For Students

Fall 2009 University Writing Seminars

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• 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 1a: Medicine in Literature
MWR 9-10
Aaron Wirth
In recent decades, Narrative medicine has gradually gained significance as an interdisciplinary approach to issues of health, illness, medical science, violence, and the body.  In this course, we will explore how the interfaces between literature and medical knowledge can strengthen and support both the doctor-physician relationship and a physician’s instincts overall. This course will examine medical literature from a sociological dimension.  

We will look at medicine through the lenses of Social Darwinism, Immigrant culture clash, and Feminism.  Can a story which is usually read as Victorian feminism be analyzed as a detailed account of a woman’s descent into postpartum depression?   How do ideas of society and community, human nature and identity, play in the classic The Island of Dr. Moreau? How can you better understand the significance of culture clash by analyzing a refugee family from Laos' tragic interaction with a small county hospital in California?  Through different readings you will discuss these questions and others similar.  You will learn to write creatively and analytically about medical literature and society and develop writing skills that will help you during your time at Brandeis University.  Keep in mind that this class will not require any prior knowledge of medicine.

UWS 2a: Murder Most Foul
MWR 9-10
Vino 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 3a: Understanding Violence in the Contemporary State
MWR 9-10
Ieva Jusionyte
What do drug trafficking and police brutality in a Brazilian favela, the Dirty War in Argentina, South Africa’s apartheid regime, and the prison system in the U.S. tell us about the role of violence in the contemporary state? How have urban segregation and such techniques as surveillance and torture become normalized in governing societies? In general, how can we understand the complex interdependence between state and violence in everyday life?

While questioning the nature of the state and its relation to different forms of violence, seen as a continuum from direct physical assault to routinized practices of oppression, this seminar will foster the development of critical analysis and good academic writing. We will read Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, memoirs by Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, as well as discuss book excerpts, newspaper stories, ethnographic film, and song lyrics to explore how the state is related to violence both at home and abroad. In the final research paper you will investigate an event or a process of your own choice, analyzing the relationship between state and violence as one of its tools of power.

UWS 4a: Style and Content: The Art of the Essay
MWR 9-10
Dominic Green
What makes good writing good, and great writing great? Does style (how you say it) affect content (what you say)? Students have to write endless essays. 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. We’ll read them closely, work out the tricks and techniques that make good writing great, and then incorporate our findings into your writing. Many of these essays will appear elsewhere on your reading lists too, so reading them now will save time later. But studying them as a writer will help your writing and speaking at Brandeis and beyond, because successful people are articulate people. 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 a topic of your choice.

UWS 5a: Gender and the Body in Society
MWR 9-10
Miranda Waggoner
We typically think of the human body as a fixed biological reality, however, the body also constructs and is constructed by profound social and cultural forces. The body intersects with: the practice of medicine, through screening techniques and biomedical interventions; body modification, including cosmetic surgery and weight management; and, state policies regarding reproduction and sexual behavior. In this course, we develop an analytical understanding of the body and its cultural meanings, and we interrogate body practices in terms of discourses of gender and power. We begin by examining the medicalization of pregnancy, through which the maternal body becomes specifically subject to medical testing and monitoring. Then, we use Michel Foucault’s theory of “biopower” – how modern states deploy latent power over individual bodies – as a lens through which to analyze the contemporary culture of fitness and nutrition. In the second half of the course, students will conduct a research project on the social and cultural significance of a body-related practice of choice. Potential topics include scarification, aesthetic surgery, organ trafficking, circumcision, sperm and egg donation, anorexia, or sexual enhancement. Finally, we will also explore contemporary popular media representations of the body and what they reveal about hegemonic body and gender ideals.

