between the nonhuman and human worlds, thus calling into question persisting divisions between the two. By exploring animal-human relationships through a variety of works—both fiction and nonfiction—we will come to explore issues of identity, ideology, and being. In short, we will learn not only to think-through (to comprehend) animals but also how to think through them (to use them to think). In this regard, the course will approach writing as a process by which we critically engage with texts and the arguments of others.

The works of be covered include a series of essays and scholarly articles like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Becoming-Animal” and Donna Haraway’s “Cyborgs to Companion Species,” and longer texts such as Mark Rowland’s The Philosopher and the Wolf, as well as poetry and fables from a variety of world cultures.

Through the course’s writing assignments, students will learn not only how to craft a solid and cogent argument, but also how the structuring of writing influences argumentation. We will be experimenting with a variety of types of writing throughout the semester. Assignments will emphasize both creativity and clarity.

Section 3: Culture Shock—Stories of Division, Change, and Reconciliation Across Social and Ethnic Boundaries
Instructor: Sharon Bain
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
The concept of culture comprises the beliefs, values, and institutions that are passed down from generation to generation within a social or ethnic group. Culture, as each of us defines it, influences our behavior, informs our attitudes toward others, and shapes our understanding of right and wrong. What happens when disparate cultures intersect? How do individuals cope with the “culture shock” that forces them to redefine reality as they know it? Does this shock lead to conflict, destruction, or enlightenment?

This seminar will explore culture shock through works that depict groups and individuals whose lives are changed when they encounter a foreign culture. Works include the novels Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia and East Wind: West Wind by Pearl Buck; short stories Kirinyaga by Mike Resnick and Annie and Fatima by Assia Djebar; and the films Arranged and Everything Is Illuminated.

In weekly writing assignments and class discussions students will examine the cross-cultural relationships between characters in these works and will analyze the methods used by the authors and filmmakers to illustrate the constructive or destructive nature of these relationships. For our semester project, students will choose one of their writing assignments to expand into a larger paper and to discuss informally during our final class meetings.

Sections 4 & 5: Performance and Self
Section 4 Instructor: Linda Caruso-Havilland
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Section 5 Instructor: Gail Hemmeter
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1 – 2:30 p.m.
When we use the word “self” what do we mean? Are we coherent, authentic, natural selves, or is what we call “self” a role we’ve taken on and can easily discard or change at will? What does it mean to perform ourselves—in life, on stage, in film, in dance, in texts? Do we perform a social or cultural role in a script that has already been written for us? Or do we create ourselves through desire, passion and will? In this seminar, we will use a variety of texts to examine the ways we perform ourselves in daily life at the intersections of gender, race, and class. We will also look at the ways artists and writers construct performances that convey these social and political aspects of identity.

We will draw our texts from a variety of sources: philosophy, psychology, theater, dance, fiction, poetry, and film. They include examinations of the self by Descartes and Freud; poetic expressions of gender performance by Tony Hoagland, Anne Sexton, and Gloria Anzaldua; theories of performance and performativity by Judith Butler and others; analyses of gender in ballet and modern dance, in films such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch; depictions of race in Henry David Hwang’s M. Butterfly; and dramas of class in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation and in the writing of Dorothy Alison.

Our final project will provide an opportunity for groups to create a short performance around themes and ideas generated by the class. Because writing is also a performance, we will pay attention to how we present ourselves on paper. Students will write frequently, participate in occasional projects and peer review groups, and have opportunities to revise their work.

Section 6: What’s Out There? Exploring the Unknown
Instructor: Michael Tratner
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
This course will examine experiences that are valuable for an unusual reason: they bring people into contact with the unknown. We will examine three such experiences, mostly through reading about them: 1) traveling to escape the familiar world, seeking what seems amazing or strange in other cultures or in nature; 2) probing what is hidden inside each of us in the unconscious; and 3) seeking to communicate with the “supernatural,” most commonly in the form of the divine. For each of these kinds of experiences, we will study intellectual methods that are used to write about and make use of what seems unknowable.

