Fall 2011 University Writing Seminars

Writing Program > For Students > Fall UWS Courses

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Course Title	Course #	Time	Instructor
Style and Content: The Art of the Essay	UWS 12b	MWR 9-9:50	Dominic Green
Payback: Revenge and Culture	UWS 26a 1	MWR 9-9:50	Kyle Wiggins
Representing Realism and Idealism in American Prose and Film	UWS 23a	MWR 9-9:50	David Razor
Sex and Violence in Shakespeare	UWS 3a	MWR 9-9:50	Avi Mendelson
Protest and Propaganda in Music	UWS 2b	MWR 9-9:50	Peter Van Zandt Lane
Jazz Age Fiction	UWS 4a	MWR 12-12:50	Luigi Juarez
Crisis and the American Musical	UWS 8a	MWR 12-12:50	Georgia Luikens
Television in the Eyes of Film	UWS 5a 1	MWR 12-12:50	Joseph Wensink
Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: Science and the Supernatural	UWS 4b	MWR 12-12:50	Lisa Rourke
Food and Power	UWS 7b	MWR 12-12:50	Sarah Sutton
Music in Television	UWS 7a	MWR 1-1:50	Reba Wissner
Murder Most Foul	UWS 2a	MWR 1-1:50	Vinodini Murugesan
Chaos and Context	UWS 11a	MWR 1-1:50	Jonathan Sudholt
Comedy and Sympathy	UWS 12a	MWR 1-1:50	Steven Plunkett
The Victorian Novella	UWS 10a	MWR 1-1:50	Lauren Ellis Holm
Payback: Revenge and Culture	UWS 26a 2	MWR 1-1:50	Kyle Wiggins
The Solitary Walker: Looking at Nature in the Romantic Era	UWS 13a	TR 5-6:20	Bendta Schroeder
Hip-hop and American Culture	UWS 18a	TR 5-6:20	Conley Wouters
Gender Role Construction in Music	UWS 15b	TR 5-6:20	Elizabeth Perten
Modern Metropolis: The Transformation of Cities at the Turn of the Century	UWS 15a	TR 5-6:20	Allison Lange
Representing Women in 20th-Century America	UWS 16a	TR 5-6:20	Amy Easton-Flake
Shanghai as Past, Present and Future Metropolis	UWS 14a	MW 5-6:20	Steven Pieragastini
The Long Civil Rights Movement	UWS 11b	MW 5-6:20	Winston Bowman
Kafka	UWS 19a	MW 5-6:20	Diana George
"I have a self to recover": Confessional Writing and the Politics of Narrating Selfhood	UWS 20a	MW 5-6:20	James Hood
Television in the Eyes of Film	UWS 5a 2	MW 5-6:20	Joseph Wensink

• See the Brandeis University Bulletin for undergraduate writing requirements
• Further information and frequently asked questions regarding the writing program, including composition, can be found here.

UWS 12b: Style and Content: The Art of the Essay
MWR 9-9:50
Dominic Green

What makes good writing good, and great writing great? Does style (how you say it) affect content (what you say)? This course teaches the secrets of successful writing. Its reading list contains no complex theoretical literature, only short essays by great writers: Montaigne, Bacon, Tolstoy, Huxley, Brookner, Benjamin, Ozick. You'll write three essays: a short technical analysis of Aldous Huxley's "The Charms of History and the Future of the Past"; a comparative reading between two essays (the Second Epilogue to Tolstoy's War and Peace and Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox"); and then a research essay on the topic of your choice.

UWS 26a, sections 1 & 2: Payback: Revenge and Culture
MWR 9-9:50, MWR 1-1:50
Kyle Wiggins

Whether "getting even" or "paying back," avengers in western culture often speak in idioms of debt and credit. What sort of payment does their revenge extract? What does that economic register tell us about the ethical or political value of revenge? This course will examine the various forms that revenge assumes in literature, film, and philosophy. After familiarizing ourselves with classical theories of vengeance (Kant, Bacon, Nietzsche), we'll turn our attention to contemporary narratives of "wild justice." Writing assignments will investigate the historical evolution of revenge and why modern culture teems with stories of retaliation. Course reading includes works by James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, and one or two movies about angry citizens. Confronting these vindictive texts will give students the opportunity to hone analytic, writing, and research skills essential for success at the university.