UWS 6a: Modernism Through Music
MWR 9-10
Nathaniel Eschler
In the twentieth century, music along with literature, art, and poetry continued a march along an evolutionary path that coincided directly with disciplines of the sciences and thought that affected, and were affected by the everyday life of people the world over. Impressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Neo-classicism, for example, are just a few of the trends that coalesced to form the artistic timbre of the twenty-first century. In this course, students will be encouraged to examine any one of the twentieth-century artistic movement they choose through music, comparing it to any one of its artistic counterparts such as painting. In the process, students will seek to answer two questions: 1. How are the characteristics of the given trend chosen by the student manifested in music and its counterpart and 2. What characteristics does the trend in question have that differ between music and its counterpart. In this course, students will learn to think and write analytically and creatively about modernism and music, and will develop writing skills that will prepare them for a successful future as a writer at Brandeis. This class does require some prior knowledge of music or another artistic discipline.

UWS 7a1: Defining Satire
TR 3-4
Steven Plunkett
There are those who say that we are living in a golden age of satire. A survey of the local paper or the evening news certainly seems to reveal a world that is rife with satiric possibility, and if the widespread popularity of entertainment fare like The Daily Show is any indication, it seems as though audiences are hungry for it. These commentators point to the multiplicity of satiric forms that have emerged with the new century and the ease with which they find new targets and audiences. However, others claim that modern public discourse has become too arch and ironized for the satirist’s tools to have any real effect, and that productions like The Daily Show and The Onion are themselves symptoms of this trend. They claim that satire’s classic mission of moral correction has in fact fallen away, replaced by petty partisanism or total misanthropy. How did we ever reach this peculiar historical moment? How do contemporary forms like The Colbert Report really compare to the classic models of Pope and Swift? How do we go about defining a mode of expression that has adapted itself to nearly every available form, from the classical epic to the news broadcast, and that has attracted the talents of writers as different from one another as Dorothy Parker, George Saunders, Ambrose Bierce, and Langston Hughes? What is satire? Can we ever find a definition that can account for all of it?

This course offers the opportunity to investigate the mode of expression we call satire through a variety of readings in multiple media that stretch from satire’s modern reinvention in the early Eighteenth Century to the present day. Students will investigate a number of different theories of satire that attempt to define the genre in various ways. The rhetoric of satire and the never-ending quest to define it offers engaged scholars a good opportunity to sharpen and apply their own skills of argumentation and analysis, and that is precisely what students in this course will do as they read closely, apply theories of satire, and engage in original research over the course of three substantial essay assignments. The semester culminates in the opportunity for students to produce a well-researched satire of their own. Students should leave the course with an understanding of the nature and conventions of academic writing and prepared to begin their scholastic careers at Brandeis.

UWS 7a2: Defining Satire
TR 4-5
Steven Plunkett
There are those who say that we are living in a golden age of satire. A survey of the local paper or the evening news certainly seems to reveal a world that is rife with satiric possibility, and if the widespread popularity of entertainment fare like The Daily Show is any indication, it seems as though audiences are hungry for it. These commentators point to the multiplicity of satiric forms that have emerged with the new century and the ease with which they find new targets and audiences. However, others claim that modern public discourse has become too arch and ironized for the satirist’s tools to have any real effect, and that productions like The Daily Show and The Onion are themselves symptoms of this trend. They claim that satire’s classic mission of moral correction has in fact fallen away, replaced by petty partisanism or total misanthropy. How did we ever reach this peculiar historical moment? How do contemporary forms like The Colbert Report really compare to the classic models of Pope and Swift? How do we go about defining a mode of expression that has adapted itself to nearly every available form, from the classical epic to the news broadcast, and that has attracted the talents of writers as different from one another as Dorothy Parker, George Saunders, Ambrose Bierce, and Langston Hughes? What is satire? Can we ever find a definition that can account for all of it?