Thus, we will read the nature writer Annie Dillard, whose wondrous descriptions of a rural creek provide a guide for discovering a glowing, incomprehensible, transcendent universe all around us. Then we will read the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, who will show us how to interpret strange thoughts in our heads as evidence of minds inside us that we do not know. And we will read the religious writers Soren Kirkegaard and Paul Ricoeur who search for features of the world that seem to tell us about a consciousness beyond human understanding. Finally, as one prime example of facing the unknown, we will look at the moment of first contact in the New World, as described in the diaries and chronicles of the European Christopher Columbus and the Mayan Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and we will study the way professors have tried to make sense of these conflicting accounts.

Section 7: The Problem of Politics and Philosophy
Instructor: Stephen Salkever
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
This is a course about the problematic relationship between two ways of life. Political life involves law, authority, and participation in public affairs. Philosophy is a quest for truth. How are the two related? Are they interdependent? Opposed to one another? How can each support and/or subvert the other? Can one be both a good citizen and a good philosopher? Is it possible to be one without being the other?

The course has two parts. The first is titled “Antiquity: the Problem Revealed,” and considers the way the tension between philosophy and politics was expressed in a variety of very different and conflicting ways in ancient Greek political thought. Readings include: Thucydides, Peloponnesian War (excerpts); Antiphon the Sophist, On Truth (excerpt); Sophocles, Antigone; Plato, Apology, Crito, and Gorgias.

The second part is called “Modernity: the Problem Resolved?” and considers a variety of similarly conflicting resolutions to the problem of politics and philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present. Readings here will be drawn from: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (excerpts); John Locke, Second Treatise; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers (excerpts); Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (excerpts); Herman Melville, Billy Budd; Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries; Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger.

Short papers (500-800 words) will be assigned weekly in the first part of the course, and will serve as the basis for individual writing conferences. The second part of the course involves writing several longer interpretive essays (1,200-2,000 words) on the texts we’re discussing in seminar. At least one of these longer papers will involve preliminary drafts and revisions.

Section 8: Philosophy and Its Beginnings
Instructor: Robert Dostal
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
This course is an introduction to philosophy by way of its history. Our most general question, "what is philosophy?", we address by examining the historical beginnings of the western philosophical tradition in Greece. To introduce the beginnings in Greece we look briefly at short selections from epic poetry, history, and the so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers. We then take up three accounts of Socrates—Aristophanes (comic drama), Xenophon (history), and Plato's dialogues—and consider the question "Who is Socrates?" We pursue Plato's explicitly philosophical identification by reading several dialogues which tell the story of Socrates trial and death: Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. We read part of the Republic and conclude our reading of Plato with the Phaedrus which defines philosophy as a kind of erotic madness. We see how Aristotle develops this tradition of philosophy by reading selections from his works: Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics. Throughout the semester we consider questions that are both theoretical (what can we know?) and practical (what ought we do? what is best?). We also consider the relation between knowledge and action, theory and practice.

Section 9: Clash of Cultures (?): East and West in European and Middle Eastern Literature
Instructor: David Kenosian
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
This seminar examines European Middle East and North African literature from the 1700s to the present to see how conflicts have shaped the cultural relations between East and West. Works for the seminar could include texts by Orhan Pamuk, Tolstoy, and Gertrude Bell, who was known as the “female Lawrence of Arabia.” Topics for discussions include: how and why does the West see itself as different from its Middle Eastern neighbors; to what extent does imperialism prevent an understanding of shared cultural and religious history; the extent to which conflicts have provided the incentive to question one’s own culture, and whether questions on the construction of difference and the rationale for conflict have opened avenues for recognizing and understanding shared values and cultural traits. To help improve writing, we will work on posing insightful analytical questions and on revision as a means of refining and deepening arguments.

Section 10: The Race for Cyberspace
Instructor: Hoang Tan Nguyen
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
This seminar explores the central role that race plays in our understanding and experience of the Internet. Instead of an absolute division between online and offline worlds, the course insists on the interconnections between the real and the virtual. How is race differently constructed in old and new media? In what ways have virtual spaces enabled new identities and community formations? Which of these identities and communities become targets of surveillance, control, and marketing? How have people of color interacted with these new technologies? Our investigation of race and new media will be guided by the following key terms: access, community, identity, democracy, sexuality, interactivity, and activism.

We will read a wide range of texts from different disciplines and fields of study. Our case studies will encompass social networking Web sites, chat rooms, video games, artists’ Web projects, YouTube, blogs, film, and video art. Readings will include Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of Independence of Cyperspace”; Howard Rheingold’s“The Virtual Community”; Sherry Turkle’s, Life on the Screen; and Lisa Nakamura’s, “Race in/for Cyberspace.” Films will include Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Greg Pak’s Robot Stories. We’ll also consider Web sites such as stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, blackpeopleloveus.com, and Alllooksame.com.