UWS 23a: Representing Realism and Idealism in American Prose and Film
MWR 9-9:50
David Razor

From the 19^th-century mad doctors and sea captains of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to 20^th-century protagonists such as Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, Cather's Alexandra Bergson, and Orson Welles's Charles Foster Kane, a distinctly American version of a universal question and dilemma will be explored in this course: How do conflicting realistic and idealistic perspectives, approaches to truth, and ways of questioning ones' place within society and the natural world not only pull against one another, but shape one another? Why is this particular conflict so emphasized in American storytelling? Why is it that so much serious American prose and film usually show the idealist madly chasing dreams and phantoms to the point of self-delusion and destruction while the realist must compromise one's standards to prevail, to escape,-- or merely to survive? Going back to Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and Aristotle's "Poetics" to provide background, we focus on pivotal 19^th-century representations of this key American conflict using short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville before moving on to two films of the 20^th-century, Citizen Kane and The Graduate, and the critical analyses surrounding them, to explore how this literary theme has been transposed into film. Finally, we end with a short modern novel, Fight Club.

These works of prose and film will occasion three major writing assignments though which students learn the basics of successful college writing. The course emphasizes writing as a process of thesis creation, essay organization, concrete examples, peer review and rewriting that is much more involved -- and ultimately successful -- than merely turning on the word processor and typing without preparation or process. The first paper focuses on close readings of the short stories; the second analyzes a text, this time a film, based mainly upon outside critical sources; finally a self-directed research paper combines both close reading skills and the application of outside philosophical, critical or historical frameworks to analyze the novel.

UWS 3a: Sex and Violence in Shakespeare
MWR 9-9:50
Avi Mendelson

T.S. Eliot called Titus Andronicus "one of the stupidest and most uninspiring plays ever written." Acts of gratuitous violence - human sacrifice, gang rape, dismemberment, cannibalism - are the stuff of Tragedy in Titus' Rome. And, yet, they are also the stuff of Comedy. Straddling the line between humor and horror, Titus is Shakespeare's vicious harassment of an audience that doesn't know whether to laugh at another's pain, or stew in the self-serving joy of public pity. This class will boldly attempt to reform any potential romantic notions about Shakespeare by focusing on two of his more perverse plays: Measure for Measure and Titus Andronicus. Apart from asking how Shakespeare represents sex and violence in these plays, we will study the aesthetics of "the grotesque body."

As we read about severed pirate heads, venereal disease, and giants battling with dung, this course will foster the development of incisive analysis and sophisticated academic writing. Structured assignments, class discussions, peer group workshops, and conferences will direct us as we explore different writing tasks. We will experiment with a variety of writing activities and assignments including close reading, lens, and a research-based essay.

UWS 2b: Protest and Propaganda in Music
MWR 9-9:50
Peter Van Zandt Lane

Bob Dylan. Dmitri Shostakovich. Tupac Shakur. For centuries, musicians have used their art as a vehicle for social and political demonstration. Musicologists and historians debate at length the complex roles of composers and songwriters and their effect on cultural movements. Why is music such a prevalent form of protest? How have the counterculture and establishment alike exploited musicians and artists for their political ambitions? At what point does music shift from entertainment to polemics? Be it the ‘60s Hippie culture, the anti-communist movement of Czechoslovakia, revisionism in the Third-Reich, South African anti-apartheid music, or the Rock Against Bush punk movement; with deeper inquiry, we find that no artistic faction is as simple as it is often historically portrayed. By analyzing various forms of music as well as the writings of musicologists and critics, we will explore the role of the musician as activist. Through continual writing, revision, group discussion, and student conferences, we will gain a better understanding of how the arts define culture and develop the writing skills crucial for your academic and professional success.