This course offers the opportunity to investigate the mode of expression we call satire through a variety of readings in multiple media that stretch from satire’s modern reinvention in the early Eighteenth Century to the present day. Students will investigate a number of different theories of satire that attempt to define the genre in various ways. The rhetoric of satire and the never-ending quest to define it offers engaged scholars a good opportunity to sharpen and apply their own skills of argumentation and analysis, and that is precisely what students in this course will do as they read closely, apply theories of satire, and engage in original research over the course of three substantial essay assignments. The semester culminates in the opportunity for students to produce a well-researched satire of their own. Students should leave the course with an understanding of the nature and conventions of academic writing and prepared to begin their scholastic careers at Brandeis.

UWS 8a: Music and Noise
TR 3-4
Jeremy Spindler
What is music? For that matter, what is noise? Do these terms, music and noise, have an objective definition? To some music exists only in Heavy Metal, Easy Listening, or Classical, while to others music exists solely in nature, devoid of any human production whatsoever. Still, others consider everything music: silence, the sounds of a construction site, the squeaking of a rubber duck. During the twentieth-century several artists forced people to think deeper about what defines music by introducing non-conventional instruments, highly complex structures, multitudes of unresolved dissonances, and new artistic concepts into their art. On a somewhat different note, some claim the music industry has turned music less into an art and more into a product, a commodity devoid of artistic meaning. Since these radical shifts in artistic thinking and the industrialization of music the phrase "one person's music is another person's noise" has evolved into a far more complex statement with significantly more interpretations than in previous centuries.

Through critical reading, writing, and peer review we will take a look at artists whose work straddles the line between art, music, and noise. Our writing will primarily concern the issues of music as torture, "Anti-Art", and the saturation of our environment with sound and music. The goal of this course will be to elevate your academic writing skills, learn to develop an argument, and become a more effective communicator with the written word. No prior study of music is required.

UWS 9a: Native American Voices
TR 3-4
Joshua Cracraft

The Trail of Tears, Little Big Horn, and Wounded Knee are all familiar events in American Indian history, and to this day the history of the West is remembered as the triumph of white civilization over the Native Americans. But is this the whole story? What role did Indians play in the history of the United States? Is Native American history purely a story of conquest? Did Indians have no say over the course of their own destinies? In this writing seminar we examine the history of the mid-to-late nineteenth century West through the eyes of Native Americans, asking how Indian peoples understood and dealt with the transforming world around them. We begin by investigating Indians’ encounters with white settlers in the mid 1800s through a variety of primary sources, including letters, journals, court cases, sketches, and photographs. Next, we study the theories of Frederick Jackson Turner, Patricia Limerick, and Richard White so that students may reassess a key work of nineteenth century American Indian autobiography of their choosing. Students then select and research a particular episode in the nineteenth century West and examine the ways in which Indian peoples both influenced and were influenced by the course of events. Finally, students will review a classic western film, such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, Hondo, or Dances with Wolves, on the basis of its portrayal of Native Americans.

UWS 10a: Staging Madness
TR 3-4
Cory Nelson
Why are playwrights so fascinated with fractured minds, with breaks in reality, with scenes of madness? What is the inherent theatricality of madness, as well as the madness of theatricality? From Medea to Hamlet to Blanche DuBois, the madman and madwoman have been recurrent dramatic archetypes, figures that both critique social conventions and complicate the notion of a stable, unified self. In this writing seminar, we will examine theatrical representations of insanity, focusing on major works by modern dramatists. The texts we examine will include Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Peter Shaffer's Equus, and David Auburn's Proof. We will discuss the manner in which madness is linked to creativity, sexuality, and the desire for transcendence. Guiding our exploration will be excerpts from critical theory. We will also write about everything that we read, developing three polished essays as we work through the elements of academic writing. By the end of the semester, each student will have produced a close reading essay, a "lens" essay - which uses one text to interpret another - and a research paper.