Section 11: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ours
Instructor: Jane Hedley
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
As Hamlet was dying he asked his best friend Horatio “to tell my story” after his death in order to clear his name. Four centuries later, we are still reading that story and watching it performed. How to explain this tragedy’s uncanny staying power? Harold Bloom explains it by suggesting, “You can make of the play . . . pretty much what you will; push any stance or quest into it and the drama will illuminate what you have brought with you.” We’ll test that hypothesis by reading some of the classic interpretations of Hamlet’s character and of his story, including those of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, and by screening several 20th-century film adaptations and spinoffs of Hamlet, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. Meanwhile we’ll test the play’s interpretability in weekly writing assignments and in “table readings” of key scenes from the play.

Section 12: Classical Myth and the Contemporary Imagination
Instructor: Karl Kirchwey
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10 – 11:30 a.m.
Greek and Roman myths have proven themselves to be of enduring interest to the literary imagination, in part for the insight they offer into problems of contemporary history, politics, and sexuality, for example. Each generation has translated or adapted these myths for its own purposes. This course will consider a number of Greek and Roman myths, both in their “source” form (in translations of Greek drama, or the Metamorphoses of Ovid) and in various subsequent retellings in poetry, prose, or drama.

Sophocles’ play Antigone, for instance, about the young woman who defies her tyrannical uncle in giving her dead brother a decent burial, became a powerful parable of resistance to French playwright Jean Anouilh during the Nazi occupation of Paris in World War II. Sophocles’s play Philoctetes, about the Greek archer abandoned by his fellow-soldiers on a desert island because of his infected foot and later rescued by them in order to complete the taking of Troy, becomes a story about the necessity of forgiveness between mortal enemies, as Irish Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney imagines it in his play The Cure at Troy. And Euripides’ play Hippolytus, originally about a young prince’s unbending chastity, becomes, in its revisions by Seneca and Racine, the story of a queen’s guilty passion for her stepson, and in Richard Nelson’s contemporary American play Rodney’s Wife becomes an exploration of traditional gender roles in 1962, and of the romance between a stepmother and her stepdaughter.

Various film adaptations of these plays (and myths) may also be considered, as well as some critical readings. The course will require regular short essays and essay rewrites as well as the option of one creative writing assignment based on the myths being discussed

Section 13: Classical Myth and the Contemporary Imagination
Instructor: Karl Kirchwey
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
See course description for section 12

Section 14: The Altered “I”
Instructor: Pim Higginson
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
This seminar examines how identities are constructed, altered, bypassed, deviated, or otherwise manipulated. Using texts such as Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jeloun’s "Sand Child" and African American author Nella Larsen’s "Passing", films such as The Crying Game and Boys Don’t Cry, as well as critical essays, we will look at questions of gender, sexuality, race, and class, with an eye to experiences of acculturation (the conscious or unconscious loss of an “original” culture in favor of a dominant culture), passing (whether between sexes, classes, or races), and/or self-invention. We will use a variety of different resources and students will be asked to contribute texts they have found on their own to the course.

This seminar will consist of three related activities: 1) Broad and relatively extensive reading of texts (this will also include listening to music and watching movies or video clips); 2) Discussions in class conducted in various formats; 3) Extensive critical writing (and rewriting). The hope is that these activities will help you familiarize yourself with the demands of college writing and assist you becoming a more effective and refined critical thinker while introducing you to a fascinating topic that impacts every one of us.

Section 15: Reading Culture—Poverty in the United States
Instructor: Matthew Ruben
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Poverty is one of the most persistent problems and controversial issues in the United States. Along with its obvious economic dimensions, poverty has a wide variety of cultural meanings. In fact, the subject of poverty forces us to think critically about how we define and understand the concept of culture. This seminar will explore key methods for studying and writing about culture, by looking critically at a variety of works addressing the theme of poverty and wealth in America, including Benjamin Franklin’s classic “The Way to Wealth,” Michael Harrington’s highly influential The Other America, Sandra Cisneros’ novella The House on Mango Street, and the feature films American Beauty and Menace II Society. The seminar will look at how poverty and poor people have been discussed and represented in the United States during the last 150 years, and will provide an opportunity to explore the many ways "poverty" and "culture" intersect and interact, each term affecting the meaning of the other.