This course is organized into three units with the main purpose of developing academic writing. From classical to country, from rock to hip-hop, subject matter for writing assignments will deal with the music and political statements from various genres and styles. Prior formal musical training or knowledge of music is not a requirement for this course.

UWS 4a: Jazz Age Fiction
MWR 12-12:50
Luigi Juarez

It has been referred to as the "Jazz Age," the "Ballyhoo Years," and the "Roaring Twenties." The 1920s so arrested the post-war American imagination that many were compelled to characterize and describe the riotous sprit of the era. But this age of "excess" was also an age of "art," as F. Scott Fitzgerald later remembered it. Indeed, writers, painters, and now suddenly filmmakers sought to reflect and affect that "excess" through their art, and often, they accomplished both.

For this course, we will look at this kinetic decade through literature, specifically, the American short story. The short story during the 1920s represents a fascinating intersection of production (the increased output of a relatively new literary form) and consumption (the rise of mass-circulation magazines). We will read stories by Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Katherine Anne Porter, and debate what exactly they reveal about the decade. In addition, we will supplement our readings of fiction with non-fiction articles, and also consider that which is not our focus but that is crucial to our overall understanding of the Jazz Age (e.g. the political landscape, the Harlem Renaissance, etc.). Some major questions that will drive our discussions and assignments include: How did literary critics such as Edmund Wilson turn their attention to short stories instead of novels and poetry? What is the relationship between these short fictions and the growth of literacy in 1920s America? And finally, how did depictions of the youth in these stories capture and influence the growing rift between an older and younger generation post-World War I?

More importantly, we will respond to all our readings by writing about them. As this is a University Writing Seminar (UWS), the ability to display your critical and analytical skills not only in reading but also in writing is paramount in this course, and will contribute to your future success here at Brandeis.

UWS 8a: Crisis and the American Musical
MWR 12-12:50
Georgia Luikens

Since the advent of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein's 1957 musical West Side Story, the themes and plots of the American Musical have diverged from traditional love stories to in depth analyses of the human condition. This class will study four musicals which explore a level of crisis: Company depicts an individual in crisis, Next to Normal a family, Rent a community, and West Side Story a society.

Through a close study of production history, characterizations, lyrics, music, movement, plot and script, this class will investigate the portrayal of ‘crisis' in the modern American musical. This will also be achieved through a combination of close readings of critical, academic, and other artistic responses to the works studied, as well as by listening to relevant soundtracks and viewing production videos. Throughout this class, students will be required to develop thoughtful, well written responses in clear academic English. Over the course of the semester, researching, writing, and editing skills essential to the Brandeis undergraduate curriculum will be covered. Students do not need any prior drama or musical training; however, an interest in music and/or musical theatre is encouraged.

UWS 5a, sections 1 & 2: Television in the Eyes of Film
MWR 12-12:50, MWR 1-1:50
Joseph Wensink

From Hollywood blockbusters to arthouse cinema, film consistently portrays television badly: mindless entertainment at best, at its worst television in film represents insidious, even murderous corporate and political mind-control. Is television really that bad? Or, if we grant that these critiques might contain some valuable insights, is film really that different? This course will examine several classic and contemporary films obsesively concerned with television, television production, and television's vexed relationship to film. An important axiom of the course is that critique never comes from an entirely objective standpoint. Film, after all, is the original audio-visual mass medium, and so its critique of television unavoidably reflects on the very film in which this critique appears. We explore this curious self-reflecting dynamic through three major writing projects: a close reading assignment in which we learn the language of film production and practice techniques of visual analysis, a lens essay applying the insights of media theory to our analysis of film, and a research paper situating a particular film within its larger critical/historical context. Tentative film screenings include A Face in the Crowd, Network, Videodrome, Tootsie, Bamboozled, and Hot Fuzz.

UWS 4b: Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: Science and the Supernatural
MWR 12-12:50
Lisa Rourke

What is it about the supernatural that makes us willingly suspend our disbelief in order to go along for the ride? Why are we drawn again and again to that which gives us nightmares? Can science really account for all phenomena? In this class we will seek to answer these questions by looking at the formal qualities of the supernatural in texts including Henry James' Turn of the Screw, Coleridge poems, and Edgar Allen Poe's short stories. In addition, we will join in the scholarly debates between scientists and those who believe that the natural world cannot account for everything.