UWS 11a: Shakespeare and the Samurai
TR 3-4
Jodie Austin
Although adaptations of Shakespeare continually surprise us with the play's adaptability to the silver screen, what is most fascinating is the means in which non-English cultures have been drawn to the project of adapting his tragedies into film.
In the case of Kurosawa's films Ran and Throne of Blood, the "new" setting takes place in feudal Japan. Replacing broadswords with katanas is one thing; more significantly, Kurosawa replaces Shakespeare's dialogue as well, prompting the question: is this a form of adaptation? Or translation?
This course will pair one or two well-known plays by Shakespeare with two well-known films by Akira Kurosawa— including but not limited to Ran and Throne of Blood (both of which were adapted from Shakespeare's King Lear and Macbeth, respectively). Using aspects of film theory we will analyze these pieces in terms of style, cinematography, and performance, pursuing questions of how Kurosawa adapts and/or transforms Early Modern concepts of honor, allegiance, and courtly behavior. Overall, our discussions will revolve around whether or not tragedy is communicated through images, action, or speech, and whether or not any of these are preserved in the mobilization of text to the screen.

UWS 12a: The Hamlet Complex
TR 3-4
Martin Moraw
“Who’s there?” Shakespeare’s most debated play begins with a simple question, one sentry’s call to another to reveal his identity. Turned on the central character and the tragedy as a whole, it has generated a flood of responses that shows no signs of abating. In this University Writing Seminar, we will conduct an intense, semester-long reading of Hamlet, and we will explore a wide variety of related materials, ranging from historical sources and critical commentary on the play to modern reactions to it. The goal of this seminar is to arrive at a better understanding of Hamlet as a text that is simultaneously determined by the historical moment out of which it arose, and that has, time and again, prompted audiences and readers to find reflections of themselves in it. This course is an inquiry-based writing seminar. As such, it has the twofold aim of encouraging students to think critically about literary and cultural texts, and of rehearsing the expression of these thoughts in writing. Over the course of the semester, students will complete a sequence of exercises and assignments designed to help them acquire the skills needed to navigate the challenges of academic writing successfully.

UWS 14a: The Invasion of America: Interpreting New World Encounters
TR 4-5
Jonathan DeCoster
The encounter between Europeans and indigenous people in the Americas is arguably the most significant historical event of the past millennium. It sparked not only American colonization, but also ignited the explosive growth of African slavery, European imperialism, and global capitalism. But as important as this phenomenon is, its dynamics are still not fully understood. Various paradigms have been suggested to explain this encounter: contact, conquest, colonization, adaptation, and resistance. Each of these models reflects a particular moral and political point of view, but no singular experience captures the diverse and pluralistic experience of New World encounters.

In this course, students will read the writings of Spanish conquistadores, Aztec nobles, and French missionaries, comparing the interpretations of encounters across a range of space, time, and cultures. Then students will conduct their own firsthand research into early encounters in the Boston area, learning how a broader understanding of the process of encounter changes their perspective. In the process, they will acquire some key tools of critical analysis, useful both within the discipline of history and beyond, including: reading against biased sources, recovering the perspective of those without a documentary voice, and writing a persuasive argument based on original texts.

UWS 15a: Friendship, Justice, and Politics
TR 4-5
Timothy McCarty
According to Aristotle, "If people are friends, they have no need of justice." Yet, we are all familiar with stories of loyalty, love, and friendship getting in the way of the pursuit of justice, whether it is the code of honor among thieves, helping a friend evade the law, or refusing to testify against a loved one. What is a little injustice among friends? Are friends beyond justice? Does friendship impede the pursuit of justice? Is friendship itself a higher form of justice? In other words: can it be unjust to be a good friend?

This course explores the tensions between friendship and justice in the great works of moral or political philosophy and literature. The course begins with a study of how philosophers such as Aristotle, Montaigne, and Nietzsche treated the problems of friendship and justice. Next, we will investigate how these philosophic concepts play out in literature, specifically the work of Graham Greene. Finally, we will confront the ways that the potential tensions between justice and friendship play out in politics. Students will explore these themes while developing essential writing skills through careful engagement with texts, exercises in style and form, analytical essays, and a self-directed research project.