This seminar involves critical reading, in-class discussion, and cogent, idea-driven writing with one-on-one writing conferences outside of class. Course materials are drawn from a variety of genres and fields, and are meant to promote rich, open-ended interpretation and discussion. Students will write a series of papers and will have the opportunity to revise their work.

Section 16: Reading Culture—Poverty in the United States
Instructor: Matthew Ruben
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:30 – 4 p.m.
See course description for section 15

Section 17: Critical Issues in Education
Instructor: Alice Lesnick
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
In this course, we will explore important challenges facing the field of education in the United States and imagine ways to transform processes of teaching and learning. How do people learn? What is good teaching? What do people’s cultural identities, life histories, and personal and societal goals have to do with their education in formal and informal contexts? How do the relationships between knowledge, language, and power make education a matter of social justice?

Our consideration of these questions will be informed by readings chosen to illustrate the great range of educational research and theory, including selected memoirs, sociologist Annette Laureau’s Unequal Childhoods, an ethnography of social class divisions, texts by philosophers John Dewey and Paolo Freire, and a comparative study of the U.S. and Japanese educational systems. Students will have the opportunity to learn and eventually to lead approaches to teaching that invite learners to engage deeply with texts and experiences.

Throughout the course we will write descriptively, analytically, and creatively. In addition to conferences and written comments from the instructor, students will serve as a community of readers for their peers’ work. Students will engage in a process of drafting and revising toward mid-semester and final portfolios.

Section 18: The Victorious and the Dead
Instructor: Richard Hamilton
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
The two major poetic forms that come to us from Classical Greece present starkly different images of the relationship of gods and men. Greek tragedy we all think we know, particularly the Sophoclean brand so beloved of Aristotle, where flawed heroes harm themselves and those close to them in the absence of clear guidance from the gods. Much less familiar is the picture presented by Pindar’s epinikia, songs in praise of Olympic (and other) victors, where the gods are always given top billing and the heroic world, though conceptually present, is spoken of in the past.

What other differences are there in the two genres? Is epinikion never about death and tragedy never about victory? Why are women absent in epinikion and dominant in tragedy? What about the stories they tell—if every myth is a variant, what do the variations mean and is there a difference in the two genres? Does it matter that tragedy is performed only in Athens and epinikion anywhere in the Greek-speaking world? What about the authors? Pindar was a Theban, on the wrong side of the Persian war that almost destroyed Greece; Sophocles was a general and, at one point, a political leader. And what about the resident alien Aristotle, who in his Poetics hardly mentions the gods at all?

To confront these and other questions we will begin with Heracles then turn to Trojan War heroes, Helen, Ajax, Achilles, Philoctetes, and end by looking more synoptically at those questions we have found to be most important and by considering possible modern analogues to epinikion and tragedy (obituaries, sneaker ads, operas, television series). Readings will include Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Ajax, and Philoctetes; Euripides’s Heracles, Helen, and Iphigenia Among the Taurians; Pindar’s Odes; and selections from Homer.

Section 19: Poetry and Politics in Landscape Art
Instructor: Christiane Hertel
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
We speak of the cityscape, dreamscape, and political landscape. But what is a landscape? And whose is it? Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response was, “Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape: There is a property in the horizon that no man has but… the poet.” (Nature, 1836)

The idea of freedom—be it personal, poetic or political—has long been attached to the experience of nature and is an important theme in the arts. In this seminar we shall explore the representation of nature in and as art. The genres of landscape include wilderness, the pastoral, and the sublime. We shall find that the concepts of nature in art often reflect binary pairs, such as country/city, nature/culture, and garden/wasteland. And we shall study the relation of nature to history and memory in memorial landscapes, such as battlefields, cemeteries, and memory gardens.

Our primary focus will be on examples of Western visual culture—painting, land art, photography, installation, the panorama, and gardens and parks, from the 16th century to the present, from Titian’s pastoral paintings to Maya Lin’s recent Storm King Wavefield. We shall pair these works with a diverse range of texts—artist’s writings, art criticism, interview, poetry, short story, art theory, and essays in environmental aesthetics. Field trips will enhance our study experience. Students will write regularly and have the opportunity to revise their work.