This course will also foster the development of incisive analysis and sophisticated academic writing as a way to explore the phenomenon of the supernatural. Structured assignments, class discussions, peer group workshops, and conferences will direct us as we explore different writing tasks. We will experiment with a variety of writing activities and assignments including close reading, lens, and a research-based essay that can be done on a film, text, or work of art. In addition, we will supplement our fictional texts with a range of theoretical readings by thinkers including Michel Foucault. Our goal will be to produce about 25 pages of strong academic writing in which we expand and develop our analytical and technical skills.

UWS 7b: Food and Power
MWR 12-12:50
Sarah Sutton

Our oranges come from California, our bananas from Central America, our apples from New Zealand. Over the course of the last century, food traveled increasingly longer distances to get from farm to table. In this class, we will explore the social, moral and ecological implications of American mass consumption, playing close attention to the power relationships that developed over the past century to support the modern industrial food system. As a writing seminar, this course will be structured around three major writing assignments. We will begin the semester by critically analyzing early twentieth century food advertisements in order to learn how farmers and advertising agents transformed agricultural products into commodities of mass consumption. Next, we will explore the impact of industrialized agriculture on farm workers and the environment. Finally, in a research paper, students will examine an aspect of the journey from farm to table of an agricultural commodity of their choosing. Course assignments and activities are designed to help students learn to think critically about history and gain the essential research and writing skills necessary to turn their ideas into successful academic essays.

UWS 7a: Music in Television
MWR 1-1:50
Reba Wissner

Television is a visual medium that has been the primary form of American entertainment for years. But while viewers often pay close attention to the dialogue, music, the role of the other aural component of the medium, is frequently over looked. As a result, several questions should be asked. How closely related is music to the images that appear on television? How and why are various plot devices expressed through music? Can music depict a different event or underlying meaning than the images and dialogue depict? This course will explore these questions by examining the role of music in television. This course is designed to prepare you to engage critically and creatively with difficult and unfamiliar texts in order to think critically and construct effective and cohesive arguments. Through frequent writing assignments and revisions you will develop the necessary writing skills that will serve you in college and in your future careers.

UWS 2a: Murder Most Foul
MWR 1-1:50
Vinodini Murugesan

As the story of Cain and Abel in the Book of Genesis demonstrates, the taking of a human life by another human being is considered a terrible crime, and subject to severe punishment. What, however, defines a murderer? In common law jurisdictions, murder is both the act of killing a person, as well as the state of mind that makes it a purposeful act. It is usually supposed that both these actions exist in the person of the murderer. However, what if the hand that strikes the killing blow is not the psyche that conceives of the crime? The concept of the instigator of malevolence figures significantly in classical and modern literature; Shakespeare's famous villain Iago in Othello could be argued to be the perfect murderer because he instigates murder in the mind of another without bloodying his hands by committing the deed itself.

In this Writing Seminar, you will be reading Shakespeare's Othello in order to compare Iago's role with Othello's in bringing about the murder of Desdemona. In interrogating the moral, social and often ironic elements of murder, we will be aided by Foucault's groundbreaking idea of social surveillance and behavior in "Panopticism" as we consider the key characters in Hitchcock's Rope in the context of the instigation of murder, murder as an art form and the role of the school as a social institution. We will also read selectively among Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Speckled Band," Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and Curtain: Poirot's Last Case and set these texts against well-known treatises on murder to analyze different ways in which murder can be both committed and interpreted by society. Through active engagement with these materials, this course will undertake to develop the writing skills you will need while you are pursuing an undergraduate degree. Each stage of the writing process will be consistently worked on and improved from the pre-draft stage to the point at which you will produce polished pieces of academic writing.