UWS 16a: Myth of the Modern
TR 4-5
Adam Rutledge
What does it mean to be modern? Why, at the turn of the twentieth century, did authors begin producing works that were radical in form, yet whose content was often organized by ancient myths or religious systems? Does “high modernism” define the peak of modernity, or does it include an implicit critique of modern culture and intellectual life? And to what extent do these concerns still govern debates today, in our “post”-modern society. To explore these ideas, this course will pair theoretical texts by authors such as Nietzsche, Benjamin, Eliot, and Kierkegaard, with the writings of the poets W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, the novelists James Joyce and Djuna Barnes, and the playwrights Henrick Ibsen and Samuel Beckett. Students will write three papers relating the theories they encounter in the course to the literature and art they discuss in class or discover on their own, using analytical and research techniques applicable to all disciplines.

UWS 17a: The City in Early America
TR 4-5
Kevin Doyle
In 1899, a decade after returning from a world tour of America, Burma, China, England, India, and Japan, Rudyard Kipling published From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel. Comparing Calcutta and Chicago, he deplored the avarice, the dirt, and the savagery of the latter while clarifying that the city was not, he thought, a good representative of the rest of the country. Still, unlike either Salt Lake or San Francisco, it was, Kipling wrote, the first real city he had encountered in America. Five decades later, Richard Hofstadter--the 1956 Pulitzer Prize winner for history--argued that the United States "was born in the country and ha[d] moved to the city." Though "the land of the free and the home of the brave" first became an urban state in the 1910s, the city had long been a place of great significance--a center of commerce, culture, and politics. But just what was "the city in the wilderness," before the age of the skyscraper and the streetcar? What distinguished it from the country? How did it look? Who peopled it? How did it operate? And what happens when the birth of a nation, this nation, is set in the cities?

In seeking answers to these questions, this course will traverse the alleys and the thoroughfares of the big towns of early America, from prehistoric times to the middle of the nineteenth century. But this seminar will do much more than revisit buildings, byways, and other records of the past. Understanding that it can be a challenge to craft (and revise) writing that is elegant and effective, scholarly and stimulating, the course will prepare you to do just that. It will focus on the composition of the college paper, acquainting you with methods and practices, standards and structures, of academic prose. It will give you a rare space in which to focus on the writing that you will do at Brandeis and beyond. In addition, it will provide you with practice in analysis, argumentation, discussion, reading, and research. Finally, the class will lend learning and writing more comfort, more confidence, more ease, and more enjoyment.

UWS 18a: The Tread of Dreadful Feet: Horror and the Supernatural in Literature
TR 4-5
Daniel Donatacci
Ghosts, vampires, skeletons, haunted houses and the walking dead--these are just a few of the apparitions we will meet on this exploration of horror and the supernatural in literature. In this course, we will consider some of the following questions: How do we categorize literature that contains these themes? Does their presence create, as some theorists of the Gothic believe, a site for literary transgression and the expression of otherness? In what ways do these works intersect with issues of sex, race, class and gender? We will consider three writers' works in some depth. Beginning with William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek, we will then skip forward in time to the work of H. P. Lovecraft. From there, we will again jump forward to a writer of the modern Gothic, Stephenie Meyer. Our discussions will also by supplemented by short selections from other writers as well as by critical readings.

Our conversations will serve as basic material for the main focus of the University Writing Seminar, that being writing in an academic environment. This seminar will prepare you for the other classes you will take at Brandeis through the discussion of style, academic writing standards, the formulation of effective arguments, and how to do research. Learning how to articulate complex arguments and utilize resources in support of them are vital tools in your college career and beyond, regardless of your intended major, and this class will enable you to develop them in the context of our topical focus on horror and the supernatural in literature. The focus is on transferable skills, but my hope is that your literary critical eye will be sharpened in the process as well.