Section 20: Drugs, Brain and Culture—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Instructor: Earl Thomas
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1 – 2:30 p.m.
Is there a responsible use of cognitive enhancing drugs in healthy adults? Is ADHD over-diagnosed and over-treated or is it under-diagnosed and under-treated? Should currently illicit drugs be legalized? Should we treat severe pain with highly addictive opiate drugs? Are we generally an over-medicated society? Should brain surgery be carried out to treat psychological problems? Is it ethical for physicians to prescribe placebos? These are some of the many controversies that are being fiercely debated in scholarly circles. We will consider these controversies in the context of how we see the role of drugs and the brain in our culture.

Our view of drugs and society is often revealed in literature, as for example, Aldous Huxley’s Brave new World and the Doors of Perception), and in film, as for example, Mon Oncle d’Amérique). We will examine these and other examples from literature and film as a means of reflecting upon how we view the interface between drugs, brain, and culture. We will also examine closely the writing of those who are highly involved in the controversies, as for example Eliot Valenstein’s book Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health. We will examine Valenstein’s controversial contention that American psychiatry has changed from blaming the mother to blaming the brain, and that the claim that psychotherapeutic drugs correct a biological imbalance that is the root cause of most psychological problems rests on a very shaky scientific foundation. Texts will also include Don Delillo’s White Noise and Peter Kramer’s Listening to Prozac; and the films Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

One of the goals of the seminar is to provide the student with enough scientific background to enable her develop an informed opinion on these issues. Students will write regularly on the issues and participate in group discussions as well as in one-on-one conferences with the instructor.

Section 21: Truth and Justice in World Literature
Instructor: Kaley Carpenter
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.

This course explores topics related to truth and justice as they appear in various classics of world literature.  Through close readings of texts, critical essays, and personal reflections, students will engage such questions as the following:

     * What do we mean by justice?  What is, or counts as, truth?
     * How have different civilizations and cultures decided what is deemed just in their society?
     * What assumptions do various authors make about the nature, source, and possibility of truth?
     * What assumptions do we make about the same?
     * What influence does genre (e.g., drama, philosophy, narrative, autobiography, folktale) have on depictions and discussions of truth and justice?
     * What can we learn about the notions of truth and justice when we consider the motives and contexts (e.g., religious, political, individual, or communal) from which the literary reflections sprang?

Throughout the course, students are encouraged to make connections between their academic study and their personal experience.

The course texts span several continents and date from the ancient world up to the seventeenth century.  Representative readings may include Plato's Apology, Sophocles' Antigone, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, biblical material such as Genesis and Luke-Acts, Augustine's Confessions, A Thousand and One Nights, and Shakespeare's As You Like It.

Sections 22 & 23: Food for Thought—The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Instructors: Peter Brodfuehrer and Anne Dalke
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
"The desire to have it all and the illusion that we can is one of the principal sources of torture of modern affluent free and autonomous thinkers." Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2003)

“Some philosophers have argued that the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since a creature that could conceive of eating anything (including, notably, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals.” Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006)

This seminar was designed by a biologist and a literary critic to explore how we—as “free thinkers” with “open-ended human appetites”—might learn to make thoughtful decisions in a world that we may experience alternatively as both too constrained and too bountiful. The course will move from personal to collective decision-making. We will draw on disciplines ranging from statistics to food studies—including anthropology, neurobiology, philosophy, psychology, and literary interpretation—in our search for guidance in how to select among our options in what to eat, what data to attend to, and what interpretations to accept, before ending with a series of questions about curricular decision-making.

Readings will also include two contemporary novels: Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and a selection from Sena Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife. Students will be asked to listen carefully to what both these authors and their classmates have to say, before posting weekly comments in an online forum. Along with the practice of careful listening, 40 pages of more formal writing will also be required in the course of the semester. A sequence of linked weekly writing assignments will culminate in a portfolio accounting for the semester’s experiences, as well as two collaborative projects: a new curricular design for the College, and a performance for the class.

Section 24: Travel Tales and Understanding
Instructor: Peter Briggs
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
This seminar covers a miscellaneous group of readings, all involving travel, exposure to new cultures, and the kinds of learning that come with exposure to unfamiliar and often thought-provoking values. Some readings are set in everyday contexts, while others are more unusual: captivity narratives, imaginary travels, a temptation narrative, and even a descent into madness. This rich reading fare guarantees lively class discussions, often centering on the social and personal values of different cultures; the same fare provides many writing opportunities, chances to look into new values or conflicts among values on paper. This is a seminar without “right answers.” It prizes ongoing explorations above arrival at a final destination.