UWS 11a: Chaos and Context
MWR 1-1:50
Jonathan Sudholt

How many hours have you wasted watching video after video on YouTube? Do you find yourself wishing you could turn off your phone, your computer, your television, and focus for a while on... something? Sometimes there is too much context. Cause and effect gets lost in an overdetermined world, making even sifting through the morass of influence a hopeless, if not immoral project. This course will explore the options available in a world with too much information and the ways in which this chaos shapes our interpersonal relationships, giving particular weight to the possibilities of kindness. Our guides in this effort will include Robert Browning, Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace, and the Coen Brothers (among others). During the first part of the semester, we will focus on close reading, and you will write a paper analyzing one of three short Browning poems, paying close attention to the interaction between action in the present and interpretation of the past. The lens essay will be your next major assignment, for which you will use Wallace's ideas about irony and the critic's responsibility toward a text to interpret Joel and Ethan Coen's film, No Country For Old Men. For the third and final block of the term you will write a research paper that explores the ways in which narrative structure –– that is, the accretion of information, artfully organized –– both serves and undermines the goal of understanding a life.

The essay assignments for this course are designed to teach you the skills necessary for success at Brandeis. You will learn to engage critically with texts, organize and develop your thoughts, and integrate outside sources to improve your arguments. Peer reviews, individual conferences, class discussion, and revisions will help you refine the style, grammatical form, organization, and overall quality of your analytical writing.

UWS 12a: Comedy and Sympathy
MWR 1-1:50
Steven Plunkett

What does it mean to find something funny? When we laugh, must we laugh at something or someone? Why do I sometimes feel such keen discomfort when watching reruns of I Love Lucy or The Office? Such notorious killjoys as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and Immanuel Kant have given their attention to humor, and their evaluations haven't always been positive. Some claim that laughter must necessarily be an expression of contempt for another, that enjoyment of comedy encourages coarseness of feeling and deadens our sympathy for others. These thinkers say that comedy transforms our neighbors' pain and humiliation into entertainment. Certainly, racist or sexist humor seems to operate on this principle, and as the saying goes –– most often attributed to Mel Brooks –– "Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall down an open manhole and die." However, there are also those who claim that laughter encourages human sympathy and community. Comedy, they claim, can both unite us in common understanding and help us get outside of our petty jealousies and prejudices by giving us a new perspective on the world. Humor, it turns out, may make us more able to care about each other and to understand our world. It may even be one of the more valuable forms of intellectual inquiry available to curious and sympathetic thinkers.

This course sets out to investigate the relationship between our capacity to enjoy comedy and our ability to appreciate the experiences of others, and seeks to provide interested students the opportunity to sharpen their academic skills and to deepen their analytic habits of mind. We will examine the real and supposed tensions between comedy and sympathy by carefully considering key ideas from a variety of disciplines and by closely examining examples of humor from literature, the visual arts, and performances in television or film. The question of what we find funny and how we ought to regard that feeling offers ample opportunity to rigorously investigate examples of humor, to engage critically the often contentious scholarship that considers that question, and to produce original research suggesting some kind of answer to it over the course of three substantive essay assignments. Students will leave the course with experience in applying essential strategies for framing and working through analytic questions in writing, amply prepared to begin with confidence their scholastic careers at Brandeis.

UWS 10a: The Victorian Novella
MWR 1-1:50
Lauren Ellis Holm

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is primarily defined by what it is not. Through reading and writing about novellas by authors like Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson, we will develop a clearer definition of what the novella is. More importantly, students will be introduced to the art of the college essay. A range of writing activities will teach students to read critically, craft complex arguments, evaluate and engage with scholarly sources, and articulate their ideas in graceful prose.

UWS 13a: The Solitary Walker: Looking at Nature in the Romantic Era
TR 5-6:20
Bendta Schroeder

In one of his last published works, The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau, French philosophe, memoirist, and novelist recounts his long, lonely walks through the countryside and his new-found enthusiasm for the late eighteenth century fad for botany. He tells us of the "magnificent spectacles" of wood, mountain, and meadow that his botanizing allows him to take in, but also that every time he sees a particular species of flower seen on his walks, he can exactly recall the "peace and repose" enjoyed among them and his "youth and harmless pleasures," even when "plunged by Fate into the most melancholy situation that ever mortal experienced." Rousseau's mixture of nature aesthetics, science, memory, and feeling is by no means unusual for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; in fact, Rousseau ushered in a whole new way of walking in nature and thinking about the self for Romantic era thinkers and artists. Rousseau's solitary walking casts a long shadow on how we think about nature and ourselves –– how we respond to natural beauty and which versions of nature we think are beautiful, how we use science and art as a lens for looking at nature, how we think about the relationship between nature and ourselves, and which kinds of "selves" we think are natural and valuable.