UWS 19a: Grotesque Bodies
MWR 1-2
Tina Van Kley
Henry David Thoreau declared, “I stand in awe of my body,” expressing a sense of the body as a source of delight, wonder, and even artistic inspiration. Conversely, the body can also be a source of embarrassment, dismay, and disgust. Both the pleasure and the disgust the body can evoke are brought together in the concept of the “grotesque body,” which will be the theme of this writing seminar. Mikhail Bakhtin claimed that exaggeration, hyperbolism, and excessiveness are “fundamental attributes of the grotesque style,” and that, as a mode of representation, the grotesque comments on and critiques social realities. In this class we will read, discuss, and write about the “grotesque body” as it is represented across a variety of cultural texts, including poetry, short stories, and television, in order to ask what critical functions those representations serve. What can the spectacle of a “grotesque body” convey that an ordinary one can’t? For what reasons and on what occasions is the grotesque appropriate? Is the grotesque ever “appropriate”? We will consider the function of the “grotesque body” with respect to issues of gender, race, and class, drawing examples from the past, as well as from our own historical moment, as we work together to write three major essays, each developing skills that will be crucial throughout your college careers.

UWS 20a: Antisemitism in America
MWR 1-2
Amaryah Orenstein
Though Jews have encountered antisemitism since their arrival in the New World, earlier students of American Jewish history commonly downplayed its occurrence, dismissing anti-Jewish prejudice as a “late and alien phenomenon,” the antics of a “lunatic fringe,” and thus not worthy of study. Despite the remarkable freedom and successes that have characterized Jewish life in America, scholars have increasingly begun to look at the role of antisemitism in shaping the American Jewish experience. Focusing on two case studies, the Leo Frank trial and the publication of Henry Ford’s The International Jew, this course will consider the extent and distinctiveness of American antisemitism. What do these episodes reveal about the nature of antisemitic prejudice in the United States and about American society? What do their responses to antisemitism teach us about American Jews and their place in American society? Moreover, the theme of antisemitism in twentieth-century America will serve as a lens through which to focus on the key strategies and techniques of college-level argument and writing. Thus, in addition to debating the nature and significance of “the oldest hatred” in American society, this course will help you to hone the skills necessary for producing successful academic papers -- framing analytical questions, formulating and supporting original arguments, and interpreting a variety of sources.

UWS 21a: American Frontiers
MWR 1-2
Scott Moore
The Pathfinder. The Pioneer. The Gun-slinger. These are all familiar variations of the romanticized figure of the frontiersman, the self-reliant individualist chock-full of grit capable of inhabiting the paradise-savage space between civilization and the wild—the mythic space of the American Frontier. To what extent has the frontier and the frontiersman shaped the cultural and political trajectory of the nation? In what form(s) do these symbols exist in the present? How have they managed to transcend the specific temporalities in which they were originally forged? These are a few of the questions that this course will grapple with as we attempt to divine the incredible staying-power of American frontier mythology. We begin by examining the genre-forming works of canonical 19th-century authors such as James Fennimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman. We then consider the frontier thematic as it manifests in the American Western. We conclude by exploring/predicting the ways in which traditional tropes of the frontier are remapped onto both today’s and tomorrow’s national landscapes.

UWS 22a: Taking to the Streets
MWR 1-2
Lydia Fash
From Bourbon Street to Wall Street, streets index celebration, dissatisfaction, location, and wealth. We mob them to protest bad banking; we use them to drive West and find ourselves. As the most public of all locations, they define our ideas of space, community, and travel. And we often feel personal possession over “our” street corner, intersection, or address. Yet, despite their cultural importance in locating us, in advancing social causes, and in moving us from place to place, many dismiss streets as empty conduits.

Among other texts, this course will use a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, a theoretical essay by Georg Simmel, and the road movie Little Miss Sunshine to interrogate our own assumptions about the public-private space of streets and about American street-related culture.  Why is it that we use roads to map development, we use streets to make political statements, and we locate ourselves with pavement byways? And what do streets mean to American movements, subcultures, and literature? To assist students in developing their writing process, this discussion-based seminar will emphasize drafting, revising, peer editing, and conferencing. Ultimately, the goal of Taking to the Street is to further develop the critical thinking and writing skills necessary to university and post-university writing.