Readings include Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity among Native Americans, Zitkala-Sa’s account of her educational travels, Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats, Nancy Mairs’ account of her crippling illness, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market,” at least three books of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Section 25: The Origins and Fortunes of Biography
Instructor: R.T. Scott
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
The course will examine the writing of biography over the centuries from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the modern era and consider a variety of issues: why write biography rather than history? Is biography potentially a safer or more controversial form of writing than history? Is it better to write about the dead than the living? What about writing about oneself? Does autobiography only serve selfish interests or does the same apply to the biographer?

   We begin chronologically and thematically with the Lives of Famous Greeks of the classical period (fifth century BCE) written by a Greek author and Roman citizen, Plutarch, centuries later during the Roman Empire; his motives for writing these biographies at such a distance in time from his own day are a subject of debate, as is his decision to pair a Greek with an equivalent early Roman life. We then move to a Roman biographer, Suetonius, who wrote the lives of the early Roman emperors (Julius Caesar to Domitian) not long after Plutarch. His writing is controversial for his time and especially for its preoccupation with the private aspects of his subjects. Separate lives of men and women who suffered at the hands of some of these same emperors or their agents will introduce us to "Victim Literature" that influenced the development of later Christian lives of martyrs and saints that we will consider briefly. This important cultural shift is also marked in late antiquity by the first autobiography to be read, The Confessions of Saint Augustine (Selections),an account of his early life and teaching career that eventually led him from philosophy to Christianity.

   From ancient empires, pagan and Christian, we move to the British Empire and studies by Lytton Strachey of some "Eminent Victorians" , who may be markers, not of imperial success but of its faults.  Nigel Nicholson and his mother,Vita Sackville-West, then bring us to another pivotal moment in English manners and letters in the twentieth century with an unusual work that combines biography and autobiography: Portrait of a Marriage. If time allows, it may be possible  to pose the same questions pursued in this survey about the new forms of self-publishing (YouTube, MySpace) that the emergence of the web has brought about.

   The class format will be discussion and writing about the readings. Individual papers are frequently enhanced by previous class discussion and the schedule for submitting short papers will reflect this. Additional secondary materials will also be provided to help situate authors in their times. There will also be regular one on one discussions of written work with the instructor.

 

Section 26: Anxious Masculinity
Instructor: Raymond J. Ricketts
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
The chivalrous knight, Clint Eastwood’s stoic Dirty Harry, 9/11 firefighters, laconic cowboys, dandies, Tony Soprano, the tomboy, Malcolm X, Rosie the Riveter—these are only a few of the figures of masculinity that resonate in our cultural memory. Whether actual or mythical, heroic or depraved, how do these representations challenge or affirm a timeless “essence” of masculinity, or reveal the anxiety behind masculine display?

Because we usually define masculinity in relation to femininity, often in starkly polarized ways, this course will explore the means by which social and cultural forces participate in constructing both genders. We’ll examine significant flashpoints in the ongoing cultural construction of masculinity in history, literature, popular culture, politics, psychology, medicine, social science, gender/sexuality studies, and biology. In the end, we may conclude that the only timeless aspect of masculinity is its constant vulnerability to subversion, resistance, and change. Topics will include the connections among masculinity, race, and class; the roots of phenomena such as the sensitive man, the “men’s movement,” and the metrosexual; nature/nurture debates, homoeroticism, queer masculinity and “female masculinity”; and issues of representation in popular culture, including iconic and “normative” masculinity.

Texts will include: Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club; Susan Bordo’s The Male Body; Foucault’s Herculine Barbin, and other works by literary, film, and legal scholars; social scientists, biologists and doctors; philosophers, poets, playwrights, and fiction writers. We’ll also watch films that represent or interrogate the topic. Students will write frequently, have the opportunity to revise their work, and participate in one-on-one meetings as well as group work.

Note: the course will include frank discussions of sex, sexuality, and the body.

Section 27: Anxious Masculinity

Instructor: Raymond J. Ricketts

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:30-4 p.m.

See course description for section 26