Over the course of three units, we will interrogate how men and women in the Romantic era used nature to construct ideas of the self in (and apart from) society across a range of genres. We will visit major Romantic poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth, some of the lesser known but influential writers such as Erasmus Darwin (Charles's grandfather), Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith, and some of the major painters and illustrators of the day.

In the close reading essay, you will analyze poems and paintings evoking the sublime and the beautiful in order to interrogate the dynamics of individualism, power, and gender that underpin two of the most important ways of looking at nature in that period. In the lens essay, you will investigate how the rise of picturesque discourses reflected the rise of the middle class and shift toward industrialism, and how these changes influenced what kinds of nature and natural selves were valued. In the final unit, we will explore how new discoveries in science shifted how nature was represented in visual arts and literature, and you will be asked to choose a facet of how art, literature, and science influences how we perceive ourselves through nature. However, the topic of this class will serve as a springboard for our primary goal: sharpening the reading, writing, and analytical skills necessary to succeed at university-level writing. Through structured assignments, class discussions, peer group workshop, and one-on-one conferences, we will learn and practice the elements of the academic essay and methods of research.

UWS 18a: Hip-hop and American Culture
TR 5-6:20
Conley Wouters

There's a paradox at the heart of hip-hop's unequaled pop music-ascension over the last thirty years: how did a such self-referential genre, one that often defines itself against mainstream culture, come to be one of the most visible, dominant, and widespread forms of popular music? Hip-hop and rap music depend largely on recursive references to themselves and to their musical precursors, and sample-heavy tracks are only a small part of this persistent self-consciousness. Borrowed lyrics, recycled hooks, and constant reconfigurations of featured artists all contribute to the ostensibly closed loop that is contemporary hip-hop.

This course will examine hip-hop by analyzing classic albums including The Blueprint by Jay-Z, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and Mos Def's Black on Both Sides, as well contemporary records that aim to deconstruct the very traditions they claim to want to advance, like Sit Down, Man by Das Racist or Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. We'll try to understand how hip-hop evolved from a geographically and structurally specific subculture and musical genre to one of the predominant producers of mainstream American culture. In addition to close readings of songs and lyrics, we'll look at critical and theoretical readings on both hip-hop and African-American culture by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello, and bell hooks to help us grapple with some of the music's persistent thematic and formal concerns. This is a university writing seminar, so students will learn how to draft, revise, and edit both their own essays and those of their peers. Ultimately, the goal of the class is to equip students with the analytical and mechanical skills that are necessary to excel in university writing.

UWS 15b: Gender Role Construction in Music
TR 5-6:20
Elizabeth Perten

Does the "sex sells" mentality apply to Classical music? Are there benefits to being an androgynous pop music artist? Is "masculinity" in jazz the same as in country? The increasing recognition of individual means of gender expression in popular culture has had noticeable effects on the music world. This growing sensitivity has opened doors to artists of all sexual orientations and genders, yet has simultaneously helped to limit gender acceptance through the public's tendency to judge artists using these same criteria. This course will explore gender role construction in popular, Classical, jazz and country music. In addition to analyzing Madonna's "Open Your Heart" music video and discussing the masculinity of both male and female artists, we will compare the portrayals of Classical, popular, jazz and country artists in the media, on album covers and in performance. With Judith Butler's original essay introducing the performative aspect of gender as one of our foundational texts, we will critically approach these issues among others to gain further understanding into gender construction in music and its subsequent effect on American culture. Through readings, class discussions, listening and writing assignments, students will develop their analytic skills, learn how to critically approach texts in a variety of mediums, and discover their own voice as a writer. This course will provide the tools necessary to composing successful academic essays, providing a strong foundation for future studies at Brandeis.