UWS 23a: The Monster and Me
MWR 12-1
Lisa Rourke
Whether it’s Frankenstein’s Monster or Dr. Jekyll’s counterpart, Mr. Hyde, we are often both fascinated and repelled by these beings. We may even wonder how different we really are from the dysfunctional creatures. Does each of us, in fact, harbor a subconscious monster? Do we even have agency over our actions and ourselves? Focusing on monstrous figures depicted in literature, we will consider the various ways we construct and deconstruct identity. To frame our thinking we will actively participate in the nature versus nurture debate by engaging with critical thinkers from the fields of philosophy and psychology.

This course will also foster the development of incisive analysis and sophisticated academic writing as a way to explore questions of identity and its constitution. Structured assignments, class discussions, peer group workshops, and conferences will direct us as we explore different writing tasks and consider an array of texts including Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We will experiment with a variety of writing activities and assignments including close reading, lens, and a research-based essay. In addition, we will supplement our fictional texts with a range of theoretical readings by thinkers including John Locke, B.F Skinner and Sigmund Freud. 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 24a: Imagining Australia
MWR 12-1
Margaret Carkeet
The continent of Australia is roughly the same size as mainland USA, yet its population is less than that of California. In popular culture, the prevailing image of this sparsely-populated nation is the outback – the “bush” – yet 87% of Australians live in urban areas. The images of Australia that appeal to tourists – the kangaroo, the koala, Uluru, and the Great Barrier Reef – are associated with a vast unpopulated space. Why does the outback dominate images of Australia? How does Australian culture imagine its urban space and the people who live there? What kind of image does Australia present to the rest of the world? In this Writing Seminar, we examine the images of Australia constructed by various cultural forms: literature, film, art and music. We look at the way images of the nation are constructed and questioned, and how the relationship between Australians and the vast space around them is imagined, sentimentalized, and interrogated. We will read literature from Peter Carey, Henry Lawson, and Judith Wright, and watch two Australian films, one located in remote Western Australia (The Rabbit-Proof Fence), and the other in suburban Sydney (Lantana). Popular music from Paul Kelly, Midnight Oil, and Not Drowning, Waving rounds out our cultural exploration. In the final part of the course, you will write about an image of Australia you research yourself.

UWS 25a: Race, Dance and Videotape
MWR 12-1
Njelle Hamilton
From the martial capoeira arts of slavery to dancehall, from jazz to modern dance, from hip-hop to krump, from salsa to mambo, dance has been a way that blacks were defined and have defined themselves as raced, gendered and sexualized beings, carrying the marks of a cultural identity. In this course we will use our screenings of various dance videos, performances and films as the background to discuss issues of race and performance, as we develop the analytical and argumentative skills of sophisticated academic writing. Assignments will range from close reading clichés of blackness in hip-hop and R&B music videos, and exploring the concept of “Negro Dance” in Josephine Baker or Alvin Ailey, to researching recent dance films such as Dance with Me, Step Up and Stomp the Yard . Our class discussions, peer group workshops, conferences and sequenced papers will challenge you to question the social, cultural and political significance of dance as you develop the critical thinking and writing skills that will stand you in good stead throughout college and beyond.

UWS 26a: Payback: Revenge in American Culture
MWR 9-10
Kyle Wiggins
Whether “getting even” or “paying back,” revenge is spoken in the idiom of debt and credit. What can this economic register tell us about the value of revenge in American culture? What sort of payment does revenge extract? This course will examine vengeance’s various forms in the national imaginary and weigh the moral, political, and legal ramifications of retribution. After familiarizing ourselves with classical theories of revenge (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 American culture teems with tales of retaliation. The course reading includes works by James Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates, and one or two films about angry citizens. Confronting these vindictive narratives will give students the opportunity to hone analytic, writing, and research skills essential for success at the university.