UWS 15a: Modern Metropolis: The Transformation of Cities at the Turn of the Century
TR 5-6:20
Allison Lange

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and through the early twentieth century, cities across the world experienced dramatic transformations as they became centers of industry, culture, and politics. What made urbanization possible? What were the accomplishments of cities? What were some of the problems? Although cities were entering a new, modern era, not everything about them about them was positive. Urban areas featured the most lavish Vanderbilt mansions and the most dirty, overcrowded tenements-often inhabited by immigrants-that could double as sweatshops. Cities were centers of cutting edge social and political reforms as well as of race, gender, and class oppression.

Modern Metropolis will use New York and Chicago as subjects of inquiry. For the close reading assignment, you will examine the Chicago Vice Commission Report and consider the social and cultural themes the report addresses. The lens essay assignment asks you to analyze photographs of New York by Jacob Riis and to consider photography as a tool for social change through the ideas of theorist Bruno Latour. For your research paper, you will have the opportunity to research an aspect of turn-of-the-century urban life in depth and consider the historical trends at work. In addition to working with these primary sources, we will also read secondary sources in order to gain insights into these centers of commerce and culture, such as selections from George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 and Mary Ting Yi Lui's The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters. This university writing course will teach you how to critically analyze historical sources and use them as evidence to support your arguments. You will also gain the essential writing skills to create refined, structured essays for your other coursework at Brandeis and your post-graduation plans.

UWS 16a: Representing Women in Twentieth-Century America
TR 5-6:20
Amy Easton-Flake

How do images of the suffragist, the flapper, Rosie the Riveter, or June Cleaver affect society today? This course will focus on representations of women in literature, media, and society during the first half of the Twentieth Century and the implications of these images for women today. We begin by looking at the "new woman" at the turn-of-the-century, women's struggle for the vote, and how the popular press portrayed these types and issues. In unit two, we will use the ideas of Laura Mulvey to investigate how classic Hollywood cinema reflected, constructed, and questioned the dominant image and understanding of American women in the 1950s. The class culminates in a research paper that allows you to explore how a facet of culture today normalizes individuals into gender identities. Using depictions of and arguments about the "new woman" found in literature, film, political tracts, and advertisements, we will learn to look analytically at texts and break down each author's argument. The essay assignments for this course are designed to teach you the skills necessary for your success at Brandeis. You will learn to engage critically with texts, organize and develop your thoughts, and integrate outside sources to express your arguments better. Peer reviews, individual conferences, class discussion, and revisions will help you refine the style, grammatical form, organization, and overall quality of your analytical writing.

UWS 14a: Shanghai as Past, Present, and Future Metropolis
MW 5-6:20
Steven Pieragastini

Shanghai: "the Paris of the East," "the New New York," "the City of the Future!" Why is it that this city evokes such hyperbolic statements? What distinguishes it from other megacities around the globe? How, despite dramatic social, political, and economic upheavals, is Shanghai's unique history guiding its present and future path?

This course will focus on the rich cultural production (literature, film, visual arts, and material culture) of Shanghai, both in the past and present, in order to explore the representation of gender and sexuality, the complex adaptation of global influences, and the role of class.

This course will begin by critically analyzing, or "close reading," a 1934 English-language travel guide, All About Shanghai and Environs. In unit two, we will use Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony and Baudrillard's views on consumption and exchange as lenses on the consumer revolution in Shanghai in the past 30 years. Finally, students will be asked to develop a research project that addresses interests relevant to this course.

Using the context of Shanghai's modern history as a vehicle to teach the elements of academic writing, this course will foster the development of incisive analysis, well researched arguments, and sophisticated writing. Structured assignments, class discussions, peer group workshops, and conferences will direct us as we explore different writing tasks and consider a wide array of texts.

UWS 11b: The Long Civil Rights Movement
MW 5-6:20
Winston Bowman

Few periods in American history have attracted so much popular and scholarly attention as the "classical" phase of the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968). Images of Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at the Lincoln Memorial and little Linda Brown celebrating her victory in the school desegregation case that bears her name have become shorthand for an inspiring narrative of triumph in the face of intolerance. Yet this narrative reveals only part of a longer, harder, and more complex movement for racial equality.

This University Writing Seminar explores that movement through a series of reading and writing assignments designed to enhance students' writing and critical thinking skills. To this end, students will engage in a close textual analysis of an early Supreme Court opinion dealing with civil rights issues, examine King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" using the theoretical framework established in James Scott's Weapons of the Weak, and write a detailed research paper developing an original argument about the "end" of the Civil Rights Movement.

UWS 19a: Kafka
MW 5-6:20
Diana George

Franz Kafka was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. In his short life, he produced a remarkable body of work: stories and novels and sketches and parables of astonishing inventiveness and sere, elliptical irony. We may think we know the meaning of the word "Kafka-esque" –– a bleak, despairing, blackly humorous existentialism –– and so the label is easy to apply. But Kafka's work itself seems strangely unanticipated and inimitable; he appears to have had neither precursors nor inheritors. Kafka's work seems to have come from nowhere and to have left behind itself no Kafkan "school" or style.

The legacy of Kafka's actual papers is equally puzzling. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts. Brod disobeyed. Among the writings Brod saved for posterity were Kafka's novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika. A further cache of unpublished Kafka papers survived Brod's death and World War II and the murder and dispossession of European Jews. Those papers are now the object of a legal dispute: their current owners would like to sell the papers to the highest bidder (possibly the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany), while the state of Israel would like to preserve them in its National Library.

In this UWS course, we will read Kafka's stories and one of his novels, together with some of Kafka's interpreters (Deleuze and Guatarri, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida). We'll also read a few writers who seem to work territories similar to Kafka's: Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Leonard Michaels. We'll try to find out what literary genius is: where does it come from? To whom or what do works of a genius belong: to a language, a national literature, a people? What is the relationship between an author and his works? (Must we burn Kafka's writing, if he asks us to?) Throughout the course, students will complete frequent written exercises and three major essays, with the aim of acquiring and practicing the techniques of academic writing.

UWS 20a: "I have a self to recover": Confessional Writing and the Politics of Narrating Selfhood
MW 5-6:20
James Hood

Women's "confessional" writing, a subgenre emblematized by such ‘tragic' figures as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, has come to inhabit a peculiar, often scorned, location in literary history. Plath's Bell Jar, for example, now operates as iconographic shorthand for the figure of the troubled teen girl: look no further than Lisa Simpson's bookshelf or Julia Stiles's melancholic reading in 10 Things I Hate About You. The superficial notion that ‘confessional' writing (when it comes to the woman writer) signifies a kind of ‘bleeding upon the page,' however, conceals broader cultural anxieties concerning the position and significance of the woman writer, the fear of the unstable or incoherent self, perhaps even a terror of the "portrait of the reader as a young girl." What might it mean, however, to unhinge distinctions between truth and fiction by revealing the precariousness of boundaries between autobiographical and ‘literary' writing? What if, indeed, the very enactment of the so-called ‘confession' of the self in writing signals a destabilization of that idea of ‘self'?

This course begins with close readings of the poetry, journals, and letters of confessional women poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, considering the ways in which each narrative context enables different constructions of identity. Next, we will interrogate these formulations of selfhood through seminal works of criticism dealing with questions of gender and the writer, sex and the body, sexuality and desire. Finally, we will research the historical conditions under which confessional poetry as a subgenre emerged, particularly with regard to the shadow of the Cold War, technologies of mass annihilation, and the rise of feminist politics.

In addition to the poetry, short stories, letters and journals of Plath and Sexton, we will examine selections from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Judith Butler's seminal essay "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," literary criticism by Janet Badia, Sandra Gilbert, and Jo Gill, as well as selected poems by Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, and others. This is, one should keep in mind, a writing course, and as such will explore different strategies for excelling in academic writing at Brandeis, including methods of close reading, theoretical interpretation, and secondary research.


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